Since April I’ve farted around with a few setups for a website and started dipping my toes into blogging. I went with a fail-fast, learn-fast approach, signed up to a heap of services, downloaded a bunch of git thingos, and posted a bunch of crap to figure out what works for me.

For now, I’ve landed on micro.blog with a customised Tiny Theme. It’s the most frictionless and well-rounded tool I’ve used so far. I like simplicity, with out of the box design and ability to customise. I never tried Pika, but I reckon I’d be happy with that too.

I’ve just done a digital cleanse and deleted my published websites and accounts with services I tinkered with. In the end the setups just gave me the shits. It’s nice and refreshing to just have one main online space now.

Websites I deleted

…and a snapshot of the workflow I tried.

  • z - Obsidian->Digital Garden Plugin->GitHub->Vercel (website)->RSS->EchoFeed/MastoFeed/IFTTT->Mastodon
  • alt.ctrl.zb (2) - Obsidian->Digital Garden Plugin->GitHub->Vercel (website)->RSS
  • Crispy-octo-train - Obsidian->Jekyll->GitHub Pages (website)
  • Octo-waddle - Obsidian->Quartz 2.0->GitHub Pages (website)
  • zb.logs - Obsidian->GitHub Publisher plugin->GitHub->Jekyll Now static site generator->GitHub Pages->RSS->EchoFeed/MastoFeed/IFTTT->Mastodon

I also removed some old sites I had from way back which I didn’t tinker with any further:

  • Dig Deep - WordPress
  • alt.ctrl.zb (1) - Blogger.com

Services and tools I tried

I am not saying any of these are bad - in fact, most of them are really good. They just don’t fit my needs right now, or more that micro.blog just does it all for me.

  • EchoFeed
  • GitHub
  • IFTTT
  • MastoFeed
  • Quartz
  • Vercel

I have kept a Neocities account where I can tinker with HTML and CSS and use back in micro.blog.

Of note there is the micro.publish plugin where I can push notes out to micro.blog from Obsidian and the RSS Reader plugin where I can pull published posts back into Obsidian via the RSS. I sometimes use these, but my desire to push all my notes from Obsidian has dwindled. If they get the image attachments working I may look at using micro.publish more frequently.

Resources

#TechNotes