Hello, Blot!

WordPress was my go-to blogging engine in the past 16 years. It’s probably the friendliest solution to both mobile bloggers and non-web-savvy beginners. But over years it has become insufferably cumbersome and sophisticated, to the point where I had to submit a few tickets for bug fixes along with their recent routine updates. The last straw was their most recent update that has corrupted the highly customized child theme I’ve used for about 4.5 years. It’s high time for a change.

After days of painstaking research, I tried and soon gave up on Jekyll, Pelican, and Hugo, among others. For someone heavily relying on mobile devices, or rather the iPhone and the iPad, they are fair-to-middling at best, far from amazeballs.

Then I looked to Blot, a blogging platform with no interface.

I’m no stranger to Blot. Around 2018 I stumbled upon Micro.blog, where users were allowed to connect their own blogs to the service. A few users I knew, including Sameer Vasta, were fans of Blot. Back then, however, I didn’t realize WordPress would become what it is today, and I didn’t appreciate the merits of static blogs (I was more of a database guy). A Blot-powered blog, just like any static blog you have seen, is neat, fast, lightweight, and, of course, a bit “boring” at the same time. If you were fascinated by websites written in HTML boasting awe-inspiring Macromedia (not yet Adobe) Flash animations in late 90s like I was, you would know what I mean. … To be continued …