🌐 Warez your website | Angelino Desmet

🌐 Warez your website

How to have a proper small web website within minutes; free, lightweight, easy. TL;DR: register on mataroa.blog, pagecord.com, or bearblog.dev and voilà, your blog.

―Image: computer with a bread motherboard. Source uncertain,‍[⇣] but undoubtedly a funny person.

“Oh I use Instagram.”

There's so many people I've come across whose thoughts and creations I would consume with pleasure. Yet most of them don't have their own blog/website and instead resort to the infinite scrolling slot machines whose plentiful issues and scandals require a distinct essay; 🔜. Aside from all that, these sites are ugly, slow, soulless, and force readers to sign up. No thanks.

Unrealistically but ideally one buys a domain name, codes their own site, and uses Codeberg and/or statichost to host it so that one ensures full control and safety of their content, e.g., easy migration if need be—this is what I do. However, considering how lazy/complacent/inept corporate social media has made the populace, or how scarce spare time is while working full-time, or the frequency of poorly written documentation, then not making one's own website is understandable. Below, three solutions. None of them Wix, Medium, nor Substack.

Read on if one wishes to trade in their excuses for a small web website that would run on a potato.‍[⇣] A cozy cobweb that reflects your personality.

Free hosting options

With the small web in mind I found these three options, sorted according to preference:

Mataroa.blog

Pagecord.com

Bearblog.dev

―Image: Side by side comparison of Mataroa, Pagecord, and Bear.

I'm a bit disappointed because without hesitation I would use all of them had I not become accustomed to having full control of aesthetics and functionality of my own website. However, a simple place to write is fine for most. Below are the links to my three quick example homepages with the same content, and some first impressions. They all support Markdown syntax; to the non-geeks, this simply means it's easy to create titles, embed images, create bold fonts, et cetera.

Reach out if there's missing proper alternatives. I've already seen Pika.page but consider a free account post limit of 50 too harsh.

🥇 Mataroa

“Naked blogging platform, for minimalists. Just write.”

Cost: free & $9/year

Features: https://mataroa.blog > features

Example homepage: https://arscynic.mataroa.blog

+ Mataroa gets my preference because it natively supports comments, and while free, the price for premium is commendably hard to beat.

🥈 Pagecord

“No lock-in, no AI*, no bloat. Just your words, written your way, on your own corner of the web.”

Cost: free & $39/year

Features: https://pagecord.com/#features

Example homepage: https://arscynic.pagecord.com

+ Pagecord's default homepage design pleases me the most of all three. One can natively click embedded images to enlarge them. One big difference is that Pagecord's the only one that renders YouTube videos.

± It's the most feature rich option, but also the least straightforward and slowest. My gripe is that Pagecord's text editor immediately converts Markdown syntax into its graphical representation within the text editor, which I find intolerably annoying, but I'm sure others would prefer.

︎<br>What does this mean?<br>For example to create a title/heading with the Markup language one places a hashtag # before a word or sentence to make it a title. Usually this only shows as a title when viewing the finished resulting file or page, but leaves the # visible in the text editor. Here it immediately converts the syntax + text into the title, meaning that syntax disappears.

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* “[…] The “no AI” means no AI features. […]” The developer uses Claude to speed up the grunt work. I reached out and there's zero malicious ambiguity present. Since LLM use can be a deciding factor and is a quite divisive topic, I thought I'd mention it.

🥉 Bear

“A privacy-first, no-nonsense, super-fast blogging platform. No trackers, no javascript, no stylesheets. Just your words.”

Cost: free & $49/year or $189 once

Features: https://docs.bearblog.dev

Example homepage: https://arscynic.bearblog.dev

+ Bear has the most straightforward user experience. A surprisingly cool feature is that one can easily use an emoji or image as a favicon, and it natively supports LaTeX—yay math!

An indirect feature disadvantage of Bear is that free accounts are hidden from search engines and its own discovery feed. The former I find weird as it limits the reach of the small web and Bear's own success. The developer's response after reaching out:

“Free blogs can be unhidden from the discovery feed and search engines, they just need to go through a manual review process (https://docs.bearblog.dev/not-seeing-your-post/). This is because 30% of all new blogs are spam, and it turns out that upgrading is a good filter, as is opting in for a review.”

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