⭐ My experiences using Minimalistic Blogs Mataroa Blog vs Bear Blog
Last Updated: 3 months, 2 weeks ago
I Migrated from Mataroa Blog to Bear Blog
I am roughly a month into my commitment to writing every day and two-and-a-half weeks into blogging everyday and as of this morning I have migrated all of my blog articles from Mataora blog to this (Bear) blog, which is created on Bear blog.
Update: May 7 2024 :
I have finally found a use for my Mataora Blog that suits my current workflow! It is now the home of my initial-draft stories, which will hopefully eventually make it up onto this blog's stories section! You can check it out here! It allows comments, so you can also give your feedback and suggestions if you like, and even subscribe to new story posts and updated stories as they progress!
Minimalistic Blog Sites
Both of these sites market themselves as simple or naked blogging sites, free from the noise of social media integrations and other bloaty, distracting and potentially overwhelming add-on "features" to configure.
Why I started with Mataora Blog
My Instincts told me it'd be Simpler Getting Started- and it Probably Was
Honestly, it might have partly been Mataora's marketing that made me pick them - their home page has a description of the importance of words - which is something that deeply resonates with me. Maybe something about the extra simple appearance of the interface also spoke to me, as I tend to get overwhelmed easily by visual clutter (ADHD/ASD) and the extra minimalistic appearance of their site promised me less clutter.
Possibly my choice was also because I'd been initially recommended Write As as a simple blogging site and been looking into that before realising they weren't taking any more free accounts at the time, and this looked similar aesthetically, so... familiarity bias and sunken cost fallacy maybe?
Mostly silly subconscious reasons, I know. I can be honest about my availability heuristic biases when it comes to seeing simple clear fonts and minimalism in marketing and assuming it means simple solutions in design. It seemed to pay off well enough.
It is true both Mataroa and Bear are simple blog sites. But with that heuristic I sensed more configuration required on Bear blog, and as a new blogger and famous procrastinator battling the ADHDemon, I was determined to resist the distraction-turned-overwhelm of getting caught up in the weeds, as my mind is so often wont to do.
Thus I swerved to avoid ANY potential pitfall of death by a thousand configurations before I'd even begun ... (ok it turns out not that many configurations but allow me my moment of melodrama!) and decided to just get started with imperfect blogging with NO distractions - come hell or high water!
Why I Migrated to Bear Blog:
In a Word: "Filtering"
I write a ton of different genres of content, as you will have noticed from my extensive navigation bar, my home page - which is basically a more explanatory navigation bar, and the hashtags below my posts. I also prefer to keep all of these diverse writing genres on a singular blog.
In light of this, Bear Blog is more feature-rich in the ways that make sense to me (still not clunky, still core to the function of just blogging), but the main decider that made me migrate was tags and secondarily, customisable navigation which was an elegant way to use them to abstract away the clutter of so many combined genres!
You can customise this nav bar in Bear blog and therefore link not only to extra pages, but also to filters of posts by tag. BOOM! A whole automated section that pulls the posts you want! My ADHD brain = happy!
My Mataroa Blog became Cluttered
It turns out "write a post every day" as a goal is not much of a constraint. I actually like writing about a lot of different things, in different writing styles.
This appeals to different audiences (and maybe sometimes just to me), making organisation complicated and messy for me on Mataroa Blog.
Sometimes I blog more personal posts, other times I write articles, and sometimes I feel inclined towards writing poetry and short stories. I don't want to limit that, but I did find that Mataora blog gets tricky to navigate when you are working with different genres.
You can see what I mean here:
As you can see, I had ended up resorting to using square brackets and corresponding emojis in the title itself, to remind myself visually of what topic fit what genre. There wasn't a way to filter these into separate streams for myself or a potential audience.
Update: April 11 2024: It turns out I like using emojis for visibility and have re-introduced them into my titles,however as you can see these are for *visibility while * not * being a proxy for a filter system as they were on Mataora, which as mentioned was the primary reason for my migration, given the diverse types of content I write on here.*
Given I make extensive *use of Bear blog's tagging, and I also use these tag filters in my custom navbar links. I have considered reaching out to Herman, the creator, about the possibility of a multi-tag filter, as he has been incredibly helpful in the past in implementing a feature that enabled me to add a style widget to my editor.
Mataroa blog do have a way to create separate pages, and if you're quite technical you can probably write a script to use their API to programmatically populate those pages with your articles, (and I wouldn't be surprised if someone on GitHub has done just that) but the whole point of finding a solution for me is not engineering add-ons to its core functionality in order to write.
Compare this to my Filtered Posts on my Bear Blog Nav Bar
Moving to Bear with its filter tags and customisable nav bar therefore solved this problem for me, as you can see just from scrolling up and glancing up at my blog's navigation, BOOM! A simple and neat solution to my problems!
This is what Bear's Nav Bar Customization Looks Like:
This gives me future scalability potential for new categories and filters no matter how many different things I write about!
Maybe at some point, I'll even add a story or poetry section, or even filter by topic if I write enough specialised content in those writing genres too! Update: May 7 2024 : I did end up creating all of these things, as you can see!
See how nice this looks? With my Articles under one menu ...
... and my Journal posts under another!
Finding the Better Solution Depends on Your Needs
Mataroa has less customization but might still be a better solution for you
For Basic Blogging Without Customization
If you are ADHD like me, or just want to get started immediately, maybe want as little configurability and scope creep as possible until you know you need it, Mataora is great for letting you just dive in and focus on writing instead of peripheries like themes and layouts.
The free version is also fully contained as a basic blogging service: out of the box, you get a blog, enableable comment functionality (which Bear blog does not have), free image hosting (which is a paid feature on Bear), and email subscribing for free (albeit note your email posts do come out as html and markdown, so you may want to upgrade to a newsletter service if you become more professional). You can even enable a monthly automated emailed-backup of your blog to yourself!For Your First Blog
If you want to write your very first blog, and get into the habit of writing, and tend to get bogged down by periphery distractions like layout, I recommend Mataora. Honestly, I don't know if I would have gotten started if things hadn't been set up in that simple, structured style where my only real focus could be writing.For A Single Genre
If all you want is to write within a single genre, write infrequently, or tackle one writing project at a time, such as journalling or writing a story, Mataora may be more than perfect for you.
Update: May 7 2024 : As mentioned above, I have found my own niche for my old mataora blog again, in using it to write my early-draft stories somewhere where people can still view them, subscribe to new stories and updates, and even comment feedback if they like!
Bear vs Mataroa Blog - Main Feature Comparison:
Bear's big advantages include:
- Customizable Themes
- Post Tags for Filtering
- Customizable Nav Bar
- A Customizable Post Template
- A Discovery Feed where you could potentially end up on their Trending topics - which is no Social Network, and is kind of the thing we were trying to get away from, but at least it's not distracting and it is an opt-in configuration, though the downside is it requires manual approval by the developer.
Honestly I prefer the look and feel of Bear, it is more comfortable for me and I've always been a fan of configurability (too much a fan, hence my having to avoid its distracting powers!)
Mataroa have more free (but basic) services out-of-the-box
Mataroa lack this customizability but have some free services Bear Blog charges for:
- Image hosting: I had to find somewhere else to store my linked images on Bear)
- Post Commenting: Mataroa also allows readers to comment on a post, (subject to your approval) which Bear does not, so bear (haha! pun!) that in mind.
- Email subscriptions: allowing readers to subscribe to emails of your new posts. On Bear I have to stick with RSS for my subscribers unless I want a paid plan.
The email feature in Mataroa unfortunately doesn't support any Markdown you used in your posts (which both Bear and Mataroa support by the way) or custom emails, but subscribers can also click through to your post via the email link.
I also found subscribing to my own emails a very helpful automated backup strategy, not to mention those emails may be a nifty lazy extra form of copywrite protection, similarly to how pre-internet musicians used to mail themselves a copy of their own original CDs to use the date sent as proof of their original ownership.
Mataroa may not have the customizations but is a more well-rounded properly minimalistic out-of-the-box free blogging solution in that sense, perfect for getting started and not getting overwhelmed or distracted.
So I can see this solution working out well for someone looking to get right into blogging for the first time or to have a dedicated blog within a specific genre of writing, or possibly to have a family or close community news blog that everyone can subscribe to.
It may also be fine for you if you are writing a story or simply blogging your daily creations without the intention to organise them by anything but date. It could make a very nice public journal, particularly with the image hosting. I notice they even have the option to export into several formats, including .epub, to memorialize your posts in book format!
Reflections on My Decision
The Basis of My Decision Was Filtering...
Everything about my decision was based on the ability to use tagging and build filters into the navigation, given the diversity of my content, which it's now clear relies on this.
I was willing to sacrifice everything else for that scalability as a core feature : comments, free email subscription (and my automated backup system), image hosting, multi-format exportability and the API (OK those last two I most likely would never use).
It was a tough decision to leave Mataroa, I even considered just leaving my journal posts up there and only migrating my articles, but decided against it - my journal posts are of the form where they veer into article territory and I intend to transform a good deal of them into a more article-ish format and do still rely on tags, so it ultimately made sense for me to keep all of my content in the same place.
... But I May Return To Mataroa For a Different Type of Blogging
And hey, if I end up wanting to export any work into a book someday and particularly want to use Mataroa, they do have the API I mentioned, so posting a book's worth of Markdown text from Bear Blog to Mataroa again can still be automated! (Yeah I said I left developer work for a reason and I'd never use it - but I still have developer friends to help with that future hypothetical!😛 ... OK there've got to be way more efficient ways to turn Bear Blog's downloaded CSV data into a book, let's be real.)
But I may consider returning to Mataroa for a blog with a singular purpose, such as short stories. or perhaps it'd be a fun experiment to blog a public novel someday and allow people to comment feedback as it progresses.
Which Should You Choose?
That depends on your goal.
Here's the big pitfall of overthinking it though:
Are you new to blogging/still building a routine of consistent blogging? If you are looking to get into blogging art, writing or anything else, my recommendation is just to do what I did:
Follow this article's advice on how I managed to commit to and stick with daily blogging despite my ADHD.
Then start with whichever one you can start with. If one of them is a hurdle for you mentally and the other feels easy to get into, start with that one.
Why? Your goal is to get into blogging. That's it. Don't create any more hurdles for yourself.
Sure, I migrated, but only moved when it made sense. Take it from a recovering perfectionist - Let the problem arise before you start thinking of the optimization. Perfectionism, as article in 1) explains, is the ultimate saboteur of all endeavours.
Seriously, read the article, it addresses exactly why you shouldn't listen to your brain when it creates distracting hurdles of perfectionism before you even get started.
So which one is easier?
To be honest, though Mataroa might just be a bit simpler to get started immediately, I didn't find Bear blog tricky after all - it too was remarkably simple as it comes with a handy quick start video as well as useful docs including a migration guide, but given how easily overwhelmed I get with even minimal choices when first getting started with something, maybe some of the configuration would still have distracted or intimidated me when I was just getting into the flow of blogging and needed to just focus on getting into writing.
So really, it is up to you, and the nice thing about an all-in-one barebones site is once you are in the flow of things, in my experience you learn pretty quickly what your writing needs are and whether you need to migrate, so there's no need to overthink the process and worry you'll be "locked in" to one or the other.
And hey, migration isn't that scary and both of these sites allow you to download your data, so don't let it constrain your decisions and definitely don't let worrying about hypotheticals prevent you from getting started with blogging! (Seriously, read that article! You'll thank me!)
I wish you all the best in your blogging!
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