Bloggi - Request for Updates

Trust me. I have experimented with or hosted almost every other blogging platform - cluttered beasts or the simple. I wish my quest for the blog platform of my dreams had ended with Ghost¹ or never started in the first place 😂.

Many of the simple ones end up as bare bones lacking functionality or luster. You would start thinking of using a text file or a hand-rolled HTML page instead.

Bloggi beats them all and is by far the best² of the simple blogging platforms.

I have heard Simple is subjective. I don’t buy it. Simple is complex and multi-faceted. You look at something and consider it simple. Or not. That decision is the weight of simplicity. The rest of it is careful control over customization.

Bloggi comes with simplicity in presentation, which is sophistication in disguise. It is undeniably content-centric for the writer and the reader.

In all fairness, there are other simple blogging platforms comparable to Bloggi. In my experimentation and opinion, they lose where it matters (at least to me). I don’t want to spin off into the details in this post. But if you sit with me, I can talk about it for hours and hours.

If I were to pick a competitor for Bloggi, I would choose WriteAs (or its OSS version, WriteFreely). While WriteAs is simple and content-centric like Bloggi, customization is tedious and rigid. You have to fight to get your CSS style accepted. With my limited knowledge of frontend/CSS, I could only guess that it is because of built-in styling applied on the HTML element ids, which I have not seen in almost any other blog platforms. It is where Bloggi shines best.

Bloggi comes with a thoughtful set of controls for customization. The spectrum ranges from:

• No necessity for customization. If you are content, what you get out of the box is grand enough.
• Mild (one-click) customization with a fine set of fonts, excellent layouts, and coloring options.
• Complete control with custom CSS.

With all its power and simplicity, there are a few things I wish are fixed in Bloggi.

Bugs

• Title of the featured image used in the post excerpt.
  • If the first element of a post/page is an image, aka featured image, then the image title is used as part of the auto-generated excerpt for the post.

Feature Requests

• Search functionality (to search across blogs, if not, search per blog - posts, pages, etc.)

• Under Design

  • Support for rearranging items under the navigation and social links.
  • Support for choosing syntax highlight styles for code blocks.

• Accept markdown in the excerpt for post/page. At least, a few simple ones - bold, italic, code.

• Support for conversations or comments in a post/page (aka integration with Disqus or the like).

  • To maintain simplicity and cleanliness, unlike other blogs, the comments section may be entirely collapsed to a visible cue leaving it to the reader to expand.

• Keyboard shortcuts

  • Save draft (Cmd+S)
  • Publish post (Cmd+Shift+S)
  • Focus on the search bar to type the search word (Ctrl+F)

Do the above points matter in moving this blog to Bloggi? Well, I can’t say Yes. I can’t say No either. Remember, my quest is not to chase the blogging platform of my dreams forever. It is to put an end to it. So, I am hoping Bloggi does it.