Recently, I worked a little bit on this blog¹ and thought about how I’m gonna blog when I’m at the re-publica. Installing and configuring all this git(hub) stuff on my laptop is the only way. I can write text on my iPad or iPhone, but I can’t publish from it. Maybe there’s a solution that involves a ‘server’² and some scripts that detect changes - aka new articles in a folder - that’s synced via dropbox. But that involves some effort. For me, at least.

So I thought:

Well, I used the wordpress software once, that’s pretty huge, but there’s all this easy-blogging tumblr stuff going on, right? All I need is a service sporting an iOS App that I can create drafts with and post from. Should be pretty easy to get a slick, nice-looking text-only blog going.

Boy, was I wrong.

Spaces, hm? Okay, multiple blogs, I get it.
'SLIDESHOW', are you kidding me?

Why sould I post a photo of me? Chat? FOLLOW?

I just can't use a standard theme. But I know so little CSS, it ain't worth 30$/year. Also: WordPress lets you follow people now, too.

Is blogger doing a geocities rememberance thing today? Oh no, they're serious about this design.

To be more specific:

• Posterous tries to be tumblr. Nobody wants that. Posterous doesn’t need to be thumblr, they could try to differentiate themselves and provide a service without all this ‘follow’ and ‘easy publishing’ crap. Instead, the posterous iOS app looks exactly like tumblr’s, but yellow.
• Posterous’ iOS app doesn’t support online drafts. So I can’t start writing a post at home and finish it on the subway. Full mobile capability was one of the main reasons why I started looking for alternatives. With Dropbox and an iOS text editor, I have all my drafts and posts with me, at least.
• WordPress.com is even worse, they go in all directions at once. They still do their serious publishing thing. But you can ‘follow’ people now, too.
• When you delete all the widgets from the sidebar(s), WordPress still displays a ‘standard set’.
• Blogger. I just couldn’t get beyond that hideous sign up screen.
• What’s wrong with these services? Following people on Twitter makes sense, and maybe on Instagram. For consuming any other form of content, RSS is the way to go. Does Posterous really think a stream of only their content deserves an extra space in my daily routine of media consumption? That’s cute. And dumb.

I’m not a web developer, I’m not a designer or programmer of some kind. I’m a law student who likes tech very much and is able to google the html and CSS snippets he needs. But all those ‘easy blogging’ services³ make the option of writing a script and running a server look very… easy.

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1. This footnote displays beautifully in Instapaper! And Instapaper now knows my name! These features are brought to you by @talinee. Thx! ↩

2. My desktop machine. ↩

3. There are no ‘blogging’ services anymore, apparently. ↩