A mixed world
Sometime last week Matt Mercurio sent me this question:
I’m wandering around on Bear Blog. I’m at the point where I’ve proven I can easily do a Hugo generated site with a GH pipeline etc. But there is something about Bear. I noticed you are in a mixed world with Eleventy for your site and Bear for the blog. Just curious to hear why Bear and not just add on to the existing gen stack?
Here's an edited version of my reply:
I can't remember how I found Bear Blog. But I've been on the platform for the last 2 years, migrating over from a free Wordpress.com site. That one is still up, I suppose for posterity's sake; there are also some posts I haven't re-posted here, and I don't want to lose them before I do a full back-up.
Bear came first before I started dabbling in 11ty for my personal website (and eventually a photo blog built from ground-up). I continue to use both because I find it a lot easier to blog from Bear anywhere. With my 11ty setup, there are a few hurdles to overcome before publishing. I have a couple options: I can write a post and save the .md file and upload it to GitHub, or create a new file directly in Github.
The other way I update the blog is to edit the site in VSCode on my computer and uploading to GH that way. I have another blog over on Neocities - the process to update that site is entirely manual. I have to write new posts on my personal computer and upload all the changes to Neocities (which I can do via Powershell).
The reason I stay on Bear is because it's much simpler to maintain. The 11ty stuff - that's for fun, hobby stuff.