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I have been writing this blog on and off since 2007. It has been through many iterations and voices as I try to figure out what mine truly is. When I first began writing, it was on Blogger, as I am sure many other people started as well. After a year, I moved to TypePad. I was there for a very long time and was super happy. When it began to feel like the feature set was not growing fast enough, I moved to Squarespace. I had heard all the podcast ads for Squarespace and again jumped in with both feet. There was an awkward upgrade process from version 5 to 7, but the service was rock solid. I think I have built 30-40 other websites on Squarespace for friends and customers.
A few years ago, my company decided to use WordPress for the corporate blog, which made perfect sense. I moved my site to WordPress for my learning since the maintenance fell under my responsibility. I loved the ease of writing posts in Markdown. WordPress continues to evolve with blocks and patterns. These are great, but I often fought with the toolset or was distracted by the next bell or whistle. I also realized there was so much more overhead for the number of posts I write. Hosting costs have also increased drastically. Most providers offer you a good first year, and then the prices rise drastically, perhaps because they know the pain of moving a site from one platform to another.
I was interested in a relatively simple static site generator. I looked at Hugo and Jekyll, and I am sure I could have figured them out. But then I remember reading Nicolas Magand site and loving how simple, clean, and fast his site was.
One of his recent posts mentions using Blot.im. I remember seeing Blot some time ago, maybe shortly after it launched in 2014, and decided to see where it has progressed. Blot.im is based on Markdown files stored in Dropbox, Git, or GoogleDrive and then synced to Blot servers. There are several templates you can use, or you can build one from scratch.
I signed up for a month to try it out and see if there were any features I would be missing. It is great! It’s fast, easy, has plenty of features for what I want, and really by its nature, asks you to concentrate on your writing, which I hope to do more of in the coming weeks.