Finally, an actual blog
TL;DR- I've moved my personal blog to Bear. I've also switched to this new domain.
If you've known me long enough, you would know of my almost-annual tradition of revamping my personal website and/or blog for no reason whatsoever.
I don't know why I deleted most of the older projects from GitHub (maybe out of embarrassment), but thankfully since I was very bad at deployments and version control back then some of my manual deploys are available on netlify. The earliest digital footprint I seem to have left on the internet in terms of a personal website was back in late 2020. I was yet to start college, and had always enjoyed the little programming I had learnt years ago in school (mostly HTML,CSS,JS) before I dropped programming altogether so I could prepare for getting into a good college to...become a programmer. Crazy.
My first website (or as we used to call these things back then - portfolio) is something you'd recognise instantly if you're a fellow 2020s B.Tech student since everyone used to edit the same templates. This stayed with me for a good 1-2 years. I had always wanted to write and have a blog on the internet. At this point, I had learnt React, NextJS and had been playing around with CMS (content management systems) like Sanity and Strapi, so I did the most logical thing for any developer.
And that was how mightwritehere was born. Nothing works here since I seem to have never pushed the rest of the code to Github and deleted the Sanity backend but the manually uploaded netlify site stays alive (I still struggled with deployments). As you might notice, I had high hopes. I wasn't just setting up a personal blog - I was building the next big blogging platform. Predictably, I got bored in a few days and moved on.
In 2023, I really got into Astro and luckliy found Hussain. He was building his own website back then and I followed the tutorial to create ansharora.live.
Mid 2024, I got bored again and stripped off all the fancy CSS to create a very minimalist page. ansharora.tech had been my most satisfactory attempt so far. It looked good, clean and was easy to frequently upload content to (at the time). I absolutely love Astro.
Now that I have finally started writing more actively (and hope to increase the frequency in 2025), I was starting to get irritated with having to deal with templates, formatting issues and bugs (it's not astro, it's me) just to publish a small weekly piece of text. Moreover, the site wasn't the lightweight bloat-free repository of my ramblings that I imagined it to be anymore. As of writing this post, I'm almost on the verge of being kicked out from the 1MB club.
However, the main reason of saying goodbye to the old website is that I have finally discovered the blogging platform I had been looking for since a very long time. Over the last few months, I have looked into Hugo, Ghost, Pelican and even Medium but all of these felt either bloated, complicated, or were just too closed.
Enter, Bear. Bear is a privacy-first, no-nonsense, super-fast blogging platform. I discovered it 2 days back, and was able to sign up, find a theme of my liking and quickly transfer all of my blog posts all within an hour. I obviously like how it has little to no javascript, looks great and all of that.
I'm also greatly impressed by the general philosophy behind the project. The project is built to last forever* and values words over anything else, including fancy iframes. Within a day of discovering bear, I ended up upgrading to the paid tier.
Note that even when I was doing all of this, I didn't plan to get rid of the old website. The idea was to just redirect /blog to ansh.bearblog.dev. But by the time I was done, I realised I didn't need anything more complicated than this motherfucking blog I've set up with my bear hands.
Happy new year!