Updated: My email is no longer my blog, but I've linked to a copy. Turns out I really like posting to my blog via an email.
For several years I've been using Fastmail for my email and calendar. I love it! But the entire time there's been a "sites" feature to host a static website that I've toyed with but never really used.
What I've really wanted to use it for all of these years is to host my blog. There wasn't an out of the box way to do it so I settled on paying for Posthaven most of the time and more recently moved over to Bear.
Going back to my more recent post of wanting to move away from subscriptions, this one became a surprisingly difficult one to shake.
Fastmail could be so easy, a blog is just static content. But if I throw in a bunch of markdown files, it just winds up looking like this.
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That's a problem right?
Well, if you look at it as a directory listing, it is. But really, that's just a database. A bit funky, but it's clean and simple and pretty easy for Javascript to parse.
You can still go to https://experimental-blog.noahkoch.com/blog/ to see that same directory listing. But on this page you're reading it's a bit of a magic trick. The URL has secret info in it (query params, for my nerds out there) that's instructing the browser where to fetch the contents and metadata (post title, date) from.
It's a fun little trick and means I have a blog hosting platform via a service I was already paying for. Yet another subscription cut out!
That being said, I really recommend Bear Blog, it's one guy and he's building a great thing. If I wanted to go back to a hosted blog, that's where I'd go.