My Last Blog Post

08/23/25

This is my last blog post. Well, my last blog post to write on Bearblog.

I've decided to start blogging from my main website. I'm gonna keep my Bearblog account and use it as a mirror/archive. So, you'll still see me around! Just at a lesser capacity.

I publish my blog posts through the terminal with Astro. I'll still have to post them here manually. Not sure yet how often I'll mirror stuff. Might be the same day I post things, or I might wait until the end of the week and post batches of stuff.

Here's the actual blog post I wrote on my website:

My First Blog Post

Hooray!

This is my first blog post!

Or at least, my "first" blog post here on my website!

I've put so much work into this, it's unreal haha. I still can't believe I actually managed to pull it off! I think it was only a little over a week ago when I decided to jump into Astro—and now I'm building an entire blog infrastructure! How cool is that?

This post is more of a final proof-of-concept than anything else. I'll make a proper devlog eventually sharing code, etc and all the resources I used. I didn't really hand code much because I'm still learning, so nearly everything is copy & paste either from the Astro docs or random bits I picked up searching¹ through DuckDuckGo.

My buddy JB was a huge help, too. He fielded countless questions from me and helped write code whenever I was stuck, as well as giving me pointers on how to setup my Astro config files, etc. (If you're reading this, hi JB!)

In fact, my Astro learning journey began with his tutorial, Astro (in the indie web)!

How did I get here?

I've been blogging for ages on Bearblog, which I credit for piquing my interest for webdev in the first place.

The only reason I got on Bearblog was because I saw people talking about it on Mastodon. And the only reason I got on Mastodon was because I saw someone had made a server for a Reddit DT (daily thread) I used to be a part of.

So, I guess I should go thank the tech mod at r/neoliberal² for creating mastodo.neoliber.al, which was my first server (I've since moved to sunny.garden).

In short, my path to webdev went as follows: Reddit → Mastodon → Bearblog → Nekoweb.

I enjoyed blogging so much that I kept wanting to build up my online space. Eventually I started screwing around with HTML and CSS, which I had never done before. Needless to say, I became obsessed, and the rest is history. Here we are almost a year later.

I'd always been techy and interested in coding, but much of what I had seen thus far wasn't my jam. I'm too right-brained for it. HTML/CSS was different. It's code, but not programmable. It doesn't act as a vehicle for convoluted functions, nor loop into recursive chain reactions, each block of code acting like a dancer in some Chinese lion routine.

HTML acts as the digital structure for the written word. CSS makes that structure look nice, translating raw text into a visual language. Javascript, I guess, makes it all dynamic and self-referential—but I'm not there yet in my studies lol.

I ❤ blogging

As soon as I started blogging I wondered why I had never tried it before.

I love writing, and at nearly 28 years old I've spent two-thirds of my life online. Blogging bridges my interests in tech, my love of the internet, and my passion for writing perfectly. As a visual artist, the design process inherent in CSS scratches my creative itch, too. Combine all this with the instant gratification a quick push of code and cache refresh brings, and you've got the equivalent of crack cocaine befitting a weird Zillenial, reformed Tumblr kid such as myself.

I've tried journaling for years and years, but I've never managed to stick with it; any consistency coincided with drops in my mental health, which isn't the greatest sign lol.

I tend to think quick and type quicker. Whenever I tried journaling in the past my hand would get tired, or I'd get frustrated and impatient. Hauling around a journal felt like a hassle.³ Then there's the intimidation of an empty page—a threat I know all too well from virgin sketchbooks and blank canvases. Or if a journal was already filled, at some point I'd become disoriented and lose any semblance of organization, requiring a "fresh start" with a new journal—resulting in stacks of abandoned, half-full predecessors.

All of these annoyances fall away when I sit down at my computer. Something about putting my fingers to a keyboard unleashes a stream of thought that never slows. Maybe it's a case of Stockholm Syndrome between me and the digital interfaces I learned to rely on as an isolated, depressed teenager. Maybe it's an indictment on the modern world's over-reliance on technology.

Or maybe—coming up on forty years into the age of the Personal Computer—it's just another medium at our disposal, and blogs are analog journals gone digital.

So, I guess in a way I've managed to finally "stick" with journaling in a way that works for me!

My time on Bearblog

I've had so much fun on Bearblog. I jumped in before the platform really took off and got hooked from the get-go. It felt very insular and tight-knit. The purpose of Bearblog was very specific, too.

Bearblog was intended to be a lean, lightweight interface. Its founder, Herman (who is an awesome guy, by the way, and responds to e-mails super quick!) says as much in the docs:

Bear is the perfect blogging platform. It does everything you need, and nothing more.

Making my own site

As I said, I started feeling limited by Bearblog's capacity as a blogging platform.

I made this post musing about the limitations of Bearblog in terms of visual design, CSS, HTML, and use-cases. It also recounts my ill-fated first go at webdev on Neocities.

I finally signed up for a Neocities account yesterday and fiddled around with the HTML/CSS. It was fucking torture lol. I tried using a layout generator but the code got borked when I uploaded it to the site. Then I realized the problem wasn't the code but the fact that I'm a moron.

(Emphasis mine—some things never change, no matter how much experience you gain, lol.)

Keen readers will notice that I made the post on April 6th, 2025. Guess what date it was when I created this site?

Go figure!

I ended up liking Nekoweb better than Neocities (for no real particular reason outside of vibes). The Discord community is really nice and super helpful. Getting to know other webdevs and receive help and encouragement from them definitely made the whole process easier.

I could launch into the ins and outs of how I built this website, but that would be a whole fucking thing, and I don't have the energy to go into it right now.

I'm really excited, though! Juggling my time between two different platforms was becoming untenable. Now that I've migrated my blog, I can focus all of my time and effort to this site! I have so many ideas I want to implement, I don't even know where to begin! But that's what makes it so fun, right?

List of cool blogs on Bearblog

I'll put a list of some blogs on Bearblog⁴ here to wrap things up!

In no particular order:

Thank you!

I intend on keeping my paid Bearblog membership and use it as a mirror/archive for this blog, so I'll still be around, but at a lesser capacity.

In any case, I wanna give a shout-out to everyone I interacted with there, and all of my readers. I would not be here today writing this post after building a blog on my own website if it weren't for all of you!

I appreciate everybody so much, and feel so thankful that I got to meet as many cool people as I did and learn all that I had.

❤ Thank you! ❤

✘ Posted on — 08/23/25
✘ Last modified — 6 hours, 3 minutes ago
✘ Link — https://blog.xavierhm.com/my-last-blog-post

Footnotes

I wish "googling" as a verb wasn't depreciated by the fact that Google as a company sucks, lol. RIP.↩
As in neoliberal (non-derogatory). I call myself a liberal, seeing as my views and ideas are closer to center than what is considered "leftist" now. I plan on making a whole post about my political thoughts one day too, just want to do some reading first so I know how to articulate them. To get an idea of where I'm coming from, you can look up my favorite political writer at the moment, Franics Fukuyama.↩
For a year or two now, however, I've enjoyed carrying a fountain pen and a pocket notebook with me everywhere for writing down random ideas, shopping lists, bits of poetry or prose, etc↩
A Bearblogroll? haha↩

#devlog #featured #internet #personal #tech #webdev