Why Micro.blog?

The dust has settled.¹ I used the occasion of the incident I discussed in my previous note to create a completely hand-coded site with static files hosted on a server that I control. I hadn’t coded a website from scratch in a while, and it was fun to flex those muscles again. I had something I quite liked, actually, and I could have used that setup for a long while. Except…

I don’t write a lot of posts. But I do write occasionally. I had thought I would use Craft.do’s feature of publishing notes as a quasi-blogging method. But there were aspects of that system that felt like sand in my gears. And what if I stop using Craft in the future? I don’t really use it now, but blogging might have given me a reason to keep it around. The lack of an RSS feed, auto cross-posting to other sites, the ability to fiddle with design and code, and all the other time-wasting fun stuff that comes with curating a website don’t exist in that setup.

I looked at Pika and Bear as alternatives. With Pika, you have minimal design autonomy, so you are pretty much limited to what they offer. Bear gives you more freedom, but it has a drawback: it can’t handle posts without titles. Micro.blog currently stands out as the best option in the IndieWeb space.

And here we are. Or, here I am, as it were.