So I am with Bear now
With mixed feelings, I'm letting go of my old blog and moving to Bear Blog. I feel like I’ve failed in a way, but there are also positive sides…
I had been using the Astro framework for my website with an integrated blog. I stumbled upon Astro by chance while searching for a static page builder. No blogging platform really appealed to me, and I’ve tried quite a few over the course of my life.
So I decided to do everything myself. I first tried Jekyll, which unfortunately turned out to be a rather frustrating experience for me. At the risk of embarrassing myself: I couldn’t even manage to build a single page with it. I got stuck with dependencies and gems that just didn’t want to cooperate, causing a bunch of conflicts. I know about Hugo, but that didn’t really speak to me, and Zonelets didn’t seem to fit my needs either.
Then I came across Astro, and honestly, just because of the name and the whole theme, I had to give it a try. I followed the documentation, and it worked immediately! Astro is really remarkably well-documented, and it became my first static site generator framework. I’m still pretty excited about Astro. Unfortunately, not everything went smoothly; otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.
Before I continue, I should mention that although I’m good with HTML and CSS, I’m still somewhat clumsy with JavaScript and related tools. This means I can’t easily solve JS problems on my own—I have to research first, and, yes, consult ChatGPT. Since Astro runs on Node.js, things got a bit challenging for me at times. Most of the time, everything was fine, but recently, I encountered a nasty bug, and because it seemed impossible to figure out which script was causing it, I ended up rebuilding the site from scratch after a lot of back-and-forth. Again, I used Astro. Again, I used a template, but this time a different one.
Personally, it bothers me that most templates use an additional framework like React and/or Tailwind. I have nothing against maybe learning those at some point, but now is not the time. I’m currently doing a full-time IT retraining, and I was already struggling with JavaScript and Node.js on the side, so I didn’t need another thing on top of that.
Anyway, I rebuilt the site, and at first, everything was okay. It took some effort to transfer the blog entries to the new format, and I had to adjust the frontmatter again. As I said, everything was fine for a while. If only I hadn’t saved a few details for later, which would take a bit more time (yes, yes). Specifically, getting the robots.txt, sitemap, and especially the RSS feed up and running. And that was the beginning of the end for my Astro blog.
To make a long story short: I had to install the latest version of Astro RSS, which required a newer version of Node.js. But the template required an older version. From there, the problems piled up, and more dependencies needed to be updated, but the issues didn’t get any fewer. The main problem: the build kept failing, and I’d already spent way too long troubleshooting. I invested a whole weekend just to get the build to at least complete successfully locally — even without error messages. But things were different on Netlify. The thing is, if the build doesn’t complete successfully, the site literally doesn’t get built. So if I make any changes to my site, they don’t go live. In other words, as long as the build fails, I can’t use my site as intended — for example, to post blog entries.
On Monday, I made a few last desperate attempts to fix the problem, but without success. I had already started thinking about what to do if I couldn’t get it working again. I wanted to fix it so I could blog again, but I barely had any time to deal with it — only during breaks or on weekends. Since the whole thing had already dragged on for quite some time, I wanted a solution that was as simple as possible.
First, I tried to find a newer, simpler template for Astro. But everything came with the aforementioned extras like Tailwind, and I gave up relatively quickly. The solution that seemed best to me was to rebuild my website entirely with just HTML and CSS — without a framework. At least then it would run again. However, creating every single blog post (and linking them, ugh…) was just too much effort, so I decided to outsource my blog. I had had my eye on Bear Blog for a while and had already browsed it a bit.
Why Bear Blog? Because there's a community, it's simple, matches my indie web values, but mainly this: ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ
The two things you can bait me with is spacey stuff and cute button eye animals. There's more, but I'm not telling :-p
Right now, I simply don’t have the time to deal with these kinds of issues. Instead, I need something that just works, without stressing me out. Blogging should be fun, and I want to use my free time as actual free time, not worrying about even more things. I hope this solution will make that possible for me.
On the positive side, I learned a lot and gained valuable experience using Astro. Now, I’m looking forward to getting to know the Bear Blog community.