After giving it quite a lot of thought, I’ve finally left BearBlog and moved to a self hosted setup with Hugo. Happily I have the knowledge and means to do this and hopefully can keep finding the inspiration and time to keep writing and maintain the site as well. If anything doesn’t work then someone please let me know. It should all be nicely setup, fully https, images on a subdomain and everything logging and lovely, but still its possible I’ve missed something.
The reasons behind the move are many, there is a part of me that wants total independence and self hosting gives me that. I’ve also become dissatisfied with how BearBlog handles shadow banning posts and the backbitting and toxic meta commentating. Of course people can still comment about my blog, but getting it off Bear will mean they have to read it first and not just find it in the curated feed.
Anyway, despite all that, Bear is an excellent place to blog for most people and I’m glad it was there to get me started again on writing stuff online. Hopefully I maintain this version and don’t just drift off again as I have in the past. The idea now is I actually use this space as well as my self hosted Gemini blog to develop some more writing, introduce other subjects, keep expanding my local history pages and generally be a good smallweb citizen… I also know I’m a lazy procrastinator and its possible I won’t write anything now for months but that’s how it goes out here in small web spaces. Might get more random so if you’re here just for the plants or just for the history please feel free to ignore the posts that don’t interest you and please keep reading.