I think blogging is a really great thing and more people should do it. It’s an online space where you can shaer your thoughts and feelings, without needing to appease some magical social media deity or post simply just to collect likes. Blogging, especially when you don’t have a specific social media platform audience in mind can be hugely beneficial in allowing someone to parse their thoughts and emotions. You can create a blog to talk about mental health, interests, creative writing, etc.

Cohost shutting down came as a bit of a surprise to me, and likely many others. I was never a huge Cohost user, instead opting for creating my own blog (you’ll never guess which one it is), but many people used it as a sort of personal blog platform / friendlier Tumblr alternative. While most blog sites can’t really provide a true alternative to that, I still believe blogging is a really useful thing that more people should do… so I created this post to try to bring people in.

Here’s some blogging tools I’ve found that I think should be easy and quick to get into and start writng stuff.

Bearblog

Bearblog is a super simplistic privacy-focused blogging platform. It’s really quick to get into and fairly simple to use. If I didn’t use Jekyll for my blog I would probably use this instead. It requires some basic technical knowledge to use just because it uses Markdown to format blog posts, but Markdown is super straightforward and easy to use:

# Heading

This is some text, hi! Here is a [link](https://www.google.com/). 

You can **bold** and *italicize* text super easily too.
That turns into...

Heading

This is some text, hi! Here is a link.
You can bold and italicize text super easily too.


It’s also super customizable, having lots of built-in themes and a CSS editor so you can customize it however you want if you know a little CSS.

Overall I think Bearblog is pretty cool, I would just keep in mind that there is an optional subscription allowing you to do things like use a custom domain.

Blogger

If you’re not a Google fan, skip this one.

Blogger is a very longstanding blog platform owned by Google.

Blogger has a visual blog editor similar to that of other Google products allowing you to quickly create posts without needing to know any specific sort of formatting

They also offer a nice lsit of different customizable styles, albeit more generic blog-style.

Along with that, Blogger also allows you to use a custom domain (if you own one) and has a built-in (optional) comment system, with the caveat of the whole Google thing. This one has some weird adsense monetization thing, but I haven’t messed with that or really want to, to be honest.

Write.as

If you just want a simple way to put some text out into the world, consider something like write.as.

There’s not a huge amount to say about all the different features, cause it’s built for simplicity. If you’re more into creative writing or just want a quick and easy place to post some words, this one is great for that. It’s built on Writefreely, which is an open source blogging system you can self-host and run on your own server if you know how to do that.

Self-hosting

While these are all publicly-available platforms that anyone can create an account for, you can also self-host your own blog and not have to worry about any subscriptions or Google tracking. Personally, I use Jekyll, which is a more complex library using the Ruby programming language that generates a blog website you can host on your own server, or a static server host like GitHub or Cloudflare pages. It uses Markdown like Bearblog, but I just edit it in a regular code editor on my computer. WordPress is also an insanely popular one used to host a good chunk of blogs such as Cabel’s blog and I believe also has a visual editor like that of Blogger. I’ve also heard very good things about Ghost, but I haven’t tried it myself.

If you self-host with something like Jekyll, you can actually throw the files directly onto a Neocities or Nekoweb page, or literally any other static site hosting platform (I use Cloudflare Pages).

RSS

All of the blog systems I talk about here also generate an RSS feed, which is basically just a format for data that allows you to easily congregate all of the blogs you like into one place.

You can easily keep all your blogs in one place by using an app like NetNewsWire for Mac and iOS, Feeder for Android, Fluent for Windows, or Thunderbird for Mac, Linux, and PC, but I’d only recommend it if you also use it as your email client. Usually you can find an RSS feed by looking around for a link the webpage, or by adding something like “/feed” or “/feed.xml” to the base url. From there you can put that into your favourite RSS app and off you go.

Now go, make a blog about your favourite SCPs, your short stories, recipes you’ve tried, some weird tech meta-blog where you talk about blogging, literally nobody can stop you.

If you’re reading this there’s a decent chance you already know a lot of stuff about this, or maybe even more! If there’s any other platforms or tools you recommend, feel free to let me know in the comments here.