We’re now on Blot!
Seriously, that’s the whole site now!
Following two years of “self hosting” using Hugo and GitHub Pages, I was finally able to move this site to an easier hosting option over this weekend; Blot.im.
I’d been looking for a new option to host RistrettoRambles for awhile now (at least the past year, maybe longer). Many a late-night website brainstorming session ended with me giving up; frustrated by the limitations of whatever new hosting service I’d been demoing that evening. Not this time.
To summarize, Blot isn’t 100% perfect down to every last pixel and detail of my hypothetical “dream site”, but it seems made and maintained by someone with similar enough website requirements and goals to myself that it’s an easy match for what I’m looking to do.
I didn’t expect to port my entire existing site over a weekend, much less to also design & launch my long-planned photo site (I’ll have more to say on that soon), but it really was easy. For those curious, what follows are a few of the details that make Blot an especially great fit for me.
File-based workflow, no bloated web CMS:
One of the things I loved about running a Hugo site was that tweaking the site’s design and writing new posts was as simple as editing text files stored on my local machine before pushing them to Github for publishing, with no bloated web UI to triage through each time.
Blot somehow makes this even simpler; the entire site is auto-built for me out of a folder in my Dropbox account. Put a new “.md” markdown file there, and it’s immediately published. Tweak an existing text file, save it, and the site’s been updated by the next refresh of the page. I’m sure some folks would want more control than this (and there is an option to interface with Blot via Git), but I couldn’t be happier.
This simplicity and compatibility meant that I could share the new photo site with my friend Ethan via text, tweak the site’s layout based on our conversations directly from my phone, then refresh the page to see it had already been updated. There’s surely other ways to achieve a similar workflow (and times where you’d want more fine-grained, desktop access for editing instead), but that this just worked so darn well with minimal effort on my part was excellent.
Images that zoom, simple layout tools right from Markdown:
Try as I might, I never did figure out how to port-in the right bits of javascript to spice up my Hugo site’s image handling. Pictures were always one set size, smack in the middle of the page, no exceptions.
This was already bit of a bummer for blog posts with images, but made the idea of building a photo site with a similar feel to my existing Hugo blog (something that I’d wanted to do for awhile now) all but impossible.
Welp, over on Blot there’s an option to zoom images to fill the screen when clicked built into each Blot site’s configuration. Done deal. Then I saw that Blot supported simple re-sizing and page layout adjustments straight from Markdown text using the “Layout Tags” feature — I may have audibly squealed. Seriously, check this out. It’s so cool!
There are admittedly still some examples of page spacing I’d like to easily tweak, or even more ways to display images built-in I’d wish for, but Blot is much closer overall to my ideal set of compromises than what I’d cobbled together on Hugo. Oh, and compared to other hosting options like Ghost and Squarespace it’s cheap, too. :)
A big “Thank you!” to David — the person who created Blot and has already kept it running for 10 years now. I’m feeling excited by what it allows for and how it aligns with so much of what I’m looking to make online.
Here’s to new writing, photos, and more. Cheers!