Moving to Pureblog and a new domain

This website has become a bit nomadic over the last wee while transiting from lee-perry.co.uk to l.prry.uk before landing on its final resting place here at prry.uk.

The software powering the site has been similarly changeable. What started with amalgamating all of my wordpress projects in a single Hugo based site on Micro.blog, grew into a much more complex site built in Kirby CMS, simplified itself into a bearblog experiment, metamorphosed into a similar project using 11ty, before landing on Pure Blog via an abortive move back to Micro.Blog.

Why?

Explaining the domain name switch is simple, I'll always maintain my lee-perry.co.uk domain, I've been hosting on it since 2004. I just like the new shorter domain that I've got hold of. Originally I'd planned to host my Mastodon instance on that domain, but moved my site onto it once I'd decided (for the second time) that self-hosting is expensive, wasteful, and very quiet (moving to social.lol).

Explaining the move to Pure Blog is more complex, as I've enjoyed building every iteration of this site over the last few years. I loved learning to template in Hugo and applying it to make Micro.Blog more customisable. Then I really enjoyed building a more complex site and dashboard using Kirby CMS. Using Bearblog showed me how you could take a very simple blogging system and make it do more complex things, and in 11ty I applied the same concepts and design while going back to basics from the console before plugging in the excellent PagesCMS.

That last development introduced a few things that I was less happy with though. Having worked hard to exclude big tech from my life where I can, Apple largely excluded for the moment, using PagesCMS meant using Github and Netlify for hosting and deployment - though it did make deployment much more straightforward than my earlier Codeberg / Statichost setup.

I considered moving back to Micro.Blog at this point, spending a week building out a concept. This was borne out of a few things. I love the app environment over there, am interested in the new extended video hosting features, and also the new RSS aggregator inkwell. I was also intrigued by the 'check-in' functionality in the Micro.Social app. I aborted this though, it felt as isolated as my previous stay, and an expensive way of gaining a few phone apps and video hosting vs my current setup with Bunny.

Pure Blog

So here I am now rebuilding my site on Pure Blog.

I remember seeing Kev's earlier Hyde CMS sat on top of Jekyll, being impressed and envious in equal measure. So once I'd realised how straightforward Pure Blog is to install on traditional hosting without needing a VPS or Docker and any of that nonsense, I was sold (his Pure Comments project is similarly straightforward). I downloaded the zip from github, uploaded to the site folder in the file manager on my Krystal.io hosting, moved the files back to the root of the folder, visited my website, and followed the on screen installation instructions. Up and running in around a minute and all very straightforward.

If one of the reasons that I moved to Pure Blog was simplicity, as well as ejecting the big-tech addition to my 11ty setup, portability was also key. Pure Blog stores files in the content folder in plain markdown text format with fairly standard looking yaml frontmatter. It would be super easy to pick the site up later and completely rebuild it using Jekyll or Hugo in future, and for the most part the reader would not know or even need to know that had happened.

I've enjoyed my time writing in Pure Blog so far, easy to set up, pleasant but bare bones enough to enjoy writing in markdown text within. Ready to go out of the box as a blog, I've configured different content post types for articles, micro posts, image posts, training entries and link posts. I've not done much with the content structures yet, I want to keep this as simple as possible - but I can build specific fields into my custom content temnplates if and when I choose to.

I like Pure Blog so much that I have created a separate site trackd purely to capture short activity tracking posts that syndicate out to the fediverse, but otherwise feel weird to send out within my RSS field. I then plugged in Pure Comments to both, installed on my chatter subdomain, with Amazon SES to serve email (mainly because I just failed to get SMTP to work at all). I'll come back to this later, as I don't really want Amazon in my stack, or after a weird payment to Twilio after a decade this week, longstanding payment instructions sat in unused accounts.

Probably the most complex thing that I've done so far with Pure Blog is to build a custom front page, pulling through the latest posts from each section. Kev quickly update Pure Blog so that a custom front page would be selected where a custom route was set to it on the home url.

I have implemented microformats within the theme where easily able to, I don't think its straightforward to implement h-feed to archive pages without beginning to overhaul templates that would need to be reimplemented after every update. I've customised a Pure Blog version of the webmentions script that I had previously installed on both the 11ty and bearblog versions of my site. I think that is an improvement as it groups the mentions into a single row, taking up less space on the page. I have also made a wee Pure Blog svg to follow the day/night theme colours, positioned within my footer - that took far longer than it should have!

To do

I've still got plenty of work to do on this move, but I'm really happy with the choice and planning to hang around for a while.

I've brought across parts of my site collateral, but I've done very little theming so far, and need to put more of my stamp on the design. Part of the reason for that is, fonts aside, there are a lot of synergies between the core design and my previous design - especially in night view. So I need to style up my site.

I will probably have custom content structures that I want to create, but for now I'm trying to keep the field structure as flat as possible. Lets see how that goes.

The main thing that I need to do now is to import my existing content, preferably without making echofeed go haywire. On that point, echofeed definitely needs a master off switch. This is going to take some time though, I have thousands of pieces of content in different content structures across my 11ty and KirbyCMS builds, and its going to take some time to reformat the content and frontmatter and to move images into the right folder stucture - I'm going to try to write a script to do that when I have a moment.

Pure Blog

Great to write in, flexible enough to build custom content, but limited enough to make you not want to. Kev wrote that he thought that Pure Blog was feature complete ish. I think its great, I see a few areas where, selfishly, it can be improved further to simplify my workflow, without pulling it too far away from what it was designed to be:

• Automatically including categories as tags available within RSS feed content
• Automatically making the first image in a post available in a featured image shortcode
• Option to include post description in a summery element within post and feed
• Maybe even the ability to create a custom feed.php in the site content folder, bringing custom fields in to the feed.
• Multiple image upload.

I'd always advocate for baking microformats directly into posts, pages and feeds - but that may not be a direction Kev wants to take Pure Blog in.

Hopefully thats all constructive. I think anybody is capable of building and producing content using Pure Blog, and if you've never written in markdown, you'll not look at a text editor in the same way again once you have!

Until next time...