Fully migrated to Bear Blog
I recently completed a full migration of my personal site over here to Bear Blog. I've had my eye on Bear for a while, and I absolutely love the mission of a clean, ad-free site with easy publishing. Also, Bear-hosted sites and the Bear control panel UI are lightning fast and responsive.
My blog was previously a static Hugo website, hosted with AWS S3 and CloudFront. Because it was a static site hosted in a CDN, it was pretty darn fast. I also enjoyed crafting my own pseudo-minimalistic theme. But the feedback loop from writing or making changes and actually seeing those changes was just enough friction to keep me from wanting to write new content. To see the results of an update in real time, I needed to be at a proper computer with my blog codebase cloned down on it, and I needed to run a Hugo webserver. To make updates to the public site, I needed to commit and push the code to GitHub, and then wait for a GitHub Actions workflow to finish deploying. Pretty good workflow for websites, in general, but my typical writing process benefits greatly from being able to make lots of little changes and to be able to see those changes in real time.
Blogging with Bear is also much more friendly on a mobile device than the prior approach because the Bear control panel is super mobile-friendly. I (weirdly enough) find myself composing most of my content on my mobile device—probably because I love to walk when I think. I pace around or walk outside while dictating content with speech to text. With the previous method of hosting my site, I would usually just dictate into a notes app on my phone. Then, when I was at a proper computer later, I would follow the above process to get content actually written, previewed, and deployed out to the public.
Finally, hosting a blog in Bear means that I am not tempted to get sucked into working on my site's theme instead of actually posting content to my site. When I owned the theme myself, there was a constant temptation to make tweaks, fix bugs, or just generally change things... because I could. Maybe it's OCD, but I found myself spending at least as much time (probably more) tweaking and fixing the blog theme as I did actually putting up content.
I have absolutely been loving Bear Blog. It's hard to quantify, but everything about the experience is fast and simple and a joy to use. Because I found out about Bear through the little tagline at the bottom of Bear blogs I came across, I leave that tagline there despite paying for premium. I hope that others stumble across it and come to love Bear, just like I did.