As for Publii, yes it really does appear to be everything I was thinking of making. Except it's Electron and I was thinking native - which users wouldn't notice likely.
Really interesting to hear that people want to post from mobile. I must be in a developers' bubble - i assumed this kind of thing would be done from a desktop! You've really got me thinking there. I guess you could totally do it from mobile. But then you have to fight the app store's distribution/marketing model. Which isn't appealing - at some point you have to ask yourself 'would I just make an easier living as an electrician than do this?'.
Again, interesting to hear your shortcomings with Publii. I think the killer feature would be doing it all from mobile. Which is fine I guess, but then how do you get your data to desktop, backups, etc etc. Lots to consider!
Thanks again for the food for thought :)
I don't know much about the mobile world, so this may be a stupid question, but could you route around the app store problem by making a progressive web app?
I assume a backend of some sort would be necessary, since JS in the browser is a pretty limited environment, but if Chalkinator Desktop is handling your server setup anyway, it could install a personal backend on it for you, and the PWA could talk to that.
Anyway, here is one i found out recently and seems to be able to do the job:
https://getpublii.com/
And a blog i made with it myself:
http://runtimeterror.com/devlog/
Having said that, the first thing a friend of mine (who has managed a few blogs professionally) asked when i mentioned it to him was "can you make posts from your mobile?". Of course the answer is "no" since this runs as a desktop application, manages everything locally and just generates HTML files that can optionally upload/sync to your server for you. But apparently every single non-technical client he had wanted to use their phone to write blog posts way more often than their computer.
And yes, i know this also explains the "because apparently putting everything in the browser is sexier or something" part i wrote at the top, but, dammit, i do not care about mobiles at all, do not go and kill stuff i (might) like.
(though TBH there are several things i dislike about Publii, e.g. the themes are both ugly and too overcomplicated to work with and modify and the program is written in Electron with for real benefit - it doesn't do real WYSIWYG, just a rich text editor almost with the same capabilities as the one you could find even in Visual Basic 4 and it doesn't even preview the site inside it but launches your browser instead, but there isn't really any other alternative that i know of and at the end it seems to work... though i'm itching to go and write my own :-P)