Thank you, Bear Blog

On 31 August 2023, I wrote my first post on Bear Blog. The whole post: “Let’s start again shall we!”

I needed a fresh start. For two years, I had been building websites instead of writing on them. I wrote my own site, rewrote it, tried blogging platforms, learned to host it myself and paid a lot of money for VPSes. None of it got me writing.

Bear Blog did. Minimalistic yet functional, as I said back then. No plugins, no build step, nothing to maintain. Just a text box and a publish button.

So I wrote. 69 posts in September 2023 alone: fitness journals, game reviews, Vim vs Emacs, rants about YouTube, what I learnt in my 20s. 106 posts in four months, more than double what I wrote in all of 2022.

The best part of Bear Blog was the community and the Discover page. Surprisingly, people do reply to your emails. I even made a separate email address just for fellow Bear bloggers, and dropped the “r” from Kumar, because kuma means bear in Japanese. And one day, googling append-only journaling, I found a blog post quoting mine. First time ever. I was glad I inspired at least one person on the internet.

But little things got in the way. A draft kept the date I saved it and sank under newer posts, so I set its year to 3000 to keep it on top. Small restrictions like that added up, and I posted less and less. My last post there was in March 2026: “Still all I have is this place to write.”

Now I’m back on my own site, giving self-hosting another shot. Yes, a VPS again. 2023 me would laugh. But this time Claude does the tinkering, and I do the writing.

And the site wears the Hugo Bear Blog theme, because Bear Blog’s look is the one that got me writing. Plain, fast, light and dark. Why change what works?

I’ll keep following Bear Blog and contributing. Thank you, Herman, for making it. And thank you, Bear Blog, for getting me writing again.