I finally knocked together a [landing page](http://kukkurovaca.com/) as part of my preparation for Cohost's shutdown. I figured it would make sense to list out the tools I'm using for...everything. # Publii For both the [landing page](http://kukkurovaca.com) and my updated [photoblog](https://nickshere.com) I am using [Publii](https://getpublii.com/), a GUI-based static site generator. I'm not totally satisfied with every aspect of it -- in particular, I don't love how it does photo galleries, which is a significant point for the photo blog use case. However, I _absolutely_ refuse to use something like Wordpress again, and I think that Publii is probably a simpler, better solution for me currently than something like [Ghost](https://ghost.org/docs/) would be. I'm very interested in [Bear Blog](https://bearblog.dev/), but I'm not really to launch headfirst into it just yet. The nice thing about Publii is that it does all the website-ass shit for you, and you can just feed it some text and images and it can push out your site over SFTP, or various cloud shits, or just give you the flat files to do whatever with. I would not currently use Publii as a microblogging / midiblogging / shitposting platform, because you need a desktop computer to make it go, so you can't just fire off a quick garbage post with a phone or tablet, and that's enough of a use case for me to be a dealbreaker. This _doesn't_ pertain to photoblogging for me because I'm not posting photos on the go, I'm usually doing that after I finish exporting stuff from [DXO](https://www.dxo.com/dxo-photolab/). ## Publii Themes I'm currently using [Mercury](https://marketplace.getpublii.com/themes/mercury/) for my photoblog and [Terminal](https://marketplace.getpublii.com/themes/terminal/) for my landing page. These are my favorite of the free themes, although the [Portfolio](https://marketplace.getpublii.com/themes/portfolio/) theme has some appeal. [Persona](https://marketplace.getpublii.com/themes/persona/) is also probably pretty good? I haven't gotten into the premium themes yet, but [Easyblog](https://marketplace.getpublii.com/themes/easyblog/) has a color palette that's basically just fucking bleach bypass Cohost? So that's kind of fun. [Carla](https://marketplace.getpublii.com/themes/carla/) and [Art Gallery](https://marketplace.getpublii.com/themes/art-gallery/) look pretty good for photo themes. ## Potential alternative: Bear Blog I like the minimalist vibes of Bear Blog a lot, and a lot of Cohost folks are gravitating to it. It seems like its support for photos is kind of barely there, though, and just in general it's kind of not ready for prime time. I definitely may come back to it again in the future. # Obsidian For now, my midiblogging is going into Obsidian. I've started merging my personal vault and my music notes vault into one combined one that will make it easier to link to stuff in posts in fun ways. You know, the whole digital garden dealio, or whatever. So far the scope of the new vault is relatively conservative, because I've decided I'm going to take my time building it back out. But my eventual goal is to fold in stuff like screencaps and villainessposting about manga/etc., along with stuff relating to photo projects and tea and coffee and stationery and shit. All the messy nerd stuff. ## Obsidian Publish Currently I'm sharing the vault using Obsidian's in-house [Publish](https://obsidian.md/publish) functionality at [plaintextadventure](https://plaintextadventure.com) Obsidian Publish has the advantage of convenience, but it also comes with some significant drawbacks: - Relatively small vault storage limit, and they refuse to give an option to pay for more storage, which I would be happy to do. This is _annoying_ and it impacts two of my main interests -- screencaps and photography. - Limited support for Obsidian's own functionality, including "core" plugins. It's to the point that what you can do with Publish almost doesn't resemble how a lot of people actually use it. - The absolute worst and least you could do for an RSS feed and still say you have one. So, I am considering going to another solution for vault publishing. ## Potential alternative: Quartz [Quartz](https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/) is a solution for turning a vault into a static site that seems polished and is relatively easy to set up and run, even for someone who is non-technical -- although I am not confident in my ability to change things very much from their defaults. Quartz doesn't expand functionality too much beyond what Obsidian Publish offers, but it's definitely better, it would allow me to self-host with whatever amount of storage I need, and its delivered RSS feed is a lot better, although out of the box it doesn't allow for RSS feeds that are folder or tag specific. It [does](https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/features/folder-and-tag-listings) have pages for folders and tags that list their contents, these just don't by default have feeds associated with them. Folks have workarounds for this, such as [this](https://katb.in/velisabalih.diff). [This page](https://quartz.eilleeenz.com/Quartz-customization-log)may also be useful. What I _don't_ have yet is a workflow that I would necessarily like for publishing to Quartz from mobile. I guess I can rely on sync and then schedule the generation and publishing on my PC and just let that do its thing periodically? I am somewhat leaning this way. ## Potential alternative: Digital Garden Plugin The [Digital Garden Plugin](https://dg-docs.ole.dev/) seems to have a more straightforward path to mobile posting, and it also supports Dataview queries, which is sick as hell. However, I think its RSS feed is not as good Quartz's, and it seems like the initial setup is potentially complex and I can't immediately figure out how much it's likely to _actually cost_ if the vault gets large. More superficially, its stock configuration does not look as nice as Quartz's. ## Webpage HTML Export [This](https://docs.obsidianweb.net/getting-started/0.-initiate-an-export.html) may be a better "quick and dirty" option. It seems to support a lot of features, including Dataview and Canvas, and it just spits out a static site. It also looks pretty good! However it seems like it's the least friendly to posting on the go. Some initial test runs produce _super_ long export times, however, and sometimes when embedding notes next to each other, this plugin renders them on top of each other in a very surreal way that's kind of fun, but not...good. ## Flowershow Hmm. [This](https://flowershow.app/docs/blog) is interesting in terms of being a solution that assumes you do want something bloglike on your webbed site. Also seems like they want to compete directly with Obsidian Publish with hosting functionality. However, I can't tell if they even have RSS in there anywhere lol. ## Image Hosting ### Services - Imagebb - Postimage - Internxt - ImageShack ### Self-hosted - Piwigo - Chevereto (Available on PikaPods) - Immich (Available on PikaPods) # Linkblogging in Newsblur Cohost folks have shared a _ton_ of RSS feeds to their various new and existing blogs. I've got a bumper crop of posts sitting in a Cohost folder in [Newsblur](https://newsblur.com/). There are a number of ways to re-share stuff in a lightweight way -- i.e., linkblogging. Newsblur, which is my current RSS reader, has such a feature, which the Newsblur dude calls [blurblog](https://kukkurovaca.newsblur.com/). It's a little clunky but it works painlessly and it's part of a service I already have. It generates its own RSS feed which can then be shared with others or merged with other feeds (see [[#Feed merging with Rssingle|below]]). ## Potential alternative: Inoreader I have started considering dropping Newsblur in favor of [Inoreader](https://www.inoreader.com/). Inoreader has more polish and, more importantly, more and possibly better ways of getting RSS feeds out of it to share with others. The big question for me is how Inoreader's rules functionality compares to Newsblur's training functionality, for filtering out content one is not interested in. Unfortunately the features I am most interested in with Inoreader can't be demo'd in the free mode, so I haven't yet investigated enough to make a decision one way or another. ## Potential alternative: Clipping into Obsidian Another alternative to built-in linkblogging in feed readers is to use the Obsidian web clipper or just manually paste URLs into posts here in the Obsidian vault, probably in the form of a daily roundup of stuff I've seen. This has the advantage of being easily searchable alongside my other notes, but unless I clip the full content, it is more susceptible to link rot, probably. It's also more manual effort, but it might be more useful for others to see several links chunked together. # Feed merging with Rssingle One thing I wanted to achieve in all this is combining multiple feeds (e.g., my photoblog, my Obsidian vault, and my linkblogging) into a single feed that could be shared with others and which, critically, could be modified in the future to add, remove, or replace source feeds without needing every subscriber to update their feed reader. Unfortunately, this is the kind of trivial problem where there are lots of soclutions for it, but most of the _easy_ solutions cost money, and frankly a little too much money for the use case I'd be paying for. A free solution that I'm going to try for now is using [Rssingle](https://github.com/shymega/RSSingle), which is a local executable, to manually generate a combined feed. I haven't gotten around to trying to schedule this yet, but it shouldn't be that hard? ## Potential alternative: Rsscombine I tried [this](https://github.com/chase-seibert/rsscombine) repo previously but while I was able to get it to run, it panicked when confronted with the RSS feed generated by Obsidian Publish. ## Potential alternative: Inoreader Inoreader costs money as well, but if I drop Newsblur in favor of it, then I'm not actually spending more money overall. It allows for generating combination feeds for folders/tags, as well as easy generation of per-folder OPML files. This is potentially very appealing. ## Potential alternative: Fivefilters Fivefilters's hosted solution is too expensive, but you can also purchase on a one-time basis a copy for you to host yourself, and if you already have hosting, that makes more sense. Depending on whether you have a need for other things it can do, this might make sense. # WinSCP For uploading stuff to my webhost. As with so much open source software, WinSCP is very powerful but also extremely painful to look at. ## Potential alternative: Cyberduck Oh, it looks like Cyberduck is available for Windows now? I used that back in the day when I was still on Mac. Maybe I should try that out. # VS Code For editing config files and shit.