That’s a very refreshing take and it reminds me of a simpler time, before “Web 2.0”. I can do HTML/CSS no problem, I actually teach a web development course in high school. For my own blog it might be too much of a distraction though, I really want to focus on the content.

But I agree, building a website from scratch can be very rewarding :)

Thanks! I’ve already checked it out, and it looks promising. From what I’ve seen so far it’s similar to Hugo but written in Rust instead of Go.

I didn’t know about 11ty, thanks for the suggestion! I’ve been using Hugo before, but not for blogging. Maybe a static site generator is the way to go after all.

This is a good point actually. As others have mentioned, editors like VS Code make working with images in markdown easier. I’m also looking into Obsidian, which I already use on my phone, but it might be too much effort to setup for this purpose.

So I’m warming up to the idea of using a static site generator, just need to figure out a workflow. There is also Zola which is kind of like Hugo but smaller and written in Rust.

Oh, interesting! I was wrong about bear blog not being open-source, thank you for the correction! So it would be possible to self-host, it’s just not officially supported. mataroa looks interesting as well, maybe even more minimalistic than bear blog.

I’ve already looked into bear blog, I really like the philosophy behind it. The reason I don’t use it is because ideally I want to self-host, and bear blog is not open-source (edit: cannot be self-hosted easily). Also, I want to embed images in my blog, and from what I’ve seen, you have to either take care of the image hosting yourself or pay a monthly fee. It also looks like the backups are only text, no images, which could make migration to a different platform painful. I had the same issue with blogger.com back in the day, it was possible to export the text, but then the image links were all still pointing to Google’s CDN.

I don’t really need comments, only RSS. Hugo is a great piece of software, I actually use it for my personal webpage. It would be an option for the blog too, my only gripe is that it adds some friction. For example if I want to embed images, I have to upload them somewhere, and manually insert the filename. I also need regenerate the site if I add new posts. I know this can be automated using scripts.

With Ghost it’s very simple, I can just write a post, upload the images, hit “Publish” and done. There was even a mobile app for writing new posts, but it doesn’t work anymore.

I don’t like how it’s now a very large piece of software with a lot of features I don’t need. I’ve tried never versions. The backend is now a confusing “dashboard”. I started with version v0.x, the last upgrade I did was v1.0. They are now on v6.0 which was released in August 2025. If you look at their Github releases, the latest is v6.67.0. That means it takes them less than a week to push a new version. Apparently, the project has more than a million lines of code. To me that’s crazy! I want a stable, low-maintenance thing I don’t have to constantly keep up to date.

As it is, I cannot even re-install Ghost v1.0 anymore without headaches, they don’t support it. Apparently it has major security issues, so the only “sane” option for continuing with Ghost is doing all the upgrades.

From what I’ve read, the new editor does not use Markdown by default anymore. It’s possible to create a Markdown “card” but that’s still embedded in the new format. So it’s very easy to accidentally create posts that cannot be exported as plain .md anymore.

From the link above:

Koenig has now been rebuilt on a new stack: React.js and Lexical — both of which are open source frameworks developed by Meta. So, Ghost is now using the same underlying technology that powers every single editor, comment box, or user input for billions of users across Facebook and Instagram.

The static site generator is a very cool idea, I didn’t know Ghost could do that.

I’m in Austria where the usability of self-checkout counters is often terrible, sometimes to the point where there are employees nearby for troubleshooting. I try it sometimes in stores where it’s available, but only if I’m not in a hurry.