Bear Blog is a lightweight, self-hosted blogging platform that compiles Markdown files into static HTML pages at build time without requiring a database. It focuses on minimal publishing workflows with full visual customization through built-in themes and custom CSS, including dark mode support.
The platform distinguishes itself with bot-neutral readership tracking that only counts page views when a visitor scrolls or hovers, ensuring metrics exclude automated traffic. It supports multilingual site deployments as either separate independent instances or tag-based language versions, and offers a plugin extension framework for adding optional capabilities like pagination, full-text search, and password protection. Shortcodes enable injecting dynamic content such as filtered post lists, tag clouds, and navigation into pre-rendered pages, while RSS and Atom feeds can be filtered by tag for custom subscriptions.
Additional capabilities include embedded commenting via third-party widgets, email newsletter signup integration, full-text post search across the network, automatic generation of meta tags, Open Graph, sitemap, and robots.txt for search engine optimization. Administrators can customize the dashboard layout, configure navigation menus, use post templates for easier bulk imports, and set site access controls including private viewing and search indexing blocking.
