Bear Blog Is The Best Of Both Worlds
I read "Bear blog or Micro.blog, or both?" from the Bear Blog theme king himself, Robert Birming, and had some thoughts.
Especially after reading this paragraph:
Another thing I like about my current setup is that it’s possible to integrate the two. Bear is wonderful for publishing blog posts, but not as practical when it comes to shorter status updates or photo albums. With this setup, I can display my notes and photos from Micro.blog directly on my Bear blog, seamlessly.
With enough tinkering at Bear, I think it's possible to get all of these solutions in one place.
I've written previously about how I'm using my blog to power a blog feed, notes feed and photos feed, and that's still what I'm using today.
Granted, this probably depends on how much interconnectivity you want with your notes or photo feeds, but for someone like me who just wants a place to publish these pieces of content, Bear has been a great solution.
About the only downside I have to my notes feed is that you need a title for each notes post. That's not the norm for microblogging, and it is an additional hurdle.
But I'm also choosing to see the positive side of this specific limitation. The fact that I have to title notes means I'm creating a more useful archive of those short thoughts that could be helpful in the future.
Ultimately, that's a minor setback for me and not something that would cause me to look for solutions outside of Bear.
Since pulling back from social media and getting back into blogging, it's been refreshing to have one central location where I can put all of my digital content.
The current photo-blog setup is more than good enough for what I want—and the lack of an algorithm, likes or comments is a huge positive. I'm still in the process of backlogging my instagram photos here, and I have no plans to house those in another location in the future.
My case here is not that you need to use Bear for everything. Each person's use-case is different, and some people might need or want features that Bear doesn't provide. I agree with Robert's idea that "Blogging should feel fun and easy."
So far—for me—Bear has been the best of both worlds when it comes to combining short-form/photo content and traditional blogging, while also being fun and easy.
I always appreciate stumbling across blogs that have microblogging sections or photo feeds in addition to the classic chronological blog. Hopefully we'll continue to see more of those here at Bear.