Newer blog, who dis?

At the end of New blog, who dis? I wrote about how I'd used Quotion (this is an affiliate link that will make me rich) to build this blog, enthusing:

It's fantastic. You just share a folder in Apple Notes, and any note inside becomes a blog post. If you already use Notes, like me, you'll love it.

I still really love the concept, but I decided to make a change for a couple of small reasons, none of which are the fault of Quotion.

RSS enthusiasm

I am an RSS enthusiast, so much so that I care more about the RSS functionality than anything else. Obviously this is not normal.

Unfortunately, Quotion didn't send the full, well formatted, post in the RSS feed. Although modern feed readers (like Reeder) are quite good at fetching that on request, for some reason it stopped being able to do that for my Quotion site. I assume RSS is a pretty low priority for most of their customers, but I really wanted this to work properly, so it spurred me to make a change.

As a bonus, I fixed some other niggles with icons and titles and I can now easily do a custom signature that only appears in the RSS feed. I smile at that in every post from Harper Reed.

Notes vagaries

I love the concept of writing in Apple Notes and just dragging it into a folder to publish.

I'm still writing this in Notes to start with but notes has lately, and oddly, become somewhat buggy.

I also found enough small - and they really were small - but annoying formatting idiosyncrasies that meant a publish, check, fiddle, publish again loop before posts looked just right.

So, something new

To be honest I would have dealt with the format fiddling, because it was still so convenient but the RSS issues really got to me, so, yesterday evening I quietly ported everything over to my own static site.

I know there are lots of tools to do this, but I wanted something really lean of my own that I can do more with in future.

I looked at light-weight css frameworks like Pico.css, Simple.css and MVP.css but all of these were still bigger in scope than I needed - with my aim being to only support formatting that works in RSS - so I made something tiny just for the site.

Apart from this, it's just some HTML, images and, of course, my beloved rss.xml.

Unsurprisingly, given it's December 2025, I used Claude Code for all of this. Not my usual vibe-engineering workflow, which I still need to finish the draft post about, it was just straight up vibe-coding.

I then pushed it to git and deployed it with Cloudflare pages, where any change on main will be reflected automatically. Nice.

Something more

So for now I will write in notes, export markdown, and give it to Claude to write into a html page and the rss feed.

Eventually, I want to play with creating a native Mac and iOS App to make this as easy as using Apple Notes.

But that will come later. There are some other things occupying my time right now, which I'll share in Feb. Next up though, eating Christmas Pudding.