Set up us the blog
For more than a decade, I’ve used Dropbox as a kind of personal knowledgebase. I’d save simple text files into folders along with supporting files like images or PDFs.
It’s a simple system, but despite a few attempts to replace it with something ‘better’ - nothing has taken. I always go back to using Dropbox because its just so easy.
The closest I’ve come is Obsidian. I’ve been using it on and off for about a year. My early mistake was to try too hard with linking to create a browser style experience.
Now I’ve moved back to using Obsidian purely as an editor, with the files all stored in Dropbox in a simple folder tree.
Secondary to this, I want to write more online, but I’ve found a few barriers:
- Managing website hosting and platform updates sucks. I already do enough IT at work.
- Managing media sucks. I just want to drop a picture or file in and not worry about it.
- Managing formatting sucks. My nature means I get bogged down making things ‘look right’.
- I self-impose pressure for perfection in writing a blog post. It’s not like posting on facebook or twitter.
- Writing from a mobile device is not practical with Wordpress.
I wanted a super simple interface for blogging, and I’m aware of Quartz and some other options, but syncing with Github was yet another system to manage.
I tried using Obsidian Publish, but it has a 5GB total vault limit, which I will exceed very quickly.
I found Blot and it seems to do everything I want. I can edit files in Obsidian directly in my Dropbox folder, and they get published within seconds. The site is actually updating live as I write this. There’s a 1TB site limit which will be plenty, and because it’s in dropbox, everything is versioned and saved automagically.
I haven’t yet figured out how to use tags, but since there’s nothing here yet, that can wait for a bit.
So, here we go. I’ll port across posts from my old site eventually too, but in the time it usually takes me to sign into wordpress and get started, I’ve already written my first post.