Qwarq Robotics

I made a blog Cohost dying is what finally got me to make a real blog

I made a blog

The social media site cohost.org is going read-only starting October 1, and shutting down completely at the end of the year, and it's got me a little fucked up. Cohost was a very cozy place with a massive tech nerd population that made me feel right at home. It allowed for long-form posts with custom CSS and HTML, which produced some really wild results. I could ramble on about a random game or mechanic or coding thing for a thousand or more words and folks would actually read it and engage with it! What a novel concept.

There's really nothing else like cohost, but a popular option is to put together your own blog on neocities with an RSS feed. Being a web developer who hasn't really made a site for myself in many years I figured I'd give it a try... and you're looking at the result. It's pretty simple, but I had some fun making it.

I actually wrote some scripts to help simplify the process. The first part is described in this chost (cohost post):

i haven't done much with my neocities site yet, but i went and wrote myself a little script to generate pages with headers and footers. it recursively traverses the current directory and copies everything to the specified output directory, but for html files, it checks the contents for something like path/to/somefile.html and replaces it with the contents of somefile.html, then writes the result to the output dir.

so most of my pages actually look something like:

<include>head.html</include>
buy project ryme!
<include>foot.html</include>

i just run the script and the output dir has a complete version of the site that i can upload.

are there a mountain of existing things that'll do this? yes, but it's been a while since i did low level web dev like this and it was fun to make. that's all that really matters.

The second, is a little RSS generator. It looks at all of the files in the blog directory (each post is a separate file) and builds an RSS feed from them. It's all just string manipulation with an XML string with placeholders for wherever I need to cram in info. This also generates the index to the blog - the list of blog posts when you click on the "Blog" button. It's similar to the XML stuff, where it replaces values in an HTML template string. I've got a driver that runs both of these, so I just need to hit 2 keys to get everything setup to upload.

The big question is: will I actually update this site, or forget about it for months or years at a time? It's hard to say. Without the community interacting with my posts, the motivation to make them is severely diminished. If there was an easy way to add comments to posts it could help a lot, but what'll probably happen is I'll post a title/description and a link to Bluesky and hopefully talk to folks there. Once cohost's data export is available, I'll be migrating a number of my chosts, mostly for archival purposes. When I'm through that backlog, we'll see what happens.