Trying out Forestry

I’ve been looking for the best way to write content for a while.

I do not appreciate WordPress, too heavy, too slow, in my opinion.

Also, I get distracted easily, and if you’ve ever used WordPress, you know what I’m talking about: every time I log in to WordPress, you have between 1 and 12 new notifications from various plugins, etc. It breaks so easily too!

Static site generators are nice, and I got used to Hugo. While I don’t particularly fancy learning a new templating language (they use a go formatting tool), I do like the platform’s simplicity.

With Hugo, you edit markdown files then “git push” them to publish. That’s not super user friendly either. Writing drains my energy, so I’ll fall for any interruption.

forestry.io looks nice; this page is a test.

The editor is VERY, VERY simple. I like it. It does have a HUGE left part with my metadata, and I haven’t figured out a way to fold it yet. That part looks dumb. The rest is calm and efficient. I like.

  • They have a fancy editor and a RAW editor.
  • Preview mode, it looks like they start a Hugo instance just for you.

Save / Publish

it’s not clear when you save or when you publish content. It looks like their “Save” button will publish the content.

Looking at this message:

It looks like they have NO storage backend. Everything is stored on your main github branch. That is intriguing.


Laurent Senta

I wrote software for large distributed systems, web applications, and even robots. These days I focus on making developers, creators, and humans more productive through IPDX.co.