Considering a move to 11ty
I've started to look at the pastures all the 11ty folks are on and think "damn that grass looks green."
Bear is very cool, I should be clear. Really like using it, and this first year has been a delight compared to trying to self-host in some way. I've been able to walk away from it for a month at a time and have no concerns about it going down in my absence. I like the theming options, the "no javascript from us but do what you want" approach to scripting, and the very lightweight way they've incorporated the lightest sprinkling of analytics.
A small motivating factor is that I somewhat regret pointing my full domain at the Bear Blog - would have been much better as blog.criminallyvulgar.dev I think - it'd allow me to tinker with the homepage. I could change it to a subdomain, but I'm 95% sure that'd break RSS because I don't see a way to move the blog without moving the Bear's rss.xml location with it.
If I migrated to 11ty, I'd be able to put the rss.xml right where it is (cv.dev/rss.xml) maintaining compatibility, though it'd probably do a one-off spam of my last few posts. Small price, imo.
I've had a look over what'd be involved in moving to 11ty from Bear, and it doesn't look too demanding, might involve some scripting to get my existing posts in the correct format but that's nothing I'm not willing to do.
I have a few outstanding questions before I make a full decisions, namely:
Hosting
It looks easy enough to just point it at a webhost, but choosing a webhost looks like a horrible set of compromises. I'm happy to pay, but that's unusual enough that it usually ends up bundled with a ton of frankly excessive "features."
Then I need to vet every option for AI bullshit and other zeitgeisty trash (Bear will honestly remain extremely hard to beat on this front).
Wait, shit, is self-hosting an option? DO I WANT TO GO DOWN THAT RABBIT-HOLE???
Networking bullshit
Networking gives me hives, generally. Anything involving it usually requires me to take several deep breaths and promise to read every word of the documentation before I even start. Even then, I get overwhelmed by it pretty easily, and docs/tutorials online always seem to assume more knowledge than I have, even when they appear to explain everything.
I'm sure migrating the domain would be as simple as telling my domain provider where to point it, but then I'm opening a can of worms - do I stick with my current one? It's not CloudFlare - should I be with CloudFlare? What does it even mean to "change to CloudFlare"???
Changing nothing efficiently sidesteps this problem.
Styling
Bear has some really nice inbuilt style options (I quite like this one, that's why I chose it) - I wouldn't feel comfortable just taking this one with me though, even if I have made a bunch of modifications for my own blog. I'm fundamentally not a webdev though, so I'm a bit apprehensive about what I'd be able to achieve off my own head trying to design my own static site.
Analytics
Like I said, I really like Bear's simple built-in analytics. It's not about making the numbers go up, but just giving myself the reassurance that things are seen.
They recommend Fathom for more in-depth stuff, but really I'd just like to take the Analytics page with me - maybe there's a simple open-source equivalent? Maybe that's not trivial on a static site? I don't know.
I really don't want to scrape a bunch of user data - I just want, like, counts by page by day. Maybe referrals and some very high-level region stuff, but that's not a deal-breaker.
Maybe I'd be fine without, though.
Would I even get any value from it?
The additional work of an 11ty site looks minimal - I already draft my posts in Obsidian before moving them to Bear. Arguably, it'd be simpler on 11ty:
- Write
- Copy
- BearBlog New Post
- Paste
- Fix Images Up
- Publish
Becomes
- Write
- Move to 11ty Directory (within the same Obsidian Vault? No leaving the UI???)
- Process Site (push a button?)
- Upload (push another button?)
Enough unknowns to be a questionable benefit, but it looks potentially more freeflow. Handling images entirely on-machine does appeal, as currently I upload them to Bear's media library, then link them in my local markdown - this would remove that process as well.
No rush
One beauty to 11ty is that I can test almost all of this without committing - apart from changing my domain target, I can do literally all of it - export my BearBlog, test converting to 11ty, try out hosting providers, trial the workflow - all without giving up my existing setup.
That's one thing I've come to appreciate about self-hosting in general - it's very light on commitment if you're willing to try stuff for yourself. I've trialled a bunch of software and services lately that I've decided not to use for various reasons, but there was no big upfront cost to it so the only loss was my time.
I'll probably trial the 11ty processor this week and see how I like it. It's definitely closer to what I think of as the internet I want to be using. Bear has been extremely light and easy to use, but it's still a "platform."
While that's given me a sprinkling of discoverability, put some eyes on my posts that wouldn't see it otherwise, I'm a little uneasy with it as a set of incentives - especially paired with the referral info in Analytics.
I'll report back!