Trying Out Blot
Pen on Paper
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
For my new blog, I wanted something simple and low-friction. I’m a software developer by day, and don’t want to make blogging feel like it’s an extension of my job. I want to focus on the writing, not get caught up and dragged down by tools, and not have excuses not to write. That ruled out Wordpress for me; I host a couple of Wordpress sites for non-profits on my Dreamhost account, and even the little bit of security maintenance I have to do for them is too much like work.
There are some great static-site tools out there, like Hugo and Jekyll. Call me lazy, but I wanted something even simpler.
Enter blot. It’s a dead-simple blogging platform. All you do is create a new site from the (bare-bones) admin panel, and tell it where you want to sync the files. I chose Dropbox. It creates a Dropbox folder for you. Anything you put in that folder becomes part of your site. It can read Markdown, HTML, or Docx files.
There are a couple of special-purpose folders you can create:
- drafts is for works-in-progress; nothing in there will be public on the site;
- Pages is for top-level pages, like About or Contact or such;
- Posts is for blog posts. You don’t have to separate posts into their own directory; anything in the top level will go to the site. But I like the organization of having them in their own directory.
Also, any file or folder that starts with an underscore is ignored, so you can, for instance, have an _images folder and reference files in there from your posts, like I did above.
You can put Jekyll-style yaml at the top of your posts, for things like Title, description, tags, etc. There’s a list of the attributes you can set here.
On the dashboard for your site, there’s an “Edit Template” link. From there you can select one of the templates, and customize it a bit.
Analytics, newsletters, etc are not included. There are guides to add Heap or Google Analytics, and Buttondown for newsletters.
That’s really it. I’m writing these posts so far in Visual Studio Code, but any markdown-friendly editor would work.
The cost is $6 a month, which handles the hosting.
So far, for me, it’s the perfect level of very-minimal control, and frictionless writing. By so far, I mean I set it up yesterday. I’ll keep you posted.