I've migrated my blog to Bear
Like a lot of folks I know through Cohost and gamedev, I've started using Bear for blogging. This means I've left Wordpress behind after nearly 15 years on that service.
Bear is a fantastic blogging service for people who like to touch computers... but don't want to touch computers That Much. It has a web-based post composition UI which takes markdown, which is about all I want. I want to minimize the UI fuckery needed to put words on the internet, and these days, Wordpress is all about UI fuckery.
I migrated over the vast majority of posts from my old Wordpress site and laboriously set up URL aliases, so all of them should continue to receive any incoming links they had in the past. I also took some time to heal some link rot in the older posts back between 2013-2016 or so... I was linking to a lot of twines which don't seem to be online at all anymore. Where possible, I've left a note about missing content.
Bear provides everything you need to migrate Wordpress content, but it isn't a simple task. The Bear documentation states that it takes the site owner only about 30 minutes to migrate a blog with about 60 posts, but it took me several days of intermittent work. That was mostly because I cared so much about setting up the dates and aliases correctly.
If you're seeing this in RSS, then you have proof that the RSS migration worked perfectly as well. (I don't have proof of that yet, which is part of why I'm running this post.) I selected Bear partially because it was so easy for me to confirm that I could set up an RSS alias identical to the one Wordpress had given me--and that whoever was following me from back in ancient days wouldn't lose track of what I was doing over here.
Thank you to Dante and Bruno for showing me this tool! It's 3 USD cheaper per month than my current Wordpress package, and a lot simpler.