How I Moved my Blog off Bear and it Only Cost Me Three Days of Intense Yak Shaving

Image credit: travelwayoflife on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 So if you're reading this now, you might be noticing that my blog looks a little different from how it used to. Hopefully nothing is horribly broken on your end. I've just completed a pretty involved migration process, moving the Azhdarchid blog off of the blog hosting platform Bear and on to a self-hosted server, using a static site generator (Eleventy) and a CDN for unnecessarily fast distribution. This was in fact a very significant amount of faff, troubleshooting dumb things, and eventually temporarily giving up on some of the more dumb aspects of the project. The main motivation, really, was that I was starting to feel like Bear wasn't meeting my needs. I want to add a few things to my blog that aren't immediately available on Bear, like Webmention support, and Bear gives me limited control. Honestly when I set this blog up on Bear in late 2024, I kind of expected that this day would come; Bear advertises that your blog data…