Writing about writing

Bit of a weird meta post. Stumbled on this post by Kev that then lead me to this other post of his, then to this other one and I then finally landed on this post by Ru. I find this entire discussion around blogs and blog tools both interesting and incredibly confusing. Confusing because I'm not entirely sure I see all this complexity around the concept of running a blog. Everything seems incredibly easy from my point of view.

This is how it works for me. I write my post on iA Writer, either on my Mac or on my phone. Depending on the mood I'm in, I might run the draft through Carl first which means copy-pasting the content in a shared Dropbox Paper doc. Sometimes I don't feel like bothering him and I skip this step. Which is what's gonna happen for this specific post for example.

When the content is ready, I log into the admin of my site that runs on Kirby, create a new post, pick a title mostly at random, copy-paste the markdown into the backend, and hit publish. Post goes live, RSS feed is updated.

A bunch of people follow my blog via email. I use Buttondown for that. There's no automation. I log in, click the button to compose a new email, copy the content of my new post from my site with HTML formatting and everything, paste it into Buttondown's admin, and hit send. Takes me maybe a minute max.

Publishing involves no automation, no tooling, and no weird deployment. I don't need to mess with the command line, don't have to be at my desk, and nothing will break unexpectedly. It handles images and videos just fine. It's been like that for 6+ years and the only maintenance I do is updating the CMS.

If you want more info let me know, always happy to discuss web dev stuff.