A Not So Quiet Swap Back to Bear
A few months ago, I wrote a post about how I wanted to blog less about blogging. I was surprised by the response I got, which was the opposite of what I expected. It seems folks really like reading about blogging, but I still haven't written a word about blogging since that post. This changes today, mainly because I failed at keeping my most recent platform swap quiet.
For the past few months, I've been drooling over Robert's Bearming theme. Since this blog originated on BearBlog, I never deleted it, and it just remained in a sort of frozen state since April.
On the sly, I've been experimenting with Bearming and just toying around with my old posts, and I realized I missed writing in markdown. I also was sick of getting emails from NameCheap regarding my SSL's, which was one of the main reasons I wanted to get away from self-hosting to begin with.
Realizing that Herman was now offering a lifetime subscription to BearBlog, I decided to take the dive and for the past week I've been slowly adding all the posts I've written since April to my old blog. My goal was for this to be so seamless that no one would even notice. I mean, I've really screwed the pooch in the past moving my blog, and this time I wanted it to be a silent move.
Well, I was almost successful. I managed to maintain my RSS and keep my feeds alive, however, I cleared my blog off my RSS reader and I updated the CNAME too quickly, so I wasn't sure if all my feeds were still working. I had to reach out on Mastodon for some verification, and from there I discovered that quite a few of my other "new" posts had hit the RSS feed today. So, I ruined my own quiet switch, but at least I didn't break anything this time!
So, besides Robert's theme, annoying SSL certificates, and a lifetime subscription, why come back to Bear? Well... this idea originated in an email that I received a few months ago from a reader.
When I moved back to Wordpress, I received an email that discussed discovering my blog on Bear. This reader encouraged me to go back to Bear, because the Discovery feed had been so good to my posts and the type of readers who visit Bear for new blogs would like my content. This kind reader wasn't wrong, I mean, so many of my online blogger friends originated because of Bear. They found a post that got some upvotes and emails got exchanged and that was that. I guess, in some way, Bear operates as a sort of library for a certain type of blog that isn't easily found, and some folks, (several I've spoken with who don't blog) use it as a sort of replacement for the normal social media scroll.
I honestly didn't think moving my blog would be that big of a deal. I certainly didn't think about any of the points that were made in that email, but I do understand. Bear is a community, not only of bloggers, but also of readers, and my type of blogging fits in well here.
So, I've returned to Bear, the place the originally inspired me to get back into blogging when I really thought I'd walked away for good. I can't guarantee it's my forever home, but I'm excited about seeing how things play out.