Sal's

Moving my blog to 11ty and Cloudflare Pages

2026-05-07T00:00:00Z

I decided to move my blog away from Bear Blog to my own site built on 11ty and hosted on Cloudflare Pages.

I still very much appreciate and admire Bear Blog. It helped me get back into blogging for the nth time by offering a very low barrier to entry, got me some readers through its discovery pages, and gave me a little community of bloggers to participate in. Thank you, Herman!

I decided to move for a few reasons.

Terminal-driven workflow

I want to be able to update my blog remotely over SSH. I'm often writing on my work laptop because it's often the computer I have with me. Meanwhile, I decided not to keep any of my personal data on my work laptop, so I now edit my personal stuff — my Obsidian vault, my blog, etc. — by SSHing into my home computer.

Now, I could just write remotely and then copy/paste into the Bear Blog web editor, and I have done that many times. However, pasting into a web browser on my company laptop now triggers a popup asking me to attest that I'm not doing anything untoward with company data. That's fine I guess, but it'd be smart to assume that my company may also be scanning whatever I'm copying and pasting, and that makes me angsty.

So, I'd love to be able to edit a blog post over SSH and deploy via a git push. One of my older blogs worked this way, built with Hugo and hosted on Netlify, and I quite liked it.

I like static sites

I just do. I'm kind of an efficiency weirdo, and I find something soothing in the efficiency and simplicity of static sites. No database or CMS involved. Just text pumped through the digipipes.

I like git-driven workflows

Git (or substitute your VCS of choice) is great for lots of reasons:

as a synchronization method between machines;
as a backup method, pushing to one or more remotes;
as a navigable, searchable, virtually infinite history of changes;
as a way to find when/how a bug was introduced and fix it;
as an "Oh shit, undo! Undo!" system;
as a "Let's go back to that old color scheme" option;
as an "I'm gonna go all mad-scientist in another branch" enabler;
etc. etc.

I like locally-driven workflows

In combination with git, especially.

Let's say I'm on an airplane with no internet access. I want to be able to wrench on my blog, preview all the changes locally, make git commits as I progress, and then, when I land and hit the airport or hotel wifi, simply git push to deploy everything in one go.

I love that.

I like control and portability

When my blog is a bunch of files on disk, I have maximum control over it. I can control how it's backed up, move it between hosting providers, search it with amazing tools like ripgrep, do global find-and-replace operations, and so on.

I also don't have to worry about whether a theoretically portable export from a blogging service will actually work down the line. For example, while my hat is off to Bear Blog, there were issues with my blog's Markdown export. The title: frontmatter values weren't wrapped in quotes, so any blog title with a semi-colon or double quotation mark would break the 11ty build. Also, the tags: frontmatter values were simply comma-separated without surrounding brackets, which isn't proper syntax for a YAML list. I'm pretty sure that syntax parses to a single string rather than an array. I had to go through and fix all of those, too.

Another issue is that Bear uses /feed/ as the RSS feed URL. I now need to redirect that to a file, like /feed/rss.xml so I don't break current subscriptions. Fortunately, Cloudflare Pages has redirects, and hopefully they'll work.

Finally, I assume I'll need to move my blog eventually. Herman has wonderful intentions for Bear Blog, and I believe them. But he's one human. He might need to adjust those intentions due to changes in life circumstances. That would be thoroughly reasonable and forgivable. Cloudflare could change its terms or product. Or the most common reason people move their blogs: boredom. 😉

These are all things I don't have to worry much about when I own the raw data and build pipeline.

No shade thrown

I'll close by saying: none of this is an indictment of Bear or using that type of managed blogging provider. I happen to enjoy wrenching on an SSG blog because I'm that flavor of geek. I'd guess that most bloggers would rather not bother. Once again, I'm grateful to Bear for not only getting me back into blogging, but getting me to this point where I care enough about my blog to go through all this trouble of moving it.

Obsidian Sync is great

2026-04-25T00:00:00Z

I was going to title this post Obsidian Sync is worth it. But I don't know what four bucks a month means to you. I can't say what's worth what to other people.

But I can say that Obsidian Sync is great! Here are some reasons:

It's fast.

I wanted to sync my laptop before catching a flight this morning. I opened my laptop, switched to my already-running Obsidian window, and saw that the little sync icon was already a green checkmark indicating a full sync. "That can't be right," I thought, since the laptop had been awake for just a few seconds. Which brings me to....

It has logs.

I clicked the sync icon and then Activity log to investigate. Sure enough, the logs confirmed that the latest files I'd changed on my Mac Mini had already sync'd to the laptop. Fantastic.

Here's an example of what the logs look like:

2026-04-25 06:08 - Connecting to server
2026-04-25 06:08 - Connection successful. Detecting changes...
2026-04-26 16:14 - Server pushed [iPhone] Daily/2026-04-26.md
2026-04-26 16:14 - Downloading file Daily/2026-04-26.md
2026-04-26 16:14 - Downloading complete Daily/2026-04-26.md
2026-04-26 16:14 - Accepted Daily/2026-04-26.md
2026-04-26 16:14 - Fully synced

It works on iOS, iPadOS, and Android.

And I'm gonna invoke the j-word here: it just works on all those things.

It has version history.

Each file gets its own history, which you can navigate in the UI. That rocks. 🤘

It's cheap.

Getting back to the $4 thing. That's cheap to me, especially for something that works so well and that I get so much daily value from. I'm not going to say that's cheaper than a cup of coffee because that comparison has been played out. That's why I'm not going to tell you that it's cheaper than a cup of coffee.

It lets me support the team.

Obsidian has been such a great product that, at least from my eyes, has stayed true to its original vision and value prop. I bought the Catalyst License to support the team, and I hope they make a couple bucks in profit each month off my Sync subscription as well.

You can clean those "scratches" off ceramic dinnerware

2026-04-10T00:00:00Z

I can't believe I didn't know this earlier!

Do you have ceramic dishes that look kind of like this, with streaks caused by silverware and whatnot?

I assumed the ceramic was getting scratched and slowly ruined, which bummed me out because I bought my wife a nice set of mugs last Christmas, and they were all starting to look like this. But no! I learned that these streaks are actually just superficial metal deposits from the silverware that can be removed with a cleaner like Barkeeper's Friend.

I cleaned up our mugs and they look good as new!

Today's thoughts

2026-03-31T00:00:00Z

Funny

Thanks for this, Kottke.

Zed

Zed continues to be great. I’m still using it to remotely edit my notes. And I’m still flopping back and forth on Vim mode. The latest flop is in favor of it.

Allergies

JTR is right: ‘Tis the season. I’ve been taking Allegra for the past two days, and I think it made me feel really groggy. I’ve felt that side effect with Zyrtec before, but I was hoping Allegra would be more mild. I might prefer to suffer the allergies at the moment. They haven't been too bad yet.

Information hygiene?

I read ldstephens’s post, The Trillionaire Problem, where he talks about an episode of the Pivot podcast. I’ve had this podcast recommended to me before. The subject of this one is the possibility that Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire and controls the world’s communications backbone.

It reminded me that I really don’t like “what if” speculation about worrisome future possibilities over which I have no influence. I find myself almost immediately fatigued by it. But a lot of people seem drawn to it. That’s not meant to be a criticism of those people; rather, I’ve half-assumed those other folks have more intellectual drive than I do and therefore find this stuff more interesting to explore.

I asked Gemini for thoughts on the matter. (I wish I could snap my fingers and make AI disappear, but since I can’t, I do use it for some things.)

The takeaways aren’t shocking:

Worrying about things you can’t control creates unnecessary stress.
But, there’s a middle ground between head-in-the-sand avoidance and fixating on speculation about events outside your control.
AI said I was practicing "information hygiene" and suggested I ask myself: “If I had this information about the future, would I do anything differently tomorrow?” If the answer is no, then it’s more reasonable to just avoid it. I think that’s a decent approach.

I'm gonna go skateboard now.

Too young to be too old to start skateboarding

2026-03-29T00:00:00Z

I started skateboarding two weeks ago at 46 years young. And I’m loving it.

This was unexpected.

My 12-year-old son started skating a month ago and got pretty excited about it. I got him a lesson at a local skate shop. He was working on his ollie with the instructor, fell backward, and shot his board into the nearby bowl. The instructor dropped into the bowl, carved around it, crouched low, grabbed my son’s board, and popped back out, handing my son’s board back to him. It looked kinda like this.

Wow, I thought. That looks fun.

For the next few days, I was fixated on helping my son learn. I watched YouTube tutorials, studied Reddit threads, found and ranked all the local skateparks, planned a DIY quarter pipe. My son would get home from school and I’d start telling him all the things I’d learned and what he should try next. I’m sure he was thinking, dude, dad, chill.

But it was too late. The flame had been lit. The flame is what got me into computers, guitar, whitewater kayaking, knife sharpening. The flame is probably my particular brand of ADHD-driven hyperfocus.

The flame burns hot. It makes me feel alive, man. And it makes my wife’s eyes roll. After 13 years of marriage, she is familiar with the flame and the obsessive tendencies that follow it.

At first I assumed I was too old to start skateboarding, and I set out on the web to find confirming advice. What I found instead was a wealth of encouragement for people my age getting started. For example, this Reddit thread, this blog post, this Youtube video.

I found several common sentiments: that skateboarding gets you out of the house and moving, makes you feel young again, and perhaps due to both of those, can be great for mental health in middle age.

One guy said, “Don’t just sit on your couch and wait to die.” That struck me. Now, I’m not doing that couch thing — I’m lifting weights, riding my bike, etc. — but I realized I had assumed, half-consciously, that I was too old for something like skateboarding. At my age, I should play it safe and get the exercise that’s typical and appropriate for middle age. Skateboarding was too risky, too ... unnecessary.

Only after I started skateboarding did I realize that, by resigning myself to those safe and appropriate activities, I had given up on exhilaration. And boy did I miss it.

Two months ago, skateboarding was not anywhere near my radar. Fast forward a few weeks, and now I’m trying to get on my board at least once every day. It’s improving my strength and balance. It’s restoring a lost sense of adventure and youthfulness. It’s giving me a wonderful way to connect and have fun with both my kids.

And if this turns out to be just a mini midlife crisis, well hey, it’s a cheap one.

Quiet things

2026-03-20T00:00:00Z

Love this page by Terry Godier: The Last Quiet Thing.

I found it via this HN thread about Gary's post, I love my dumb watches, which cites Kev's post on smartwatches, which helped me shelve my Apple Watch a while back.

I've been happily wearing dumb (but cool) watches ever since. Now, whenever I put on an Apple Watch, I feel a sense of digitally driven anxiety.

Dumb stuff for the win.

macOS shortcuts for navigating by paragraph

2026-03-20T00:00:00Z

I like to think of myself as something of a power user of the macOS default keyboard shortcuts, but somehow these have eluded me:

⌥↑ and ⌥↓ (Option-Up and Option-Down) move to the start and end of a paragraph, respectively. And of course you can combine these with the Shift key to easily select entire paragraphs at a time.

So simple. So easy. So useful. Where have I been??

Actually I know where I've been: using the Emacs-derived Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E shortcuts instead. These feel the same as the Option-based shortcuts much of the time. But with the Option-based ones, you can hold Option down and keep tapping the arrow buttons to navigate paragraphs, whereas with the Control-based ones, the cursor sticks to the start or end of the paragraph.

Street names

2026-03-19T00:00:00Z

Here in Portland we have a street that used to be called 39th. It existed right in between 38th and 40th. The city later renamed it to César E Chávez Boulevard to honor the latino activist.

Fast forward to now: Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years.

I forwarded this news to my wife and asked if she had any ideas for a new street name. She said maybe we should name streets after flowers instead. People are too fucked up.

She's smart.

The monthly bill I enjoy getting

2026-03-08T00:00:00Z

There's one bill that I actually enjoy getting each month: my Quantum Fiber internet bill.

After all the shenanigans trying to get any sort of transparent pricing out of Xfinity, receiving a clean, $50 invoice — exactly $50 with no extra fees or bullshit — makes me happy. (At least slightly.) And this is for symmetrical gigabit Internet, no less. I was ready to pay Xfinity a lot more for less than half that speed.

AT&T owns Quantum Fiber now. Fingers crossed. But for the moment, this is a pretty good bill!

Slightly happy

2026-03-06T00:00:00Z

This is one of my favorite emoji reactions in work chat:

🙂

When I hover over that emoji reaction, it reads: :slightly-happy:.

I’ve worked with a couple guys who use that one a lot. I think they both use it to mean, genuinely: you made me smile. But I have to laugh when I crack a joke, which I tend to do, and someone responds with :slightly-happy:.

They’re less-technical people, and I’m guessing they don’t realize that each emoji also has a descriptive label.

Or, my jokes are just pretty mid.

I’m 50/50 on this one.