I have moved Pens and Planes to Blot.im. I tried to keep the RSS feed should the same but I wasn’t able to, so here is the new RSS feed just in case.
For those who aren’t familiar with Blot, it’s a static-site generator that uses it’s own folder in Dropbox to store everything related to your blog and then creates the site on Blot’s servers. Creating a new post is as simple as placing a file, whether it’s a .txt file, .md file, Word document, bookmark or image in Blot’s folder. Editing a post is as simple as editing the file in Dropbox, using your app of choice that can access Dropbox files.
That simplicity, especially editing a post, is the biggest reason I decided to move the site over to Blot. Publishing to WordPress from iOS is easy enough (all my posts are written on my iPhone and/or iPad), but since I like to keep a copy of all my posts, editing or updating a post meant editing it through the WordPress app as well as the copy I kept in Ulysses. With Blot, I just have to edit the Dropbox file, which makes the editing and updating process quicker and easier.
The only downside I’ve seen with the move to Blot, is that post comments use Disqus, which I have never been a fan of. There is something about the Disqus service that I’ve never liked the feel of, though I’ve never been able to exactly pinpoint what that something is. I have disabled comments for now, partially due to my personal preference against Disqus and partially due to not getting a lot of post comments. If you would prefer to have the ability to comment on posts, I will gladly put my personal feelings aside and enable commenting with Disqus. I would love to hear your thoughts on Disqus, so please let me know via email or Twitter.
The lack of posts here is something I plan on changing. Moving to Blot isn’t going to magically write more blog posts for this site, but I hope that the simplicity of posting and editing with Blot helps remove some of the friction with my previous setup and thus encourage me to write more.
Many thanks to David Merfield and Thomas Hall for their help with figuring things out, running scripts on my WordPress Export, and getting the site up and running.