Choosing Bearblog
I run my website on Bear because it is the fastest way to publish online while maintaining control. Let me explain...
The general expectation, when looking at a product designer's portfolio, is to find something visually appealing. Something that looks like
This
Or this
Or at the bare minimum this
Manuel Solera
Turns out if you want to put something visually appealing on the web and make it accessible to everyone, you either have to :
Know enough HMTL/CSS & JS to faithfully recreate your vision.
Or use a WYSIWYG tool like framer and all the lock-in that comes with it.
Or wrangle AI to do the above, and never publish it.
Or turn to traditional blogging platforms like wordpress and get stuck customizing that.
Then navigate the maze of options for pricing, bandwidth, uptime, delivery, and so much more 🫠 , you get the gist.
This is framer's 6th pricing model, lol
Speaking of which
Bear feels like web 1.0, the time when the internet was just a massive wall of text, with some images in between. That feels like a home-coming of sorts with me.
Setting aside nostalgia, the 99.5% of product design websites are puddles of information. You scroll a lot, see a bunch of nice mockups that never made it to production, gloss over vague 'metrics', get preached on 'insights', and get oversold on 'impact'.
In the end you but you walk away knowing very little.I prefer my corner of the internet be accessible & information dense, which is why,
I'm making it exist first
The polish will come later.
Bearblog is barebones, but it has:
- Markdown support
- CSS for formatting
- Webp images
- A simple navigation
- Logical device breakpoints
Anybody with an internet connection on a modern device can consume 100% of the content in the website. It will also load very fast.
That's a tradeoff I'm willing to make for a while.