After having a recent burst of energy through the form of potential blog post ideas, I knew that I had to revive it. Since then, I've been writing blog ideas, been getting into writing reviews for the media I consume, and have been trying in general to find new ways to talk about what I like, and what kind of bullshit I will never put up with.

...And then I realized that I don't remember a single thing about where the best place to blog is.

Blogging is hard when you're lazy

Unfortunately, the truth about blogging is that it's a very hard thing to do, when you're a very lazy and slacking type of person. I happen to be that kind of person, I bury myself into gaming and neglect my other hobbies. Music, for example, I have burnt myself out of and have been very sparingly been touching. Why? Because I now "suck" at being creative, and every person I wanted to Collab with can't get any good ideas either, or are very slow.

And this thing leaks into a lot of your other hobbies if you let it. For example, it's also made me slack off on my blog writing! Instead of writing for my cool, quirky blog idea, I get to sit around and play Grand Theft Auto instead, because my brain works differently than others and chases dopamine.

And sometimes, it can be really hard. You have to put aside that gaming hobby of yours, to go do blogging! That's cool, but gaming is one of my essential hobbies, which makes it... very hard to balance. Like, really hard. And that, often enough, impacts my motivations to write! And may influence my ability to brainstorm blog topics, which delays blog posts further, etc...

Point is, it's hard. And I've forgotten everything about blogging. So let's yap about it!

And Holy Shit, I do not remember shit about where it's best to blog

To be real, the simple aspect of blogging is not the hard part. I've been writing fancy write-ups, yapping about topics and dropping rants about things with my friend groups, even since I put aside Blogging a good time ago. The problem is definitely not that I don't know how to compose a post; although that can also be a struggle.

The real problem, is the fact that I don't know where to take any of it. It's like I'm brand new in the game all over again, having no real way or idea where to post things? I could post to Blogger, however I do not entirely like blogger, and I don't like working with it. Something about it is not appealing, I don't know how to explain it. Just isn't for me.

There is FriendRewind and the various MySpace-like clones out there, and for the record, I do crosspost there a lot! We will get to that some more later. However, these kind of places have, for a lack of a kinder word, a 'specific' audience, and the kind of things that become visible there are not things like this, where people just blog about anything.

Yeah, people do that, and I do it too because it doesn't cost anything, but it doesn't really get anywhere. It's not even that I really have any specific goal of getting popular, ideally just getting a comment or two and going about my day. Hell, even having friends read it is all I really ask for. Maybe one of them are going to find this, and randomly DM me "cheeseburger!" as a sign of gratitude that they read this at all, or something. I don't know.

But the point is, we're quite new to the game again. Starting all again.

The simple stuff seems too complicated

And god, there are very few options it seems. Writing raw HTML sounds like it would give you the most control, but then you would also have to write all of the RSS by hand... And ahhh, I don't want to do that. Rah.

Maybe there is a magic bullet I'm missing, I'm not sure. Let's look at our other options first.

Zonelets is a Blog creation tool written in Javascript and HTML, originally intended for use on NeoCities, a Geocities-like place where people write their own websites by hand. While the idea is cool and has a purpose in the world, it has a couple of flaws that unfortunately do not meet my standards. That includes having no native RSS.

With ZoneRSS and Zonerender, you can add it manually. However, ZoneRSS was unstable, and Zonerender was pretty unintuitive, very much just a hack.

The cool stuff is obsolete

There is also Zonelots, which leans a lot more into the Javascript end and has a lot of tagging features that are not present in Zonelets. However, it was archived in January 2026 and still does not include RSS.

Zoner is an interesting tool of a similar presence, being backwards compatible with posts written in mind for Zonelets, and includes pre-generated RSS. However, not only was it abandoned in 2024 (with no fork that I know of that is even existent or worth using), it requires manual configuration to customize, something I don't really want to get into... Maybe a task for somebody smarter than me.

The templates all use technologies I don't know how to set up

There are a range of Static Site Generators which do great for this! But they range varying, and I don't know which ones can also statically generate RSS. Not to mention, I don't have a single clue how to set up any of them.

As far as I'm aware, 11ty exists, and has a premade template suite for it already (see next section), but if I wanted to do it from scratch, I don't know how.

There are also a million other SSGs. Hugo, Jekyll, Bimbo... All ones I don't have a clue how to set up, so unfortunately they are also off the table for now. As they usually use node npm or github actions, I don't know how to make it generate a site suitable for my current workload of Cloudflare Pages... So they are unfortunately a no-go.

Hell, I want something nice and beautiful. Some suites are too ugly for me

Now, there is some hope for 11ty. There is Strawberry Starter, an amazing template for 11ty that lets you generate the site, and then put it anywhere. However, I do not like the default theme of Strawberry, and it inserts its branding everywhere, and requires at least five to ten minutes of manual setup.

There are alternative themes, but most of them are not very notable, and I find they don't much improve on Strawberry. I could make my own theme, of course, but again... Requires designing intelligence, and some knowledge of CSS. Both of which, I don't really want to learn just to build a silly website! :( So I'm not sure what to do...

I could imagine a basic theme, but how would I implement it? I don't know! Maybe some time, we will tackle that.

So how did I start to return to it?

So, there's not many options... And I don't have the time (the patience?) to create something custom or themed. Okay, cool, we are very handicapped, and probably going to fail early!

But now's not the time to doom yet. I know my website sucks, and a lot of wasted potential right now... But we still got time to sort that out! We'll just settle for a temporary thing now, and we'll figure out something more permanent later! And we'll do this all later, when I can actually stomach it all.

So now, the only thing left to rule out is the path. I know what I want to avoid so far, so where do we go from here..?

The search for the Smol Pub Key

Well, to look at our options, of course!

I had taken a look into FreeMediaHeckYeah's Blogging options, and... Well, there aren't really many good ones. There is btw, a minimalist platform that... Has an uncomfortably blind white-on-black theme with no dark mode, and no customization options. That was a hard pass.

There was TinyBones, a blog engine built on top of the Astro static site generator, but I still haven't learnt how to leverage Cloudflare Pages/Workers yet, so that was also a no. There was Bearblog... Which limits your discovery as a free user, and also has a metadata system that I wish to NEVER touch again. So that one will be for the gutter.

There is also Emanates, but it was mainly intended for GitHub pages... And I didn't know how to adapt it to Cloudflare.

Mastora, for now

So, there's not many options :(

In the meantime, I decided that for now, I would settle with mataroa, a fork of BearBlog! It is more minimalist than Bear and does lack a lot of the advanced features that made Bear appealing... However, I don't really care just yet, and just want to get my footing in before I do anything. So for now, this will be where we will be!

In the future, I'll look into better options! Perhaps maybe a self-hosted blog, or something of that sort. We'll see!

As always, I do crosspost my stuff to FriendRewind, as it's more likely to get more curious eyes there, and that's where I want an impression of what I do to be in full view anyway! So it's two birds assaulted with one stone.

How it's going

Okay, so those first bit of segments have all been written while I was still getting my blogging front going. How has things been going since then? Ehhh?

I have been very occupied with other hobbies, so it's not been something I have been able to sink all my time into... I find that writing is very hard when you try to commit to it all day!

The setup so far is a little bare and requires a bit of conversion when going back and forth... but it's certainly not the end of the world. It works, until I decide I want more!

We can leave it at that for now, I suppose.

I have not heard back, so it seems I will not be getting my smol pub key after all. And I'm not paying to get it, so this is where we shall go.

But if I'm complaining about not getting seen, what is my goal, if it's not popularity?

Okay, that's my life story out of the way. Let's yap a bit about popularity contests for a second, and then we'll leave you all bee.

There is a certain kind of goal some will aim for when making blogs like this. I've seen it, people who push their type of posts to the top of platforms for a popularity incentive, without any goal of actually fostering thought, and/or making a positive, thoughtful impact on the world. They just make posts with the intent of soaking in interactions, and sometimes just riding flames to get to where they want to go. (looking at you, goat)

There is nothing wrong with these people, usually. There are several styles when it comes to social media profiles, and the people that make them. It just seemed to happen that I don't get along with people who chase fame and attention, I guess.

But that doesn't meant all that I want to be ignored either; I love the idea of people taking the time to drop comments, and spark conversation about something, even if it's short lived. And I love to clarify things, if somebody ever notices a gap in my behavior or logic that could be patched up with some edits.

But it's also very easily overwhelming to be bombared with notifications. So in a way, I do want a little bit of attention, but not for the reason you think. I like sparking perspective. And even if I have to make a few points a little sloppy, that's okay. Sometimes, it'll be worth it to fumble a little on the end result, if it means it can spark something much bigger.

So it's kind of this balancing act. Don't sweat too much about retention because you don't actually care about gaining a very massive following (the MySpace revival community is a niche I consider about the size of audience I am most comfortable with, actually), but also sweat a little about quality, so you don't look too stupid.

I'm still working out the edges, it's been a while since I've done this. But we'll almost be there!