Writing a blog from the terminal with pico #
Why a blog #
I've always wanted to write a blog about something. I was always too lazy to actually do it,but since the year is about to end so might as well start something new!
This blog is mostly to share my thoughts and projects,along with a few personal experiences.
Choosing a blog platform #
Ever since I became serious about starting the blog,I've been looking at a few blog platforms.
What I was looking for:
- Free
- Minimal,and easy to use
- No tracking,no JS,no bloat,no ads
- Looks fine on every device
- No complicated publishing/editing process
- Low-code/none
- Supports custom domains
- Basic customization
These features were pretty normal,so I thought it should be relatively easy to find a service to start with.
I've completely ruled out hosting my own blog with Hugo/Jekyll or any other similar service since I don't really need that kind of customizations and I don't see myself caring enough to maintain the software.I just wanted a simple hosted platform for my static blogs.
I've first come across Bear while I was reading a crypto blog and noticed their footer at the end,the blog looked really neat with just words - no random buttons,ads etc.It looked like a really good fit for me since it's also free and was very minimal.
Turns out custom domains weren't free,so I had to choose something else but I really liked the Markdown-based blog.That stuck with me.
Enter prose.sh from pico #
Prose is a free minimal blog host from pico which has a suite of ssh-powered services for developers.
It is completely free to use including custom domains!
The best part is arguably the terminal-first approach and using SSH to transfer all the content,there's no web app or anything to install : everything works with already installed tools.
It is very simple to get started:
ssh pico.sh
Create an account with your SSH keys,set a username.
Create posts using your favorite editor with markdown for example ~/blog/hello-world.md
When the post is ready to be published you can transfer it with either rsync,scp like:
rsync ~/blog/* prose.sh:/
scp ~/blog/* prose.sh:/
This will upload the whole blog folder with any changes,you can also upload a single file similarly.It generates a blog hosted at https://{user}.prose.sh.
Interestingly you can also mount the blog to your storage with sshfs so you can directly use all your terminal commands and update it on the fly!
sshfs prose.sh:/ ~/blog
nvm hello.md
rm hello.md
There is a decent bit of customization,with CSS and custom domain set up. I am still exploring these features and I suggest you to take a look if this is something that interests you!
The no-nonsense architecture of prose combined with native terminal integration is something I found really fascinating and I hope this lasts long as many good services like these ultimately shut-down due to various reasons.