Switching blogging systems is my thing

At some point, the only posts on this blog are going to be semi-annual announcements that I’ve just laboriously ported my archive to another blogging system.

All jokes aside, I’ve just laboriously ported everything¹ 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.

1. Blot has importer scripts for a number of services, but my archive is still small enough that I like to manually move stuff across and fix minor cosmetic stuff myself.

tech blogging blot