I've decided to start a new blog. I'm using Ktistec to power it so that people can follow and leave comments from any fediverse/ActivityPub account, like Mastodon.

I wrote my own blog app 11 years ago in Rails after migrating it away from Octopress. If you're familiar with Octopress, you might recognize that I kept basically the same layout. I was (and still am) not a designer. It's been running on a plain-old DigitalOcean droplet ever since then. The only times I've done anything with it operationally were to upgrade Rails and/or Ruby a few times, and then I stopped even doing that. I never even added SSL to it. It serves over plain HTTP.

After that, I was blogging on DEV for a while. One of the nice things about using a community-style blog app like DEV is that it's more likely that people will actually see the things I write and folks could comment on it. The downside was that using someone else's platform meant my blog was subject to the decisions they made for the platform and community — and I frequently did not agree with those decisions. Apparently, I wasn't the only person who felt that way since the community instance they setup for people self-hosting the software saw only 5 posts in all of 2023 and none in 2024. (Disclosure: I also worked there for about 18 months.)

And while I've been passively looking for some new blogging software for the past few years, nothing really caught my attention. I went with Ktistec because, while it seems to be designed around ActivityPub, it's pretty nice as a minimalist blog.

The main thing I'd like to add to it is RSS/Atom feed discovery, because it doesn't currently support those. There's an issue open for adding RSS feeds and I implemented Atom in the Rails blog I mentioned above, so I can do it here, too.

I think maybe I should port content over from my original blog and my dev.to blog at some point, but I'm probably not gonna worry about that yet.