I have been thinking about doing something different with my web presence for some time. I have built a fantastic Kirby CMS based website over at lee-perry.co.uk. For some reason though I find it frictious to work with, largely ceasing to post anything of consequence, mainly cataloguing image and micro posts within my digital garden. I've posted on that domain for over 20 years though, so its not going anywhere, not yet at least.

I first started experimenting with Bear a couple months ago, with a new domain that I picked up l33.co.uk. I promptly set about starting to rebuild something that replicated everything that my main website did, and of course that's not what Bear does. I still find it weird that microformats are not baked in - but I think baking microformats into my post templates removed from the minimalist aesthetic of the writing experience. Wrapping a stack of HTML around every post is just ugly.

The reality probably is that functionally my original website comes pretty close to what I wanted. My ideal is that my website syndicates all content out to Mastodon and Bluesky, and using indieconnector and komments comes very close to that. Micro.blog comes pretty close too - but I thought it felt pretty lonely as a community, and I find the selective disregarding of certain types of webmentions strange, if built with good intentions.

I've built in a stack of complexity though, that maybe I don't need. Originally I had a vision that I would POSSE all of my online content, including training data, so I set about building a blueprint with separate fields for all of the metrics. In practice though I just find it a drag to use. If I was to start the whole project again, I'd simplify my content structure, and I'd simplify my blueprints with markdown throughout. That is a huge job at this point though, and not one I can get excited about, even though potentially moving here to Bear is probably even more involved.

So the Bear idea gnawed at me over the summer, and I revisited it after moving my personal mastodon hosting to self hosted server at yet another new domain that I love, prry.uk, and which I have also moved my personal email to with Proton, as I begin to see signs of Apple collaborating with bad people. Eventually I dived in and picked up a lifetime subscription, which I was wary about given that it is not the first lifetime subscription that I hold to a blogging platform that I hold.

Vickie was away this week in Portugal, collecting her award as European Responsible Welding Coordinator of the Year for 2024 for the European Welding Jedi, so I took the opportunity when not working to experiment with Bear.

So far I have set up Bear to have discreet blog, note (micropost) and snap (imagepost) sections, as well as dedicated sections for training and weigh-in data which are powered only by the post title at this point. Strangely I seen to find the posting process less frictious, even though I am entering essentially the same information.

I've also started using the post filters to start to create digital garden style pages that are potentially even easier to put together than templating new blueprints in my Krikby CMS site. Once I had my key content types structured in my own mind at least, I then set EchoFeed up to post them out to Mastodon and Bluesky, bridging my Mastodon profile after struggling to get echofeed to log in to Bluesky.

One thing I am conscious of is not spamming the discover timeline in Bear - for that reason I have set my post template default to produce posts that are not discoverable. Microposts, Imageposts and Training Log entrie for the most part will be syndicated to Mastodon, but will never appear on the BearBlog timeline. That does stop the 'toast' button appearing at the bottom of the page though, which Vickie likes clicking, so some imageposts that interesting will be made discoverable within Bear.

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I've spent the last night or two spinning the css into a whole new design, while using pages with filtered lists to allow even more customisation at the cost of setup. But hey, that gives even more opportunity to tinker with things eh? The light view is reminiscent of Burnley's third strip from last season, white, with a claret focus color. The dark view resembles this season's third strip, black, with gold trim. The main thing that makes writing simpler is the single content structure - albeit at a cost of some rigidity.

I still have some work to do, but the main item on my list is to implement webmention send and receive, where I will be using the instructions provided and linked to by gobino. If I can get that running and displaying anywhere near as well as it does on their blog, I'll probably hang out here for a while.

I have found it extremely easy to dive in to Bear to write a couple of image and micro posts, and I've really enjoyed writing this one. As I said at the beginning though, my main blog will not be going anywhere anytime soon, I'll just see how writing here feels for a while. So that's probably it for now. Hope that you like my post, and I'll be back real soon.