A funny thing happened recently. I was sitting at my desk one afternoon playing with the new iA Writer updates, and I wanted to test iA Writer’s new style check features, so I opened my Blot folder.

Uh oh, I knew right away that this was a mistake, because it reminded me how nice it is to edit simple Markdown posts in iA Writer (or BBEdit, or Typora, or Ulysses, or Emacs, or…) and have things magically collected and posted to a blog.

WordPress can do anything. It works with all kinds of other tools, and its ecosystem is unmatched. It also bores me and I don’t like using it. Editing with “blocks” can be handy, but more often than not they get in the way. To avoid this, I bought the Iceberg editor plugin so editing would feel more like living in text files.

I don’t like writing in Iceberg. It seemed like a great solution at first, but it feels like an editor pretending to be something it’s not. (Or more accurately, it’s pretending not to be something it is). You know what feels like editing a Markdown file? Editing a Markdown file!

My move to WordPress didn’t stick. I can never get comfortable in WordPress for any length of time. There are too many things about it I don’t like.

I don’t like any of WordPress themes I’ve found. They look like they were designed by recent graduates of some SEO-self-branding-professional-development course conducted by a YouTuber “coach” fresh out of a real job. If I cared about an “audience” or subscriptions I might feel differently, but I don’t, so I don’t.

I don’t like updating plugins and themes on a daily basis, even though it’s easy to do. I don’t like having to host yet another app/stack.

Long story short, while I pretend to have valid “reasons” for doing this, they’re really only cover for the fact that I do it because it’s fun.

So yeah, this blog is back to being managed by Blot. Blot is an occasionally fragile but glorious tool made and supported by one person (Is it still just David?) and remains a pleasure to use.

Fun, huh?

You’re all probably tired of this by now, and I don’t blame you.

I reinstated my Blot-based blog last week at baty.blog but I’ve never really got along with that domain name. Sounded good in theory but in practice it felt forced somehow. So, I’ve rolled copingmechanism.com up here instead. I like that domain. It fits.

To do this I had to create a couple new S3 buckets for redirection, with a Cloudfront distribution in front of it for SSL. All the old URLs should forward correctly. I haven’t moved all the original copingmechanism.com content over yet. I’m working through it slowly. I haven’t figured out how to move the original webmentions over to the new domain, so I’ll have to work on that, too.

So it seems I’m truly down to two active sites: www.copingmechanism.com and rudimentarylathe.org.

Getting there!

Now that I’ve (re)fired up this Blot.im-based blog, I needed to go through the usual round of learning how to easily create posts for it.

I nearly always post from my Mac, so this leaves the command line as a good option. I’d almost forgotten that I’d forked a repo from @kahlil and tweaked it for use with Blot. (His works for other static site generators like Hugo).

My fork is here: https://github.com/jackbaty/blog-cli

Note that I haven’t done any work to make this generally usable, so you’ll want to tweak things somewhat. Probably starting with ./lib/template.js.

Then set the path and editor (see usage instructions) and it’s ready to go.

It’s nice being in a terminal and typing something like blog cli-for-blot and being tossed into my editor du jour, ready to write.

I ran a quick poll to see which theme people preferred for this blog. Opinion was split, but since I was already inclined to use the Daring Fireball-inspired version, I applied some confirmation bias and went with that one…for a day.

After living with it, I found it hard on the eyes. I simply don’t like dark themes as much. Images looked awful and were displayed rather small/narrow. Also, other than the specific background color, it really did look like daringfireball.net and that just seemed weird.

So for now I’ve reset it to the default theme and will work on some tweaks to that. Sorry it’s so boring.

Apologies to RSS users, since none of this matters a whit to you :)