For a long time I have been hosting this blog on linode paying $5/month. Ever since I got the iPad mini, I have been rethinking my blogging work flow. I wanted the ability to be able to compose and publish my posts on the mini. And for now I have been doing so using notion.
The thought of going back to wordpress(yes, at some point I was blogging on wordpress, myopera[which is now dead]) crossed my mind multiple times but then I wanted the ability to tweak things to my liking when I want to. Now I could have just hosted Wordpress on the linode machine and tweaked it to me heart’s content but I really didn’t want to spend $5 on hosting since my posts and writing has been very sporadic. I felt I wasn’t doing justice to the $5 spent on hosting.
I don’t think lot of people know about free hosting on firebase(especially for statically generated sites), sure couldn’t find a lot of people suggesting this as an option when searching for it. I accidentally stumbled upon firebase option as I was browsing google domains evaluating for cheaper(possibly free) options and considering going back to just using some free service to write posts, Wordpress is the only platform I can think of. Medium is there but…
It was pretty smooth transitioning from Linode to Firebase. The documentation for hosting is easy to follow and firebase cli makes it really easy to deploy new posts.
But the question of my blogging flow still remains. I have been exporting the posts that I write on notion to markdown and then open it on emacs to add hakyll headers to it. This is still not optimal, I ideally want to be able to push posts from iPad. But at least now i am not paying 5 monthly opportunity hosting. Maybe Wordpress is the answer? For now I am going to go with this flow but surely I don’t want to be doing this for long.
Aside: As I typed this post and tried to send the markdown to my Linux laptop I came across my first negative/annoyance of Ipad OS(Apple) on the ipad mini, the share button doesn’t have bluetooth option. I can only share the file via air drop(obviously not an option for a Linux laptop user), or other services but no bluetooth. As mentioned in the iPad mini review, once you get an Apple device - small things like this will rope users into the Apple ecosystem. Now I have to go through some hoops to move things over from my iPad to the laptop.