BearBlog: first impression

2025-07-24

Pet heard that indie humans are amazed by BearBlog and decided to give it a try. But unlike humans who leave positive feedback only, pet used to piss in shoes and could not resist the urge.

Despite the fact that pet is amazed by minimalism of BearBlog too, its feedback is negative. It would be unfair not to say why, so here's why.

Export

This is the first thing pet was concerned about. Backups is a must.

But the only way to export is CSV.

Meow! Why?

CSV means that slack pets who prefer blogging platforms instead of doing everything with their own paws, they have to write a script to pull content out of CSV and all their expectations will break against field_size_limit, at least.

From past lives pet remembers that CSV is not portable and reading it is tricky. Per would not consider it a file format at all, but humans seem to be happy with it, so, well, okay. Of course, pet is surprised by bears, but that's their problem.

Okay, pet has got CSV but what should it do with it? Surely, CSV generated by BearBlog cannot be used to import directly to other platforms, such as medium or substack. Dream on, pet, dream on. Probably CSV could be useful for moving content to a self-hosted instance, but no more.

Pet would prefer an archive with separate files and directories that resemble the layout of the blog. This would greatly facilitate offline editing even without synchronization, simply by copy-pasting changed pages.

Of course something like rsync would be great to upload changes, but... well, pet realizes all implications.

If BearBlog-2 will ever be designed, pet suggests some version control system for the backend. Mecrurial. It's in Python and more user-friendly than weirdo git.

Header items

Pet is not a blogger, it's more interested in pages. For pages, is_page is automatically included in the post information. But other headers aren't. Unlike bears, pet cannot memorize them all and always misses the very important meta_description. Pet would fancy a form above content text area with all headers at paw. Without looking into "Anatomy of a post" each time.

Editing

Scrolling is weird. Cursor goes out of sight very often.

Analytics

The page says: Your blog is currently hidden from search engines and the discover feed."

But pet sees "Unique reads: 30" and "Unique visitors: 26".

Pet's blog was secret this far. So who those visitors are?

Is that all?

It seems so.

Pet has strong temptation to get back to tildeclub with static web pages. Or to buy a VPS.

It's a matter of taste and it's too personal.

Maybe pet will love BearBlog same as bears, but not now.

Nevertheless, pet will stay there (i.e. here) for a while. If bears won't kick it out for pissing in shoes.