Why have a blog? I now have a landing page which I find very handy to link to my online accounts like google scholar, linkedin etc. Still, there are a few posts from my previous blogging antics which I would like to keep, and every now and again it is fun to write something. I have been through quite a few platforms from wordpress to posterous. For a while I was quite happy with pelican, then rolled my own on Linux. Now I am back on Windows and want to keep things as simple as possible and couldn’t be bothered getting those Linux things working again. So, what platform to choose?
After trying about five different markdown-with-Dropbox-or-github etc solutions, most of which either sucked, clunked or both, I stumbled upon Blot which you are reading right now. It ticks all of the above boxes except it isn’t open source (yet). As everything is plain text I could just dump all my old blog files from pelican straight into the Blot folder and almost everything would just work. However in fact I am going to clean out those archives before doing so as not to fill up again with cruft. It is 20USD/year - I am happy to pay a bit to hopefully get some support and perhaps a bit of longevity.
The weirdest thing is that Blot has been around for a while but is hard to find on the web. There isn’t a free version or even a trial version or example sites. You have to just trust and pony up your (refundable) 20 USD, which I did. So far, so good.
I just discovered that David, blot’s creator, actually has a blog page! That was pretty hard to find.