
Show HN: Bear – Minimal blogging platform - HermanMartinus
https://bearblog.dev
======
CydeWeys
Small suggestion -- it seems like you're using the wrong units (or maybe
abbreviations) for your displayed average page sizes. You're using lower-case
b to indicate bits, but I suspect you mean upper-case B to indicate bytes?
Also, the lower-case k is the correct prefix for 1,000, but lower case m is
milli, or 1/000\. You want M for mega, which is 1,000,000.

Also if you _really_ want to be precise you should consider whether you're
using binary prefixes vs SI prefixes, e.g. kB (10^3 bytes) vs kiB (2^10
bytes). That doesn't matter as much because the error is small for these lower
values, but the casing errors definitely do matter. "mb" means millibars to
me, not Megabytes!

~~~
CivBase
Huh... I've always described 2^10 bytes as a "kilobyte" (kB) but I've always
hated the ambiguity, even if the difference between 2^10 and 10^3 is usually
not important. Thanks to this comment, I learned there is an formal set of
units which are distinct from their SI counterparts[0].

    
    
      1000^1 kB, 1024^1 kibibyte (kiB)
      1000^2 MB, 1024^2 mebibyte (MiB)
      1000^3 GB, 1024^3 gibibyte (GiB)
      1000^4 TB, 1024^4 tebibyte (TiB)
      1000^5 PB, 1024^5 pebibyte (PiB)
      1000^6 EB, 1024^6 exbibyte (EiB)
      1000^7 ZB, 1024^7 zebibyte (ZiB)
      1000^8 YB, 1024^8 yobibyte (YiB)
    

It looks like those units have been around since 1995, but they haven't seen
much mainstream adoption. Too bad.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte)

~~~
CydeWeys
Now that you're aware of them you're going to start seeing them everywhere.
There's more adoption than you realize.

~~~
Nursie
I've been aware of these for around 20 years, I've not seen that nomenclature
growing in popularity.

It doesn't help that it just sounds silly to my ears.

~~~
edbaskerville
Nail on the head. They're just weird, at least in the context of English
phonetics. That's the reason I discourage their adoption. I'd much rather we
just all agree that kilobyte means 2^10 bytes. Or find words that aren't
weird.

If I remember correctly, a big motivation for this change was the fact that
disk manufacturers intentionally used base-10 definitions so they could
advertise larger numbers for disk capacity. But presumably they still do that,
and presumably people still often don't notice.

~~~
earthboundkid
Why should we use 2^10? Bits matter in the small—a machine with a 12-bit word
and 1024 words of memory or whatever was popular in the ’70s—but at the scale
of gigabytes, individual bits don’t matter anymore, so may as well just use
decimal because that’s what our number system is based on. I don’t see any
point besides retro nostalgia to use base 2 after you move out of the each bit
counts space.

~~~
CydeWeys
SI prefixes are fine for mass/block storage and network speeds, because
there's no particular reason they would fall precisely into buckets of powers
of 2. But for CPU cache and system/GPU memory in particular, and maybe even
some flash memory, it does continue to make sense to use MiB and GiB, because
of the particular way that memory itself is addressed and packaged. Memory
very much does fall precisely along power of 2 boundaries.

For example, I recently bought two 32 GiB DIMMs for my computer. I guess you
could call them 34.3597 GB DIMMs, but that's strictly worse! Knowing that
they're exactly 32 GiB makes it makes it obvious that it takes 2^35 bit
pointers to address every location by byte in one of those DIMMs (so they
obviously require a 64-bit architecture to take advantage of!), or 2^36 bit
pointers to address memory locations across both of them.

~~~
earthboundkid
Sure. I support the distinction of GiB for RAM and GB for everything else.

------
jitl
“Bear” is a well-known note-taking and writing app
[https://bear.app/](https://bear.app/)

~~~
HermanMartinus
I was trying to play on the word "bare". Yeah, I realised this a bit too late

~~~
mark-r
I have to say I like the character based logo. Inventive use of Unicode I'm
guessing.

~~~
wodenokoto
It’s a fairly well known koamoji. Kaomoji is the horizontal counterpart to
smileys and they can get very creative.

If you set your iPhone to Japanese keyboard it comes with hundreds of these
build in

    
    
        ︎('ω'︎ )

~~~
pedrogpimenta
Bold to assume this person has an iPhone :)

~~~
kparaju
I copy paste them :) [http://japaneseemoticons.me/all-japanese-
emoticons/](http://japaneseemoticons.me/all-japanese-emoticons/)

------
ordinaryradical
Since HN seems to be on a blog-kick lately, I'll repost the idea that I'm
still waiting for someone to build:

A blogverse of some kind that allows for algorithmic discoverability &
aggregation (ala Medium) without the bullshit/terrible UX.

The real value proposition of Medium is that a well-made aggregator benefits
readers and writers alike. Readers find more authors they like, writers find
more audience. There are also network effects with shared comment logins,
inter-blog citations, etc.

I really think a blogging renaissance is waiting to happen. These ingredients
plus a business model not reliant on ads, massive js overhead, and other
nonsense could jumpstart it.

~~~
bachmeier
What I want is a Yahoo-style directory for blogs. Blog owners can put their
blog in exactly one category. Users can star the blogs they like, similar to
GitHub, and identify the low quality click generators/marketing blogs.

I personally find Medium to be a horrible way to find content. Maybe it works
for new content, if that's what you're after.

~~~
gen220
The success of search engines prompted Yahoo to ditch its original product
(the curation and categorization of the web) in favor of its competitors
automated (and thereby game-able) crawl-index-search approaches.

Now, decades later, there seems to be a shared yearning for the curated web,
perhaps in response to the low signal:noise ratio of search. Isn't it funny,
how the world works in cycles?

Curated search (domains chosen by a set of humans with no financial conflicts
of interests, with some grokkable categorization and full-text search) might
be the nirvana we're searching for. I think the GP has a point, that the need
for a sustaining business model tends to strongly conflict with this
equilibrium.

Wikipedia has sort of evolved to partially fill this niche, but it
periodically struggles with funding. I agree there's not a similar filling for
blogs, yet: maybe GitHub will evolve there, but it will face the same pressure
of other platforms owned by public for-profit companies.

~~~
bachmeier
I was probably one of the last users of their original directory. It was my
browser homepage until the day they removed it.

I eventually stopped using it because it didn't keep up. These days, search is
for many purposes completely useless. If I want to find someone to do work on
my house, the last place I'll go is Google. It's truly amazing just how
worthless the results are. You'll get results from Michigan and Florida and
Oregon all for the same search, in the same town, and claiming to be a local
business. I imagine it's a fraud-ridden garbage dump if you actually try to
use Google to find businesses to do work for you.

On the topic of blogs - not completely useless, but overrun with shallow,
uninformative trash posts by SEO experts. I think Google is more vulnerable
now than at any time in the past 20 years.

~~~
Jaruzel
> _You 'll get results from Michigan and Florida and Oregon all for the same
> search, in the same town, and claiming to be a local business._

It's worse if you are non-US. Google seems to think that _anywhere_ in the UK
is local to me for businesses, and that's AFTER I've added loads of filters to
stop American results from showing.

------
jedberg
Things I would like in a blogging platform:

* Generate lightweight static website

* Good clean default CSS so I don't have to mess with it

* Automatically upload website to CDN and trigger expirations as necessary.

* Self-hosted

* Runs on AWS Lambda or any other Function as a Service equivilient

* Has a super lightweight CMS that I can easily use on both desktop and mobile, so if I have ideas I can start writing anywhere, and can also make minor corrections to existing posts while on the go.

* The CMS can be a frontend to git, but git is hard to use on mobile, so I don't want the CMS to just be git.

If anyone knows of something that meets these requirements I'd be super
grateful!

~~~
pier25
Except for being "self hosted" and the "front end to git" we're building that
as a commercial service.

[https://pluma.cloud/](https://pluma.cloud/)

Not much to show yet but you can follow us on Twitter for updates in a couple
of months: [https://twitter.com/plumacloud](https://twitter.com/plumacloud)

We're also considering providing our CMS as headless via an API so that you
can connect it to your SSG and make your own template, host it wherever you
want, etc, but we haven't decided yet on the pricing for that but it would be
much cheaper than our main product.

~~~
lrdd
I think the mailto: link on your page is misspelt as mailt:

~~~
pier25
Thanks!

------
StavrosK
I love that this exists, I wish I'd thought of it first, and I like you for
making it.

I think you should improve the default stylesheet a bit, I like
[http://matejlatin.github.io/Gutenberg/](http://matejlatin.github.io/Gutenberg/).

~~~
HermanMartinus
Ooh, this looks neat

------
myfonj
I think that product template could use either `aria-hidden="true"` or `aria-
label="bear"` HTML attributes for screen readers sake (and reconsider title
and OG properties); not an expert in this area nor having SR at hand, but I
guess that

    
    
        ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ

would sound like 'pharyngeal voiced fricative - bullet - letter ain - bullet -
glottal stop', what is hardly beneficial for screen reader users. Cool Unicode
"picture" though, it's a pity such doodles hurts accessibility (sad smiley).

~~~
st1ck
Given that we can't expect everyone to use aria attributes, shouldn't screen
readers just have a list of all widely used smileys with descriptive names (if
they don't have it already)?

~~~
myfonj
Good point and interesting question indeed. Finally tried simple speech
synthesis demo [0] and in Win10 Firefox it really reads out some "basic ASCII-
smileys" as their descriptive translation (and ignores any other set of non-
alphabet characters, with few exceptions like underscores and asterisks).

Compiled all predefined textual emoticons offered by Gboard app in Android [1]
and let the Narrate speech synthesis in Reader view (F9) read them aloud (uses
presumably the same synthesis as example) - quite predictably most of them
weren't heard at all, but those simple ones that were have surprised me.

So most probably there is no problem with that particular Unicode bear in
screen readers after all.

[0] [https://mdn.github.io/web-speech-api/speak-easy-
synthesis/](https://mdn.github.io/web-speech-api/speak-easy-synthesis/) [1]
[https://gist.githubusercontent.com/myfonj/f6b0ed1c783d16a79d...](https://gist.githubusercontent.com/myfonj/f6b0ed1c783d16a79d1d8a48292eb7f9/raw/Gboard%2520textual%2520emoticons%2520list)

------
baruchel
Wouldn't twtxt be a better candidate as the most minimal blogging platform?

[https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

~~~
HermanMartinus
This is pretty rad

~~~
sequoia
Used this years ago for twitter
[https://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/](https://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/)
It was amazing... everyone thinks you're working with the terminal open ;)

------
keb_
For other similar-ish related tools/writing platforms:

* [https://write.as/](https://write.as/)

* [http://txti.es/](http://txti.es/)

* [http://telegra.ph/](http://telegra.ph/)

* [https://txt.fyi/](https://txt.fyi/)

* [https://verbatim.link/](https://verbatim.link/)

* [https://www.pastery.net/](https://www.pastery.net/)

* [http://ix.io/](http://ix.io/)

* [https://commentpara.de/](https://commentpara.de/)

* [https://rwtxt.com/](https://rwtxt.com/)

* [https://distbin.com/](https://distbin.com/)

~~~
lazyjones
I'm surprised nobody has attempted to put the content in the URL yet (to
display on a static page with styling using JS [needs a tag filter...] to
insert an URL parameter into some node). It would accommodate at least 2KB of
text, local caching and fast hosting all in one.

~~~
pmachinery
Not sure if it's what you mean, but:

(hashify) 2011:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2464213](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2464213)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3407197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3407197)

(shortly) 2012:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3834643](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3834643)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5696127](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5696127)

~~~
lazyjones
Yes, that's what I mean. But only Hashify still exists apparently...

~~~
pmachinery
Yeah, the pages linked from those HN links don't seem to exist, but you can
still download it:

[https://github.com/lucaspiller/shortly](https://github.com/lucaspiller/shortly)

I was always quite fascinated by the concept, but I suspect liability and lack
of control over the content is a fatal issue and why nothing much seemed to
come from it.

If someone makes a 'bad' page, which is inevitable, the domain with the
hashify/shortly code would be held responsible and the only way the site owner
could 'remove' the content would be to stop the service.

~~~
thinkloop
> Storing a document in a URL is nifty, but not terribly practical. Hashify
> uses the [bit.ly API][4] to shorten URLs from as many as 30,000 characters
> to just 20 or so. In essence, bit.ly acts as a document store! [1]

bit.ly et al. seem to be able to get away with being agnostic processors. I'm
surprised there haven't been more stories about their services being abused.

[1]
[https://hashify.me/IyBIYXNoaWZ5CgpIYXNoaWZ5IGRvZXMgbm90IHNvb...](https://hashify.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)

------
AnonC
What are the limits on number of posts, post size, images...? What is it going
to be priced at? Will there continue to be a free tier if/when it becomes
paid? Sorry, I can’t try any platform that doesn’t answer questions about its
future. I hope you’d provide more details on the homepage.

------
lazyload
I appreciate the no-bs lightweight website sentiment as much as anyone, but I
think there's also something to be said about drastically improving
readability with some line-height and font styling.

~~~
ubac
I really recommend [https://write.as/](https://write.as/) for those looking
for minimalism with a bit more styling

~~~
basch
There's really nothing more minimal than
[https://telegra.ph](https://telegra.ph)

It just gets out of the way.

~~~
ver_ture
It has consecutive urls, relinquishes your drop of privacy.

.../140 -> test test test

.../141 -> My personal depression diary entry no.3 ...

------
grwthckrmstr
This looks exactly like what I've been searching for all this while. Do you
plan to release a self hosted/open source version of this? The one thing that
makes me uncomfortable about a blogging service - what happens if they shut
down?

~~~
nnsne0509
너무 힘이들것 같아요

~~~
Fiveplus
What does this mean? Why is this here?

~~~
snoozypants
Lol. It's someone's language? Looks like Korean

"I think it's too hard"

------
azhenley
Landing page is straight to the point, describes what is different about Bear,
and links to an example blog. Great!

The only question I still have is what is the editor like?

~~~
HermanMartinus
I've added it to my notes, thanks. Maybe a full demo interface would be a good
idea

------
katktv
So can I self-host this? The comparisons make no sense if I can't self-host
the thing.

~~~
notadog
From the creator elsewhere in the comments:

> You can't self host it, otherwise you'd be better off writing your own basic
> HTML pages or using a static site generator. You can check out the source
> code on github though
> [https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog](https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog)

~~~
Gooblebrai
Looking at the source code, you could self host it making some changes in the
code.

------
adnanh
I've had a similar idea after looking for something like this to use as a log
for interesting stuff that I found on the internet. I ended up building a
small ruby app for this
([https://github.com/adnanh/mikro](https://github.com/adnanh/mikro)) and it
powers my (b)log which is still alive at
[http://blog.hajdarevic.net/](http://blog.hajdarevic.net/)

Since then, I've wanted to enhance it with URL unfurling, link preserving in
terms of creating a snapshot of the linked URLs, smart bookmarklet etc... but
never got around to doing it, as life tends to get busy, and other things take
priority over that :-(

------
chrismorgan
Heads up: it doesn’t have no JavaScript at present, because Cloudflare’s email
protection system is in place. (I _hate_ that thing. It mangles non-email
addresses _all the time_ if they look even _vaguely_ like an email address,
e.g. a package with version number “foo@1.2.3”. Penalising users that disable
JavaScript.)

[https://herman.bearblog.dev/](https://herman.bearblog.dev/) contains a “Get
in touch” mailto: link that gets ruined, and the following script is added:

    
    
      <script data-cfasync="false" src="/cdn-cgi/scripts/5c5dd728/cloudflare-static/email-decode.min.js"></script>

~~~
HermanMartinus
Ah shit. Turning it off. Thanks for the heads up

~~~
Tempest1981
Safari on iOS 13.4 crashed loading [https://herman.bearblog.dev/the-gods-of-
toil/](https://herman.bearblog.dev/the-gods-of-toil/)

Not blaming bearblog, but FYI

------
hybridbanner
Wondering how people feel about analytics on small sites such as these?
Including a Google Analytics tag seems to go against the ethos of such a site,
but a lot of people like to know who is visiting their blog and so including
some sort of analytics should be an option.

Self hosting seems to be a decent tradeoff. Analytics services like Fathom
[0], which provides a free, self-hosted solution, let you track basic
statistics about your site without the data being siphoned off to some
company. I have seen discussion around whether the use of analytics should
even be necessary, but I feel like that's a separate conversation :)

[0] [https://usefathom.com](https://usefathom.com)

------
marvinblum
Really cool! I like the idea to use a note taking/writing tool as a headless
CMS and thought of this for Emvi [1] too. We provide access to everything
through our API already... You can see usage of that here [2] and on GitHub
[3].

The loading times of on Bear Blog seem a bit too high? Where does Medium for
example take 16s to load?

[1] [https://emvi.com/](https://emvi.com/)

[2] [https://wiki.sts.wtf/](https://wiki.sts.wtf/)

[3] [https://github.com/Special-Tactical-
Service/wiki](https://github.com/Special-Tactical-Service/wiki)

------
Groxx
Hrm. I'm getting a certificate error when I click on the example site, on
firefox dev (up to date within the past couple days at worst):

    
    
        https://herman.bearblog.dev/
        Peer’s Certificate issuer is not recognized.
        HTTP Strict Transport Security: true
        HTTP Public Key Pinning: false
        Certificate chain:
        ... skipped ...
    

Interestingly, this one works (from browsing github issues):
[https://hyprtxt.bearblog.dev/](https://hyprtxt.bearblog.dev/)

I'd be happy to paste the whole thing somewhere, I'm just avoiding large blobs
here.

------
varlogix
Love the "early internet" feel of it, and of course the speed.

The domain name could be improved, considering that it will be part of every
hosted blog. Something more concise, or rolls off the tongue easier.

~~~
HermanMartinus
I tried to get a better domain. I tried so hard. tiny.blog, bare.blog,
bear.blog, petite.blog, smol.site, etc, etc.... Small domains are competitive
if you're on a shoestring budget :P

~~~
boomlinde
I scored text.garden a while ago which in retrospect would have been great for
something like this.

------
IAmNotAFix
[https://txti.es/](https://txti.es/) comes to mind, but I guess its lack of
account system makes it not very blog-friendly.

------
eterm
I've not worked out when firefox reader view is visible and when it isn't, but
for this blog it isn't, which is a shame because I find the chosen font
unreadable.

~~~
sunnylemon
I actually just wrote a blog post about this topic:
[https://videoinu.com/blog/firefox-reader-view-
heuristics](https://videoinu.com/blog/firefox-reader-view-heuristics)

In a nutshell, the paragraphs (<p> tags) do not contain enough text to
contribute to the readability score. Reader view heuristics rewards paragraphs
of at least 140 characters.

~~~
eterm
Thanks, that's really interesting.

------
munificent
What are the economics of this?

Presumably you are paying web hosting fees out of pocket. If this is
successful, what's the plan for when you no longer want to be that charitable?

~~~
HermanMartinus
Hosting fees are pretty negligible. If it becomes a burden, then I'll cross
that bridge when I get there. Thing is, if enough people are using this to
make me have to upgrade my hosting, that's a great problem to have.

------
6510
I sign up but no email was send.

The css should either leave the default colors alone or set both the
background and font color.

The source of this page contains much more cruft in meta tags and <!--
Microdata --> than actual content. [https://herman.bearblog.dev/markdown-
test/](https://herman.bearblog.dev/markdown-test/)

~~~
snazz
The only problem I have with that page is that the meta description contains
too much content. Otherwise, the source is very clear.

------
sneak
Note to security researchers: per the TOS, this platform censors publication
of malware, worms, viruses, and other such software.

I’ll never personally use a publishing/hosting service platform that tells me,
in advance, that they will censor my legal content.

------
XCSme
I noticed someone asked about self-hosting: I already had a PHP site so I
wanted an easy way to integrate a blog in my site. I ended up creating a
micro-blogging library[0], which just renders markdown as blog posts. The
advantage is that there is no build step, you only write markdown files
(VSCode has live-preview by default for markdown) and you have easy versioning
as markdown is just text. [0]: [https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-
blog](https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-blog)

------
samaxe
I might like it if I didn’t have to sign up, and if I could self host it.

------
fokker
Love it! Also, I think it'd be more impressive to be consistent with your
units when comparing page sizes e.g:

    
    
       4mb
       1mb
       4mb
       3mb
       0.005mb

------
meerita
I am glad that people are creating these services, but I always see a problem
with this: what happens if the developer can no longer maintain the service or
does not scale economically. All the blogs will end up being lost. Unless the
developer is a philanthropist who plans to keep this up to the end of the day,
I see these services as ideal for very specific things, not as your new home.

------
rhezab
I wish there was something like this for math blogs. I've tried Jekyll with
MathJax but it looks kind of ugly. Any suggestions anyone?

~~~
sivakon
You can visit [https://upmath.me/](https://upmath.me/) and on the preview
side, choose `md`. You can get latex equation as SVG URL hosted on s2cms.ru
CDN. It's pretty fast and supports any website that supports markdown+images
without the need for MathJax or Katex. Example post here
[https://katr.bearblog.dev/latex/](https://katr.bearblog.dev/latex/)

~~~
rhezab
Will give it a try, thanks for the example post!

------
torgoguys
This is cool!

As mentioned in other replies--some small styling tweaks for readability would
be useful and would literally only cost bytes (on the order of the x-clacks-
overhead on the page...)

If you're focusing on an extremely small page size, I'd prefer an external
static, cached stylesheet than inlining all styling on every page load. That
and a less complicated email obfuscator. :-)

~~~
HermanMartinus
Thanks for the awesome feedback. Yeah, I've come to realise that I'm the only
person partial to Garamond ;)

I've turned off the email obfuscator (courtesy of cloudflare), and will be
doing a bunch of styling improvements over the next week.

~~~
torgoguys
Nah, I actually like the Garamond. I was referring more to adding a bit more
line-height as mentioned in the (then) top comment.

------
awake
I don’t understand the desire to have no stylesheets. The default styling on
the web is not a great example of design or usability.

~~~
Narishma
But it has one...

------
mraza007
Hey a quick question Do you think can I host it myself. I really like the
platform and can this support google analytics.

------
0-O-0
This looks minimal, but a random page that I've visited [1] duplicates
article's text 6 times across different meta tags. Sure something that can be
improved.

[1] [https://herman.bearblog.dev/why-i-
journal/](https://herman.bearblog.dev/why-i-journal/)

------
aloisdg
Is it open source? Could I self hosted it?

~~~
HermanMartinus
You can't self host it, otherwise you'd be better off writing your own basic
HTML pages or using a static site generator. You can check out the source code
on github though
[https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog](https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog)

~~~
cdcarter
Love to see Django apps out in the wild! It might be worth adding a COPYRIGHT
file to the repo, to clarify if we do or do not have the right to run this
software on our own.

------
Ndymium
Nice to see these minimal sites. I also tried to make my own blog as minimal
in used bandwidth as possible without sacrificing my features. A full page
load with all resources is around 22 kB.

Just a note, there seems to be an errant </div> at the end of the generated
HTML.

------
peter_d_sherman
>"Blog platform Avg. page size

Medium ~4mb

Blogger ~1mb

Wordpress ~4mb

Ghost ~3mb

Bear ~5kb (yep)"

There is definitely something to be said with respect to how bloaty many
blogging packages are these days...

Actually, come to think of it, that would be a great name for a new blogging
service... call it "bloaty" or "bloatly" or something like that...<g>.

It could also refer to the fact that with most blogs, the signal to noise
ratio of the words comprising the articles is similarly bloated, as well... so
"bloatly" would be a great name! That'll be my next Y Combinator submission
for summer 2020!

"Bloatly"!

I can picture my future company's Y Combinator interview:

YC Staff: "So what does your piece of software do?"

Us: "It's a blogging platform, the very first HAAS (Hot-Air-As-a-Service)
platform out there... <g> Great for politicians and salespeople! 1.21
Gigabytes of useless JavaScript per page... the Internet will end before you
successfully download any page!"

YC: "So what do you call it?"

Us: "We call it _Bloatly_ \-- now _give us our $150,000 check!_ " <g>

(Kidding, obviously! <g>)

------
bgdkbtv
So glad minimal websites are becoming more popular! Great idea.
[https://catfish.dev/catfish-developer.html](https://catfish.dev/catfish-
developer.html) also follows that ideology

------
brainzap
Does it have RSS?

~~~
millette
[https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/issues/2](https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/issues/2)

------
PatrolX
I like the lighthouse numbers a lot:

[https://twitter.com/asculthorpe/status/1265374476100947971](https://twitter.com/asculthorpe/status/1265374476100947971)

Performance: 100

------
fevangelou
Unless network speeds are reversing to the modem age, browsers switching to
Trident/Gecko and PCs to single core CPUs exclusively, this is 100%
hipsterism.

As if using scripts or CSS is solely a choice of the CMS...

Get real.

~~~
qwerty456127
You probably don't know how many people still use slow, expensive and limited
(often every part extreme) connections and old CPUs. And even on a Core i7
with a 100 Mbit/s channel many websites still feel slow.

~~~
fevangelou
Perhaps in rural areas in Africa and Asia. But these areas are plagued by
poverty either way. Reading John Doe's blog on a 5KB web page is probably
their last concern... :)

~~~
MH15
There are plenty of people in the developed US who have unreliable and slow
internet. Consumers benefit from lightweight products. This is not really
difficult to understand.

------
embit
I use even a shorter version on my site, a cross between pastebin and ascii
blog [0]

[0] [https://embit.ca/scratch](https://embit.ca/scratch)

------
SquareWheel
The comparisons are all to large content management systems. However this
seems like a better fit for static site generators. Would it be better to
compare to Jekyll, Hugo, etc?

~~~
HermanMartinus
Sure, serving static files will always be the fastest, but this is for people
looking for a service like Medium, or Blogger, where there's no need to handle
anything locally.

~~~
masukomi
to be clear, you don't _need_ to do anything locally. It's possible to use
static blogs without touching your site and there are lots of competing tools
out there that will give you a web front end to your static blog.

For example. I use Hugo, with Forestry.io and don't have to touch my
filesystem (or even my personal computer) to blog. I just go to a web page
like all the CMS blogs.

I'm self-hosting rather than using something like netifly so the setup was a
bit more geeky BUT it's totally doable and doesn't have to be tooo geeky.

------
robjan
Good idea but not sure if I would call it a blog hosting platform. My
understanding is that it hosts a single parsed markdown file on a subdomain of
my choosing.

~~~
HermanMartinus
You can write as many posts as you want in markdown, check out the example
blog herman.bearblog.dev to see what I mean

------
rammy1234
Is this different from the note taking app "Bear"

~~~
notadog
Yes. The only similarity is their names.

~~~
rammy1234
Why have the same name that is linked with a well known app. 1. it confuses
the user 2. No unique branding as this question is going to crop up again and
again. Why the author wants to compete with this name ? Just curious

~~~
JadeNB
Competition was not intended:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23312634](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23312634)
.

------
busymom0
Be careful, you might be running into trademark violations with the popular
note-taking app Bear. Seems like both fall in similar genres.

~~~
djsumdog
I don't think you can trademark a generic work like "Bear" .. so long as the
author isn't using the logos from that app or conflating its brand, it should
be fine (IANAL)

~~~
freehunter
You absolutely can trademark a generic word for specific circumstances. That’s
why I can’t set up a computer shop called Apple. It was also the subject of
many lawsuits between Apple Computers and Apple Records.

------
pvsukale3
Does anyone know a blogging platform that allows you to export your content as
a standalone static site and or markdown/csv?

~~~
detaro
micro.blog

------
dunefox
I need something simple like this but with syntax highlighting, images and
Latex support with the option to host it myself.

------
xiaodai
I need to be able to write math and coding content. So coding blocks and math
blocks for writing latex would be ideal.

------
dylanz
This is great. Is there a way to export your data? This would be the only
thing stopping me from using the service.

------
sumeetk
nice initiative ... something which reminds me of ghost !

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost)

[https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost](https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost)

------
JonAtkinson
This is wonderful. I’m thinking of doing something similar. Please could you
email me? Detail in my profile.

------
627467
I love that bear looks as good (if not better) on by blackberry passport (Sq
display) as on my galaxy S9

------
rawoke083600
Looks good ! What is this header ? "X-Clacks-Overhead" :) We getting Discworld
meta as well ?

------
ehsankia
Is anyone going to mention how it says Medium takes 16s to load on average?
That can't be right?

------
jamil7
Cool project! I think you'd do well to expand the example blog with more
entries and content.

~~~
HermanMartinus
Thanks. Will do

------
clircle
Any R blogdown writers here? I started using it a few weeks ago and love it.

------
mrleinad
Add an option to use a black background, and it's perfect.

------
thex10
I see the page and example blog, but where's the platform?

------
robotmay
I like it. I actually built my own platform last year in a similar vein
([https://senryu.pub](https://senryu.pub)) but made a few different trade-
offs; I allowed myself a couple of fonts (which make up most of the page
size), but I can very much appreciate going even further towards minimalism.
Mine's a slow-burn project that I go back to every now and then and just add
small daft features just for myself, as nobody else uses the bloody thing
(probably because I put a paywall on it to stop spam). Poem formatting?
Absolutely.

I'm all for more platforms like this existing, I'd love a return to a legible,
lightweight internet.

------
kennydude
Nice to see a minimal Django-based blog platform!

------
agentdrtran
The example project page is super hard to parse

------
mcguire
" _Did Not Connect: Potential Security Issue_

" _Firefox detected a potential security threat and did not continue to
bearblog.dev because this website requires a secure connection._ "

???

------
ravenstine
That landing page is beautiful.

------
caiobegotti
Advogato feelings here.

------
themarkers
can we do it by nocss ;D

------
Antecedent
Change the font from Garamond and that will eliminate 50% of the style
complaints.

I’ve always found Garamond text online hard on my eyes.

~~~
HermanMartinus
Noted :)

