🐼 Bearly a Blog maique.eu

@maique I had no idea there were so many options at the same price point. Will have to check them out.

@TheMacPsych I missed a few too, didn’t want the list to go on forever. A lot indeed.

@maique As much as I want to support indie blogging platforms, nearly all of them are stuck in a programmer aesthetic and all but ignore image/photo storage, management, and display. I want more than dumping everything into a single, unsearchable bucket. I get it, most of these systems (except Wordpress and Ghost) are made by single devs who only created their blog systems for text and the only images they might use are some ungodly AI generated things to tack on to boost social sharing.

@gregmoore Agreed. That, as you might imagine, is a big one for me. Ghost is, in my opinion, as good as it gets. Brilliant for photos. But not ideal for the quick, title-less updates I also enjoy. If that happened I’d be there all the time.

I’m really enjoying Scribbles, and hope images will be addressed soon.

@maique I’ve given Ghost a serious look just for their image handling alone. The difficulty is I don’t need their expensive features like email newsletters or paywalls. (Honestly, I’m excited if more than two people look at my posts.)

@maique great list…also I use blot which is 5 dollars a month too, and I run it using obsidian which is good for me.

@maique $5 a month seems to be the sweet spot for most blogging options. I think that's a fair starting point. Other blog-supporting services ought to price themselves accordingly. BTW I thought WP.com was more than $5, no? They can drive the price lower, but I'm glad they aren't because doing that would harm the other indie options. Other blog-supporting services ought to price themselves accordingly.

@gregmoore @maique Despite my apprehensions to self-hosting, I’m taking another look at Kirby. I love what these indie platforms are doing, but they almost all fall short for my needs when it comes to customization and control—that’s ok, it doesn’t take away from what they offer in general for users whose needs are more simplistic than my own. CSS access is the bare minimum required, but having access to templates and layouts is a bonus. I’m lucky in that my image and photo needs aren’t heavy, otherwise that would require more consideration.

Sometimes I tell myself maybe I should just relax my need for control, and jump in with both feet to one of these simple platforms. 😂

@maique I’ve planted my flag at Micro.blog really and for what I post I’ve managed to get around the limitations and my frustrations mostly to a level I’m content with

I could move, but I’d have to weigh up the features vs loosing access to the community timeline here (no way I’d pay for two subscriptions if I migrated my site away).

@DaveyCraney You can use the community features without paying for it. That's what I was talking about in my post about people moving away from Micro.blog hosting. @maique

@gregmoore you’re describing a CMS more than a blogging engine (or purely blogging engine). I think most indie platforms are built in response to the complexity of using a full on CMS as a blog, which, by in large, is a thing that is out there, available, and pretty well-solved with huge teams and at a low price. I personally would not want to compete head to head on tons of management feaures— you’re chasing very small differentiation in a crowded market. As a small shop, you’re only going to differentiate by responding to the heavier CMSs by choosing to be exceptional at a limited set of functionality that matters a lot to you and that you hope has audience that cares nearly exclusively about those benefits.

@pratik I suspect $5 a month is near the floor for a combination of reasons— credit card fees being a big one, but also because things like Digital Ocean and other hosts bottom out around there so you’re competing against “click a few buttons to run Wordpress on your own box”.

@pratik @maique Oh! You can? I presumed people were changing their main identity to mastodon or whatever and their site but cross posting here for the community. I didn’t even know it was possible to do that!

@jsonbecker Yup. I mentioned that limit coz, anything above that, you start losing users for simple blogging purposes. I remember when I was pushing Micro.blog way back in 2018-2019 on Twitter, many loved it but balked at the $5 price. Now they understand why that is better than the "free" option.

@DaveyCraney Yup! You can 😀 My wife uses the free WP.com account but uses all the community features (mostly as a lurker) coz she doesn't post often. And uh-oh! Are we going to lose one more paying customer? Manton is gonna ask me to STFU. @maique

@lewism Blot is an excellent service. I only just cancelled my account because I didn’t want to manage two themes on two platforms and Micro.blog works much better for me.

@pimoore @maique Having said all that, the fact that we’re replying to each other like this is The killer feature that makes Micro.blog stand out from all those separate blogging islands. On here, my blog isn’t out in the wilderness and there’s a non-zero chance with connecting to cool and thoughtful people.

@jsonbecker You’re definitely right that even a small team of developers has to carefully pick and choose what features to build and support. I’ve been on or used many full CMS’s like you mention (Wordpress, Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, etc.) but that’s not the feature set I previously described. What I truly want is Micro.blog to have some kind of media management. It doesn’t even have to be automated or fancy, just something as simple as the ability to manually add categories (like we can with posts) to find images, organize them, perform bulk operations on them, and display them on pages. Show as much love and respect to the photographers and artists on here as the writers and book lovers.

@pratik Haha, nah im content where I am… plus migrating my old content <shudder> don’t even want to think about that!

@gregmoore I hear you— in my mind the entire concept of media management is the core functionality that separates out a CMS from a blogging tool.

And for what it’s worth, as a reader who likes the books feature, I think you’re way overestimating how robust it is.

I think that the take here (for better or worse) is that your files (and also collections like books and bookmarks) are meant to facilitate making a blog post. This is not a home for that data or organizing or collecting that data. It’s not about media management, but instead about media storage to facilitate writing a blog post with that media.

There’s nothing in Hugo, for example, to “manage” media— it’s all just along for the ride with blog posts— so anything to do that would fully be a platform function written from scratch and I think there’d have to be a compelling story about how that would facilitate blogging that I’m not quite sure how to tell myself. I suspect a lot of this is that Micro.blog is meant to support static blogging, and not meant to be a database of stuff you query to present lists of on a page (which again, is very CMS).

@gregmoore Ignoring some other concerns I won’t rehash here, Blot falls flat for me with its syncing options. I don’t have a Google account, git syncing was buggy when I last tried (and I don’t love git for blogging), and I’m not a fan of Dropbox for its business model or cost. So unfortunately for that reason alone Blot is out for me. I will give credit that I really do like the underlying system and tech behind the platform. It definitely seems that Dropbox is the best way to use it, which makes sense since that was the original option.

@maique @lewism

@jsonbecker You're probably right that "management" isn't possible but something simple like tagging or categorizing shouldn't be totally out of the question. Thinking out loud here, the problem seems to be that all of Hugo's features are structured around posts. Text has nowhere to exist other than inside posts (I'm ignoring pages here) while images are structured as optional, external "content" that are merely pulled into those posts. Text is a first-class citizen in posts while images are second-class visitors.
Ideally, images could have categories connected to them like posts can, making it possible to display a page of images by category just like we can display a page of posts by category.
Visually, I'm specifically thinking of something similar to Micro.blog's ability to automatically generate a photo page of all images.

@gregmoore

Text is a first-class citizen in posts while images are second-class visitors.

This is true. I tried running a photo blog on Micro.blog but felt like fighting against the grain to make it look how I wanted it to. Maybe it's fine that Micro.blog is largely text-based but there has been efforts in making photos more integral hence I tried. I ended up deleting the photoblog and instead use Glass/Pixelfed. Photos from Glass cross-post here (not perfectly as I want them but passable).

@gregmoore yes, in Hugo adding metadata is specially the task of a post. So you’d make a post with the image with any metadata data you’d want, and to see it on a page you’d make a page using a layout that collects them as a list page for that type. There are data pages in Hugo, but that requires writing JSON mostly and parsing it. Fundamentally though what you want is what you get by making a post per image that uses markdown purely as the way to store metadata about that image. That’s a completely fine and normal way to do this that has basically no disadvantages over the same function but in a database.

@pratik @gregmoore what would you say it’s missing to support/maintain a photoblog here? I had one and it was working for me, but I decided to delete and merge the content with my blog — a single place to rule them all.

The only feature missing for me is having jpeg support only in M.b’s Sunlit, filtering screenshots and other png images.

@jsonbecker I’m thinking that it will be easier to just keep coding my own pages for that kind of thing then.

@otaviocc

I decided to delete and merge the content with my blog.

I did this too for my previously-uploaded photo. Well, I just need more flexible options in terms of displaying and organizing (photo series, etc.), better categorization, metadata, etc. I understand that these options may not align with my text blogging needs hence I finally decided to separate it out. Like I said, I still cross-post my photo to the Mb blog and timeline.

@maique This is a great post. In my experience finding a place to blog that is great for both text and photos is really hard. And if you want your site to be fast it’s even more of a challenge. I’ve decided to use micro.blog mainly for text and to share images or text and images elsewhere.

@otaviocc Personally, the missing piece for me is what I outlined in my previous comments: the ability to categorize images and find/display them in a mosaic like the M.b Photos page.

@abc It’s not easy, no. Ghost is, so far, the best I’ve found for this.

@gregmoore That is one very good point. Usually these post do get a lot of traction here on M.b, and to have the replies show up on the page is nice. Most other posts get a lot more interaction on Mastodon, in my experience.

@lewism I left out a few others as well, but blot should have been mentioned, and I’ll probably just add it. I’ve been a user (for the sticker spotter project), and loved it. Thanks for reminding me of that one.

@gregmoore Ghost is very good and, if you skip their official site, you can get it for a very decent price. I have two sites going now (Boo!, and dinkiwinkiminkiwinki) with PikaPods, and together they are under $5/month.

@gregmoore @maique @pimoore Yes Micro.blog provides a community that is really it's magic ingredient. I don't participate so much but its always there when I go looking.

Blot is great with dropbox only in my experience. Maiques list was nice to see as it shows there maybe is after all a healthy community of traditional bloggers out there with a growing list of tools they can choose from.

@ddanielson I want to say Glass. But it still has some shortcomings that I wish they fix sooner rather than later. Their export format is a mess. They either need Micropub compatibility or better API support to post from elsewhere. Pixelfed is improving, too, but it still doesn't offer full export of your photos and is still rough around the edges. So I'm using both for now (Post to Glass, which crossposts to Micro.blog, which in turn crossposts to Pixelfed).

@maique I agree about Ghost. Also for photos I like Squarespace.

@maique I’ve tried Ghost. But it has some negatives: no 2FA, no full text search, no media library, no tags. To me those are three significant negatives.

@numericcitizen You are right. But no categories.

@maique I’m very tempted to start messing with Ghost. I’m currently using Weblog.lol for my hosting (using Bunny.net as my CDN).

@jmreekes I have a Ghost blog going for years now, and it was getting expensive to keep this side project. It's not updated often, or visited. Thankfully I started looking for alternatives, and PikaPods was suggested to me. I now have two Ghost blogs 🤣

I’m happy with Weblog but still feel the need to look at other options. I’ve been using Drafts for writing and using Working Copy to post to Weblog but I just found some Drafts actions that use the Weblog API. Whatever I go with, I have to be able to post from iOS

@maique I’ve got like 30 years of time on omg.lol, so the only monthly recurring costs are the minimal Bunny.net costs

@jmreekes I think one of those actions might be mine. I use Drafts to do that 🙂 One of the actions gets two together, and posts to M.b and omg.lol at the same time 😅

@jmreekes @maique jumping into this long conversation late. I too have been giving weblog a little more of a go lately but doubt I will really leave Micro.blog as everything lives here right now. However, I might have to give this bunny.net a go and see how easy that would be because that is where I have had to get a little creative of where do I put images I want on my weblog.lol post. I see both of you have some shortcuts and stuff to get things to bunny.net so I will have to dive into that and thanks in advance for doing the legwork! 😄

@maique It is. I’m not sure which I have (I might have both). I do have your Pastebin action installed

@ddanielson You may be interested in this update from Glass. I have been waiting for this for a long time and solidifies my decision to stay on Glass.

@ericmwalk This post by @Burk is what I used to initially get Bunny.net setup.

@maique @jmreekes I never did look, but does the Drafts action for weblog only allow posting, or can you also edit/update?

@pimoore Posting. That’s it.

@pimoore I think it is post only. That is the thing I like about using Working Copy is I can edit and push the update. Using Working Copy/Git for posting pretty much requires using it exclusively since the GitHub Action rewrites the database every time.

@ddanielson That line warmed the cockles of my heart, too, and underscores how Glass handles UX. The way the gallery of photos is displayed in this post on Micro.blog gives my OCD anxiety each time I see it.

@moonmehta This is the kind of thing that differentiates a photo-based service from a service aimed at blog posts with images.

@pratik 👍. Hopefully open Web platforms can adopt such features over time.