BearblogReviews of bearblog.dev

An excellent platform for blogging & minimal sites. I used it for over a year for this purpose and it performed very well. This is not a full-featured 'every bell & whistle' platform. It's a Markdown-friendly, straightforward builder. It's meant to focus on the words you write, not how shiny you can make a webpage. I wouldn't hesitate to use it again.

I’m only writing this because Herman removed the ability to share feedback on GitHub or anywhere else. If you want a simple blogging site where you can post and go for a small fee, this is it. But you will find yourself in an insular community to boot. There are no comments and no plan to ever add comments and so if someone has something to say (and they will have something to say) they usually write an entirely new post on their own blog using “Re:” and sometimes someone else will “Re:” that. Pulling you into a conversation you might not have even wanted to have. And because it’s on someone else’s blog you have no control over the conversation and no way to opt out except breaking the link back to your blog. Now if there were comments that whole thing could be entirely avoided. You could choose whether you even looked at it to begin with or just deleted it entirely before it ever went public. Bearblog fosters a toxic and rather jaded community, it leans heavily towards negativity and often rewards it with a lot of it ending up Trending. So good luck to you if you’re also a positive person wanting your beautifully written words to be read, felt and resonated with; rather than a pessimist angrily typing out a 600 word Re: response to someone you disagreed with. If you would like to use the Discover feed, say goodbye to your free time. “Curating” your experience will inevitably eat into the time you could have spent writing. The only options are to filter by language (which often doesn’t work) and “hide blog”. So if you want to explicitly filter out say all of the tech blogs in one go: you can’t. You have to manually hide each and every single tech blog you ever come across. Fun, right? I would have loved to have suggested these to the owner of Bearblog, you know give some constructive feedback. But instead I’m left having to write this here because there’s nowhere else to submit any.

bearblog.dev totally sucks. GPT advises to use it with cloudflare. To get 2 blogs, like I want, is impossible. Impossible to have on 1 homepage 2 blogs, and also impossible with 2 subdomains and pro subscription. GPT helped me for 6 hours and I got nowhere and had to mail inventor Herman. I never saw something that complicated with A CNAM servers etc, and bearblog.dev subdomains that have to point to jpblankert.com. The simple layout is a good idea, but there is no help and even GPT 4.5 does not succeed in getting it working in 6 hours! Forget bearblog.dev, I strongly disrecommend it.