Over the years, I have hopped from publishing platform to platform in search of the best solution for my meager blogging needs. After spending time in Movable Type, Typepad, Blogger, Ghost, and Wordpress, I’m now using micro.blog for my personal electronic publishing needs.

There are some things I really like about micro.blog, including:

  • Obsidian tie-in: Obsidian uses markdown for it’s notes, and micro.blog uses markdown for it’s posts. Somebody developed a nifty Obsidian plugin that allows me to directly publish both posts and pages directly from Obsidian notes. Local copies of web content in my Obsidian vault is pretty sweet.
  • Speed: micro.blog utilizes Hugo, which is fast and lightweight.
  • Cost: micro.blog is a hosted solution which is about 25% of the cost of other hosted publishing solutions.

Micro.blog does a great job at what it does. But I think it’s important to recognize some potential downsides in the way I use the product. Some of what I post is long form content, and that brings with it some challenges.

  • User expectations: Fellow micro.blog users can get bombarded with longer posts in their micro.blog timelines, and I have had one person directly communicate their annoyance of that fact to me.
  • RSS and JSON: Out of the box, micro.blog provides RSS and JSON web feeds, but their default full site and category specific feeds appear to be full post only. Another opportunity for those wanting <280 character posts to be disappointed or not to follow.
  • Feature Set: A couple of the things I miss from products like Ghost and WordPress is the lack of ‘pretty’ URLs and slug management.
  • Themes: I use a great theme called Sumo (which I like a lot), but most of the themes for micro.blog assume that content will be short form.

I’m not grousing, I just want to find ways to be a better neighbor within the microblogging community. I would really like to find a way to have the summaries from the archive page be my front page content and find a way to publish those summaries in my JSON/RSS feeds.