Replicated on my blog site and Nostr.

Hey everyone, Bit here! It's been a while since I've written a blog post.

Instead of another long ramble like you usually see, this is actually a big announcement. I have taken down my WordPress blog.

Q: Is your blog disappearing!?!?!?

No, it's not going away. In fact it never would have, even if I took away WordPress and did nothing. My blog posts are still live on Nostr and Leaflet, and will continue to be published to both of those in addition to here.

For people who like viewing blogs directly instead of through a service, a web blog will still be here. I'm just switching from a complicated WordPress blog to a simple blog built with Makko!

Now, if you have seen my last article (it's on this site too) you will know I don't have the most positive outlook of the leader (Alexia) of the collective (Starlight Network) that maintains Makko. However, I don't think differences of thought should take away from the fact that Makko is a very interesting piece of software.

My thoughts on Makko itself

It's a very simplistic yet fully-featured project.

The entire thing is one binary, just download it and copy it to /usr/local/bin or even run it from any directory. To begin scaffolding your new site, just run makko . in the folder you want to use for your site.

It comes with templates, but you can edit the front page in HTML and the theme in CSS. You write blog posts in Markdown, and you can even get a live preview of them in a browser.

Once you're done, you have static files ready for any web server. You can use Neocities, the Pages feature of some Git forges (like GitHub or Codeberg), a web hosting company, or an Apache/Nginx server you run yourself.

Why I chose Makko to replace WordPress

You might be wondering why I'm ditching WordPress.

Setting up WordPress was COMPLICATED

It took me way too much trial and error to get my WordPress site working. And now I don't know if I could get back up if I had to change my server setup in a significant way. With Makko, all you need is the CLI binary to make changes. Without that you can still keep the last version of your site online with its static files.

WordPress itself is complicated

Yes I know with WordPress I can use the Jetpack app and also make edits with that Gutenberg WYSIWYG editor. But, Markdown is basically WYSIWYG and you can get a live preview in your browser with makko -l . in a terminal. And it's much easier to maintain since you don't have to worry about plugins and updates and crap.

Also plugins were just complicated. There was a thing that posted to Bluesky, but a Bluesky post would also be generated by Leaflet when I replicate the article to there. Discord webhooks? I can leave messages in a chat myself when I'm done writing. Doesn't have to be Discord!

WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get

I like writing Markdown

I know people like Theo Browne (@theo@x.com, @t3dotgg@youtube.com) have had stuff to say about Markdown's conflicted standards but it's still a good language to write documents in.

Nostr even uses Markdown as its format for long-form blog posts, since Markdown is a standard for formatting long-form documents. I can edit files for Makko in basically any editor that supports Markdown, or I can edit in my code editor with the browser side-by-side for live previews. Also having everything in native Markdown makes things easier to replicate across the sites I use for blogging.

In conclusion

My blog posts will still be quite infrequent, but I do like being able to write my thoughts for everyone to see. There's always going to be a tech controversy, and some of them I feel like covering at length.

Or random stuff about what I'm doing when I feel like it.

This has been Bit, and I'll see you next time :>