Friday, May 16, 2025

Ideal Weblog Platform

 Blogger is not the right platform for a tech person to use for long-term. It is only good for non-tech people. If someone has the technical expertise the best way is to compose the blog posts as .md files on Obsidian or VS code and have a static site generator convert them into html files to host somewhere.

But there is one major flaw I have seen in all SSGs is their closed look. By default all of these have an index of posts (maybe along with some excerpts) but not an open feed view of the weblog. This exactly is why Blogger felt compelling to me. This old-school bloggish feeling is not just about nostalgia, there's an open feel to it, because you don't get a list of posts that you can open if you wish to. Rather, you automatically get a feed of recent posts by which you get to know what the person has been recently upto. Interestingly, Substack also has this feature but this is specifically an issue with the idea of weblog and not essays, it isn't much useful there.

Consider the experience of reading a book. You randomly swift through pages, and if something catches your attention, you stop and read around. You do not first have to select a topic from the TOC to decide what to read. Weblog should be like this, where entries are open by default, and the homepage should be a feed of atleast around 20 recent entries from which the person can swift through by scrolling. And if someone wants a list of entries, there should be a table of content for that too (which is something blogger is missing).


Also, I still need to think whether I would want /essays or /weblog in subdomain of the site or in the slug. This is difficult to decide.

I am leaning towards latter because the written content is supposed to be the substantial thing on tamseel.pk. What else am I thinking of having on my site? I can't think of anything. So, why not have it under the main site. Because different subdomain is kind of a different site.


Apparently, it seems no pre-cooked solution would satisfy my needs. I will have to tinker with these SSGs to specifically achieve what I want. I can't tolerate Blogger's stupidly long permalinks for long.


Any thoughts or questions?

Write to me aiktamseel@gmail.com and I will reply ^_^