Resisting a rewrite
I am resisting the enormous urge to ditch Bear and go back to my own self-written, self-hosted blog. I must remember that the core point of me being here in the first place is to write more. I know that it's still early days but I've found that I do actually have more desire to write - rather than just endlessly tinkering with code.
Bear basically seems like the best option available to:
- Create a blog
- With some level of exposure (discover feed)
- With no bloat or tracking
- And simple, easy customisation
There's really a lot to like. Now, no one will ever read my blog so the exposure doesn't really matter. The lack of bloat aligns with my personal philosophy and has been a reason for personal rewrites in the past. And the customisation seems to be high-leverage. Especially when compared to all the work that goes in to creating your own site.
On top of that, all the faff with user accounts, media hosting, content management, etc. is handled. As someone who has never used a pre-made blogging solution before, I could get used to this! That's something I'm noticing more as I get older: becoming more pragmatic with stuff. Letting go of some control and not letting perfect be the enemy of good.
With all that said, I think I have to just vent and get things off my chest. I'm missing the customisability that I have been accustomed to for many years.
For example, I want to start adding a link blog to this website. I think that it'd be nice to list them on their own page/feed, separate from the main blog posts and articles. In the ideal world, I'd tag these with #link and Bear would support an "exclude" feature in the tag filtering - but it doesn't. I went to the Github page and found the tag filtering code. I could have just implemented the feature and then there'd at least be a change of it getting merged.
But Bear is not open to contributions so I can't. I respect the choice because I've seen how open source maintainers tend to get treated. It's just a me problem because in the past I'd fix it and carry on. Except in the past, I'd be tinkering with other things instead of writing this post.
I suppose it all comes out in the wash in the end. If I'm that desperate for a link blog, I'll probably just add some workaround like tagging everything else with #blog and setting up separate feeds and ditching the default one.
In the end, I just need to remember that Bear is sufficient for all my needs and is honestly actually really nice to use. And, the main reason I am here is to write.