Bear Blog First Impressions
I have been using Bear for a couple of months now, migrated about three hundred posts and made a few fresh ones. I am satisfied with the decision to leave WordPress.com. Bear is more straightforward to use and does not have the limitations of free or lower-tier WordPress.com subscription.
There are not as many themes, but there is no clunky block editor, and the CSS is editable. I ended up changing one of the default themes to my liking. Writing posts in Markdown is straightforward, but more complex layouts require mixing in HTML or CSS.
The biggest downside for me is the rudimentary media management. It is easy to add new images to posts, but reusing old ones requires copying the URL from the media list, which has no search functionality. There are no comments or image galleries, and only limited email subscription functionality. It is possible to add custom JavaScript to provide extra functionality, but I went without comments or subscriptions at first. There is an Atom/RSS feed, and a implemented a simple CSS for stacked galleries.
Before going for Bear, I considered making a static website or using Pika. I played with Jekyll and Hugo and quickly decided that static sites are much work. Pika is another lightweight blogging platform that appears good, but unlike Bear, the post URL is not customisable [Pika now supports aliases]. I want the links made to the old site to work after switching the domain to point to the new site, and Pika does not use the same format as WordPress. Bear allows post aliases, the old posts are available via the original path and Bear’s default path.