A list of things that I'd add if i made my own blogging platform
Heya! It is I, Kami. As we all know, there's no blogging platform out there that's perfect - everyone has their own weird preferences for how they would like things to work. Here are mine! Oh, and just to be clear, these aren't suggestions for bear. These are just things I'd do if i had all the time in the world to make my own bear-inspired blogging platform. Some sort of perfect blogging utopia, if you will. I will be making some comparisons to bear though.
1. Drafts that don't suck
Bearblogs drafts system sucks very very hard, I'll be honest. Sorry, but it just does. First off all, there's no autosave, which by itself is mildly annoying. Also, when you save a draft, the publishing date gets set to when you made it. So, if you forget to change that it'll just sit at page three or two of most recent after you publish, which isn't great. I'm not sure if changing the date to be more recent would even fix it? I think bear has a different internal date for most recent, right? Anyways, drafts suck hard, in this fictional utopia I'd like them not to. Moving on.
2. Fulltext Search
I know, there's probably technical reasons for why it can't be done now considering bear wasn't set up with it in mind, and I'm not sure it would even be a great idea - part of the fun of using bear is having to traverse the jungles of the most recent page or the woefully underutilized tagging system to find stuff. Buut, sometimes i just think about what could've been, y'know. Oh well.
3. A decent api
I have another personal blog, in case you weren't aware, and it'd be nice to be able to crosspost from bearblog to said blog. I know i could probably scrape post data using mechanical soup or whatever, but who do you take me for? Some kind of lowly python programmer? Certainly not. Actually, I'm mostly just too lazy.
4. Some sort of universal, non-removable default Stylesheet
I know, this goes against bears whole thing of being minimalist and customizable and stuff, but this is my stupid wishlist and i say what goes. So yeah. I've seen more than one blog using the minimal, completely unstyled bearblog template that's meant for developing your own theme. Meaning that text isn't responsive and i have to constantly scroll to the right on longer sentences because they don't wrap. So, y'know, making people not do that would be nice for me specifically and probably a few other equally petty people. Also, some sort of way to enforce having not shitty color contrast. I'm sure you could statically analyze css to check if the color and background-color of css properties have decent contrast for every element. Again, very much not a bearblog-ish thing, but definitely something i would do if i were to try and make my own weird blogging platform thing. To be clear, this wouldn't be about enforcing a specific theme, but just having some kind of sane defaults that get applied no matter what.
5. An optional WYSIWG-ish editor
Yeah, i said it. Alright, lemme explain. Some days i just feel really dang lazy and wanna just copy paste pictures into my blogposts, and have them get show while I'm still editing the thing. That's it, really. Oh, and having the rendered markdown show while you're typing it out, obsidian-style.
6. really easy crossposting
What it says on the tin. I wanna be able to publish to all the places. Lemme give you a bluesky or mastodon api key or whatever and have it automatically post when something goes public. Gimme Tumblr integration as well while you're at it. Wordpress integration too, fuck it why not. We could all use more arbitrary crossposting integration in our lives.
7. set up all of that indie web microformats stuff by default
Gimme an h-feed. Send webmentions to all the links in my post. Show me the webmentions i get as notifications. Gimme an h-card as well while you're at it. I just think it'd be cool to have, i don't have much of a stake in the whole microformats thing.
8. Account-based blocklists
I know, bearblogs block list is in localstorage specifically so it works no matter what account you're on, it's a deliberate decision. But what this leads to is me inadvertantly having different block lists depending on what device I'm using which does kind of suck, I'll be perfectly honest. So, y'know. I'd rather have it get saved based on which account I'm using.
9. letting me self-host my blog
Now, i know this probably wouldn't be all that practical, and itd probably be quite difficult to do this in a way that doesn't suck, but like... Sometimes it'd be nice to have some more control over how stuff works on the backend. Let a girl have her shitty php code, damnit.
So, that's my list of stuff I'd add to a blogging platform social media bearblog-adjacent type thing if i made one. Which i probably won't, but hey. It's out there now. The list, i mean. Maybe I'll do another part when i inevitably get more ideas.