Leaving Listed…?

Lucky you. You get two blog posts today. (It's okay. This one is shorter than the other one. And it's meta, so you can ignore it if you hate that shit.)

I've been thinking about leaving Listed, the blogging service that comes with Standard Notes. (Now "powered by Proton". Mo has left. But Proton seems to be working on it, at least.)

I've been playing around a bit with 11ty lately, as it's having a moment. I like how little I really have to mess around with it to have something useful.

I have yet to actually ship this, and may not, but I used it to build out a documentation website for dye the other day. Once I figured out what exactly needed to go in my dozen-line config file, and how I really wanted to set up the requisite package.json, I just started writing. And by writing, I mean "vi file.md" over and over again, with a browser open showing the final preview render, live.

That's pretty powerful.

Right now, I'm writing Markdown inside of Standard Notes, then doing a preview publish, checking it out, correcting the differences between Standard Notes' Markdown and Listed's Markdown (why are there so many goddamned Markdowns?!), sticking images in R2… and eventually I can publish to the Rails site that runs Listed.

I could do the self-published blog thing again this way, though. And I'm considering it, seriously. There's already an OpenBSD VM from the good folks at OpenBSD Amsterdam backing some of the plumbing and a couple of my web apps. Could put the blog there too.

I'd lose subscriber email. I'd lose the cute little emoji reacts that I've hidden anyway due to abuse. I'd have to migrate (but that can be fun in its own way anyway.)

I'd gain a smoother process. I'd gain control. You'd all gain serverless search, if I decided I wanted it. It sounds pretty good.

And anyway, what's a nerd blog good for if we don't extensively fuck around with the tech every handful of years?