I didn’t realize Blogstatic has an 8-day free trial, but it does! I have two days left on mine, and while I was initially enthused about it, because it seemed to tick so many boxes, I find it has some issues:
- I don’t particularly like any of the few themes it offers
- Customization is rather limited
- I don’t want to go deep into the plumbing to modify a theme more to my liking
- Limited image support (no lightbox or click-to-enlarge support that I can see, though it’s possible I’m just a big dummy and am not seeing these things)
- Some of the editing interface is a bit confusing (which is something of a burn, when you consider how cluttered and messy WordPress’s editor is)
This means none of the following sites I’ve tried have really hit everything I want:
- Pika
- Bear
- Scribbles
- Posthaven
- Blogstatic
- Write As
- Possibly others I’m forgetting
All of the above are perfectly fine (or even great) for posting text, but I also want to post photos and drawings, so image management is important, and they all fall short in some way when it comes to that. I am sad.
I still have a Ghost trial to experiment with (kinda pricey), and there are other sites I’ve probably overlooked. Doing searches for WordPress replacements yields a lot of stuff designed for SEO/commercial interests, not just little sites for hipster bloggers not looking to be a content farm.
I will report back with more on this hopeless quest soon™.
In the meantime, here is a cat blogging furiously.