Blaugust 2023 Aftermath
I did a quick recap post on the last day of Blaugust without much retrospect. I want to write more about ideas that surfaced during the month and below are a few topics. I plan to will to write follow-up posts on how things progress.
The Old Reader
WordPress Reader user experience has never been particularly good. I have not considered alternatives, since the majority of my feed is WordPress blogs, but during Blaugust I started to look for a better reader.
My friend has been using The Old Reader and I decided to give it a try. It looks a bit dated, but it is more responsive than WP Reader and grouping feeds is much easier. I currently duplicate the feeds on both platforms but plan to eventually keep The Old Reader as the main platform and use WP Reader exclusively for WP blogs.
Static Site
I have been somewhat dissatisfied with WordPress and it feels like they are gearing more towards business websites than blogs. In the second week, Aywren highlighted blogs hosted on Neocities and I began thinking about migrating Avaruussuo to a static site.
I do not want to do any coding while preparing and publishing posts, which rules out most static site generators. Fortunately, I found Publii a static site CMS application, which has a WordPress-like desktop UI for content management.
WordPress offers many features – like statistics, scheduling, comments, and pingbacks – out of the box and is convenient to use. I am not quite ready to make the switch yet, but I will experiment with Publii.
iA Writer
The WordPress post editor is cumbersome and slow. I decided to try writing a post in an external application and copying the contents to WP. At first, I thought about trying Scrivener, but it is designed for long-form writing and the majority of my posts are short.
One Scrivener review suggested iA Writer for short-form writing. Unlike Scrivener, it is a Markdown editor, but it has advanced features like library and style check. The application is lightweight and straightforward to use. Markdown is rendered formatted which makes editing more accessible than on a plain text editor.
My current workflow is to write in iA Writer, do the final spell check with Grammarly app, and copy the text to the WP editor. I still have to add images and galleries in WordPress, but writing with iA Writer is so fun that I am going to keep using it.
Blaugust aftermath imagined by Midjourney
Midjourney’s idea of Blaugust in Varissuo