12 Jan 2024 Blogging

Neo Blogflow

This post is meta. If you’re curious enough about how I’m currently blogging, read on. Else, fuggedaboudit.

I’ve been posting at two sites: WordPress and Neocities. The latter mirrors the former, starting back in August last year. I’ve prioritized Neocities in order to learn HTML+CSS and have direct and total control over my whole blog. I might migrate there this year and leave WP behind. I might not. For now, I post to my HTML site first. Then I post to WordPress.

Here’s the blog workflow:

Neocities

  1. Draft post in Apple Notes
  2. Copy/paste draft to post template html file.
    1. For this, I use Brackets or Textastic, depending on whether I’m on my Mac or iPad
    2. All my blog’s files are synced via iCloud to work locally or offline
  3. Edit and markup in html
    1. Typically just adding 'h' and 'p' tags and links.
  4. Upload html file to Neocities backend
  5. Copy the blog post’s file path URL name and a bit of extra html
  6. Paste that into four files
    1. index, archive, and the topic html files, plus the rss feed text file

That’s it for posting to Neocities. It’s really not too complicated. It’s five or six steps, and if you focus on the verb at the start of each one, it’s pretty simple: draft, copy/paste, edit, upload, copy/paste.

WordPress

  1. Copy the html of just the post (ignoring the other html code) on Neocities
  2. Start a new post on WordPress
    1. Use Classic editor and text mode
  3. Paste the html
  4. Complete the meta tasks
    1. Type in the title
    2. Check the category
    3. Add the tags
    4. Preview
  5. Publish

On WordPress it’s fairly easy and nice to just past the html straight in. Note: I don’t use any block editor stuff.

Mastodon

  1. Copy the post URL from WordPress (for now)
  2. Go to Mastodon
  3. Create a micro post
    1. Type a blurb
    2. Add tags
    3. Paste the post URL
  4. Publish

This is the only social media site I share my posts to. Not much to it. I can automate cross-posting to Mastodon from WordPress, but I choose to simply copy/paste the URL since it’s the same manual process for sharing from Neocities.

Eventually, I’ll drop either WordPress or Neocities (or both and end up elsewhere, maybe BearBlog, Ghost, Micro.blog, Blot, Write.as, or even Blogger again). Doing so will cut out much of the work above. I look forward to simplifying in that regard.

Speaking of simplifying, I recently came across a blog post from Kev Q about this. It re-awakened within me the yearning to have the most dead-simple way to throw blog posts on the web. I briefly wondered if I should just use the WordPress jetpack app to type out my posts; it’s a simple method. I also wondered if I really want to keep plugging away at my HTML site, doing things manually and old-school. Note, I've never tried an SSG; they seem too complex and don't interest me.

Final thoughts

In the end, I refreshed my Neocities site layout and realized I like it too much to abandon it. Plus, I want to keep learning the code and hope to get certified someday. I feel like I should have done this in the 90s, kind of missing Geocities. Well, now there’s Neocities.

There was a time when I only drafted and edited all within the WordPress block editor (and the WYSIWYG editor prior). I put all my posts in the cloud CMS, keeping none for local backup. But my blog workflow was a streamlined process. Then WordPress.com rocked the boat in Spring 2022, nearly sinking it. I've been kind of jumping ship(s) ever since. At present, Neocities is pretty smooth sailing.

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