Pelican to Bear Migration
Intro & Why Did I Move
I am really enjoying the ease of use of Bear Blog for my blogging. Setting up and maintaining a blog on Bear Blog is so easy and frees up time for other activities like writing and coding. Therefore, I decided to subscribe to Bear Blog. Now I can host up to 10 blogs and they can all have their own custom domains and own analytics and I didn't have to do anything to make it work.
The Move
The hardest part of the move was deciding if I should or not. Since Pelican and Bear Blog both do everything in markdown, migration was as easy as copying and pasting each post from Pelican back-end to Bear Blog new post front-end. Then I had to edit the attributes to match Bear Blog's style. Bear Blog allows me to specify the publish date, so I was able to keep my history.
I was able to pick and edit a theme so that it matches my branding and website. I still need to make a few adjustments, such as the favicon and the font.
Custom Domain
Bear Blog also allowed me to setup my own custom domain. This was fairly easy to do but the instructions could have been clearer and more verbose. I created a CNAME record with domain-proxy.bearblog.dev and in Bear Blog settings I gave it the custom url: blog.alderautomation.ca. Of course DNS propagation takes time and I misspelled the CNAME record, more then once. Once I got past the user errors, I had the custom domain up and running in minutes.
What About Pelican
I shut down my Pelican website in favor of Bear Blog's ease of use. The more I try to do, the less I want to do. I am currently managing two blogs, a coding project, a writing project, and a family; I don't want to spend my time twiddling about with Pelican's backend. Sorry Pelican, it's been fun.
What's Next
I have been working really hard on my fantasy novel this week and as such I haven't done any programming. Makes me sad that I haven't touched my game this week but I am just about at my next writing goal. Once I get that done, I'll come back to C++. I have been thinking about resurrecting an old project, a character generator, and using it for my writing and game dev.
If you want me to elaborate on anything, please message me on Discord, Mastodon, X, or email me. I’ll be happy to go into more detail one-on-one or to create more posts.
