Switching blogging systems is my thing

All jokes aside, I've just laboriously ported everything^[1] to Blot, which I saw mentioned by Warren Ellis. Blot's landing page snagged me pretty hard, what with its enticing talk of automatic page generation from a dedicated Dropbox folder.

I don't post all that much on my blog and haven't for a long time. I really enjoyed the technical process of switching to Jekyll a couple of years ago, but it turned out the actual process of posting things was a bit fiddly and annoying. I'm not a developer, so my fingers don't instinctively type the right commands to push a new post to my Github repo. Instead, every few months when I posted something new I'd have to look up how to post to my own site again.

Blot, by contrast, could not be easier. It has a lot of the same advantages of static generators like Jekyll, in that it's fast, easily customisable and minimalist by design. But the publish 'process' is literally 'move this file into a folder'. Metadata and permalinks etc are all really easy to manage and transparent. Plus you get automatically generated preview versions of draft posts just by putting your file into a folder called 'drafts'. No need to run a local server on your machine or any of that kind of thing.

I really recommend it. Hopefully this will be the last move for a while (after Wordpress to Tumblr to Ghost to Jekyll). And thank goodness for Markdown and good old plain text files, which is what makes all of this experimentation relatively painless.