Why Did Blot Have to Be So Good?

My blog is a bunch of Markdown files in folders. I like it that way. I have thousands of posts going back to 2000, all rendered quickly and nicely with Hugo and served securely with Netlify.

Then along comes Blot and messes things up for me. Blot is great because it easily creates a blog out of a folder full of Markdown files. Even better, it does it via Dropbox so there are no build/commit/push/deploy steps. Just create a file and save it to a local Dropbox folder and poof! I’ve got a blog.

It’s so easy to publish using Blot on an iPad that I’ve been using it to post at baty.blog and it’s pretty great.

But, now I have yet another blog. I don’t want another blog. I’m also not ready to go all-in on a service that I don’t know I can trust, long-term. It’s a paid service, which boosts my confidence, but paid services fail all the time. It looks like I could self-host the app and keep going, but I’d like to avoid having to learn to do that. I’d just like static HTML files up on a server, please.

On the other hand, the Blot files are still just Markdown files and I could easily convert them for use with Hugo if it came to that.

I have a couple of options. First, make blogging with Hugo on the iPad so easy that I’m never tempted to just fire off a post quickly with Blot. Second, let baty.net sit and continue blogging with Blot and hope for the best.

There’s actually a third option, and that is to use both Hugo and Blot and keep both blogs. That’s my current head-in-the-sand option and I hope I don’t end up there. I’m typing this in Blink Shell using Vim on a remote server and it works pretty well, but there’s a lot of setup and “stuff” involved and sometimes I just want to type and click “publish”. Working on it.