Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?
robertnealan.com
robertnealan.com
A lot of this is unncessary, I could just be using css. I like that there's not all this asset-flow magic built out, just simple npm with bash cli. Unix philosophy and very little heavy lifting. I think there's still hope.
Now if we can just teach casual users git...
[0]https://gohugo.io/ [1]http://www.blevesearch.com/news/Site-Search/ [2]https://tlvince.com/static-commenting
Well, stuff like hugo, nanoc, ikiwiki... inspirational!
My static site generator is using rake for file rules to do stuff with git hooks. It's going to depend on Ruby, but won't be a "Ruby framework". Rake might as well run php, perl, a bash script or a binary. Rake is just a wonderful tool for the job, and Ruby is about as ubiquitous as Perl these days.
Here's some inspiration: http://patshaughnessy.net/2015/1/8/using-rake-to-generate-a-...
Be sure to check out the "power rake" talk he mentions if you haven't already.
Edit: one more thought. On the idea of teaching casual users "git", I think that's an amazing idea. It touches on tip of an iceberg: computer/scientific/technological literacy gaps. If our technologies continue down the path of "black magic," with the ever extreme dichotomy of priests who know the secrets vs. ordinary/"dumb" people who are locked out of the inner knowledge, it's just not going to be conducive to a bright future.
Remember, regular people are dependent on technology, but have begun to develop superstitions about how it works. It's magic to people!
This is such a deep issue.
Is there any way to install Ruby and required tooling correctly that comes anywhere near to installing JDK?
As for git. The reason these blogs are so heavy is because editing text files for most people requires a text editor interface on the http which in turn means you need dynamic content whicn in tern means you need a database which in tern means you need a way to submit this code so php which in t... and down the rabbit hole goes. If you get rid of the "editing files requires a text editor" part, then your site is easy and maintainable.
Git I think is a bit more programmer-focused of an api for random blogger joe, but a light wrapper might work. Maybe something like emailing a server with subject "POST: title of blog post" body "text for post" and having the server grab that data from the email, if it came from an allowed user, throwing it into the posts/ folder, git committing it and then deploying it to an apache server on itself. Actions like "delete", "edit" would just search for files with the exact name as in the subject and do the required git action on it.
Something like this could probably work. Email clients already have the text editor users want, why rebuild the wheel? If there was someway to wrap this all up without requiring users actually host their own entire email, I think it would be nice. I think teaching your mom git is a pipe dream unfortunately even if it would fix the Copy-of-Copy-of-Birthday-List_OLD2.txt problem.
I wouldn't put too much faith in email clients html output being sane, or consistent across clients.
You could do it with markdown, but then you're still having to teach them markdown.
IMO, lots of blogging platforms add completely unnecessary cruft. Some people may want it, and it definitely can be useful, but not for me.
I never stopped: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/
However, I don't agree with the apparently widespread conclusion that it follows, from this sentiment, that not publishing is better than publishing using a less-than-lovely platform. I also don't agree with the widespread corollary, "build your own blog", when as a result you get less features than the irksome WP would give you (a common omission is support for comments - I got some amazing comments over the years, if you think it's not worth having this feature, I think I see where you're coming from, and I think you should reconsider.)
I treat blogging software as I treat any other - I dislike most programs that I run, but I often still choose to run them because the result is worth it. I can't see how "it's not worth" to run PHP+DB in order to be able to publish your thoughts. This is not to say that, given today's alternatives, WP or similar should be chosen over those alternatives, just that not using any of the available options because they're all too irksome feels over the top.
After having had to deal with the aftermath of a hacked Wordpress site that was sending out massive amounts of spam, I would respectfully disagree. I consider Wordpress (and Wordpress plugins, especially) as essentially a security hole that allows malicious actors to gain free access to relatively powerful hardware on fat datacenter pipes, making the Internet worse for everyone around them.
By all means, publish. But don't publish using a platform that allows unauthorized users to misuse your hardware and turn it into a spam zombie/DDOS box/staging box for hacks, etc.
"GET /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1"
about eight times a day on my lowest traffic sites. And I don't even have WP installed. (Or PHP.)
WP is a distributed botnet farm. I know people who have given up reseller hosting businesses because keeping customer WP installs clean was becoming a 24/7 job for them.
Unfortunately Hugo, Jekyll, etc are a poor substitute for WP, because they're much too difficult for non-coders to use. They're also a poor substitute economically - the WP template & plug-in market is huge.
It must surely be possible to build a blog engine that's secure, easy to use, and easy to customise?
And moreover, I don't agree that not communicating is better than communicating using a less-than-lovely platform... Static generators are fine for publishing but taking into account the requirements for blog-style bidirectional communication (comments, trackback, pingbacks etc.) excludes static sites unless one surrenders control to third parties such as Discus & al.
Wordpress is fine - as long as one carefully selects plugins and culls the unmaintained ones mercilessly.
To make the process not depend on me, I'm considering wordpress.
Hugo and static site generators are nice, but need a developer.
The main two things Wordress has on static generated blogs at the moment are their current community and the editing experience. The editing is of course by design. I have heard that prose.io[0] is nice, but have never worked with it. Essentially webhooked github for cms-free blogs. To me, that seems like the way we should be going.
edit: add link, their site is mainly for access [0] https://github.com/prose/prose
It's still holding us back, though, having a PHP app that a developer needs to edit, instead of allowing any of the team to add content to the site.
[Source][1]
[1]: http://domain.org/dir/
Right now I've got my own self hosted platform, running Wordpress on a Digital Ocean droplet. The constant security updates for Wordpress are a nightmare, and it seems I have to hack both my theme and my post code every time I want to make a slightly interactive post. Never mind that there doesn't seem to be a decent way to preview posts on mobile.
As others have mentioned, it seems the best way to get more people in control of their own platforms would be with easier static tools.
On that note, I've been really impressed with org-mode and pandoc. I've been writing and generating code within a text based environment lately, but it still feels as though the process hasn't really budged or improved much at all in the past 15 years. With org-mode and pandoc, along with babel, I can write and test code, embed images, and generate decent html/pdf all in one go.
But for the casual user, I think it's become more difficult to self publish over the years, not less. The tools we've built have gotten pretty embarrassing if our goal is to get as diverse of a population as possible speaking and sharing their ideas openly on the web.
Cheers to everyone still working on tools like org-mode, pandoc, and latex. It's still relevant, and it still does a great job. If you haven't checked them out, take a look. I was certainly surprised by how far these projects have been taken.
I came to the conclusion that sometimes hand crafting HTML tags for interesting pages takes less time than fiddling with Wordpress innards and plugins.
(This might just be due to WP having generations of cruft though - for me the hard part was always figuring out which arcane PHP method I needed to hook, and how WP wanted me to hook it, in order to add something to this or that part of the page.)
But you know, I'm running WordPress for one of my sites now, and at least in my experience, the "constant security updates" are about as much of a nightmare as they are for iPhone applications at this point. It updates itself! Every so often I log into the admin panel and make sure the plugins I'm using are updated, too -- which is generally a few clicks. From a user standpoint, rather than a nerdy hacker standpoint, WP is frankly closer to a maintenance-free, turnkey CMS than I really thought possible. The majority of WP users never need to hack their theme and post code, and I'd say of the ones who do, the vast majority need to do it very, very rarely.
I get that when you do look at it from a nerdy hacker standpoint, WP can be mildly to profoundly annoying. I am writing a new theme for my site to do a few specific things and I'm finding it kind of infuriating work. But as far as full-featured, self-hostable tools go, WP is just about impossible to beat. (And on many hosts the installation is pretty close to one-click; even if you have to do it manually, there are fewer steps with WP than with almost any other major web software package out there. Anyone wondering how PHP can possibly be still so popular when its fractal wrongness is so well documented just has to look at how easy installing WP is compared to installing roughly any other non-PHP web app ever written.)
At any rate, the web isn't intrinsically any more difficult than it ever was: if you want to build a static web site, you still can, and you don't need any tools in 2016 that you wouldn't have had in 1996. The reason that hosted publishing solutions are so popular goes back to the difference between "nerd" and "non-nerd," I suspect: whatever else one can say about Medium, getting an article published through it and having it look good by modern design standards is really, really easy. I'd like to see more self-hosting blogging myself, but "just write your articles in your favorite plain text editor in Markdown, process them with Jekyll and push 'em up to your server of choice with rsync" is, for most of humanity, simply not an attractive alternative to "type into this WYSIWYG box and click Publish."
Let's compare modern blogging to how you would have blogged in 1996, or when Berners-Lee launched the first documents at CERN, your workflow looked like 'write .html file, FTP to server, Apache serves static files to anyone who visits'. In 2016, your workflow, if you want to, looks like... 'write .html file, SCP to server, nginx serves static files to anyone who visits'. You can still write HTML5 by hand, it's not harder than original HTML (may be easier). You can write Markdown which compiles to HTML with no more fuss than 'markdown.pl foo.md foo.html' or 'pandoc foo.md -o foo.html'.
You don't want to run a server? That's fine, find a host like S3 and instead of 'scp', 's3cmd'. It'll cost you next to nothing compared to back then.
You want some sort of blog software? There must be a million which are not named 'Wordpress' and do not have endless security nightmares. You want static site generators? Likewise, millions. WSIYWG HTML editors? Likewise. Free hosting? At this point almost any large site offers blog-like functionality because hosting is so cheap.
But what is harder? If you want to run your own server, everything is infinitely easy than in 1996. Apt-get may or may not have existed in 1996, but I'm sure it was far less comprehensive and reliable than it is now. You can let your server run for many years without upgrading if you want, and when you do upgrade, it's a few commands. Why, you don't even need to compile a kernel or buy a server edition of your OS. It has never been easier nor cheaper to run your own website in a myriad of different methods. So what exactly has gotten 'so damn complicated'?
The reality is that most people, and especially casuals, do not care that much about high-quality publishing or control or reliability, and instead care more about extreme convenience and network effects, and often either have nothing to say or don't want to say it and so no matter how polished your static site generator is, they couldn't care less. As Yogi Berra said, "if people don't want to go to the ballpark, how are you going stop'em?"
Agreed.
I'm not suggesting there ever was and Edenic period where things were easy, but I do think an argument could be made that things have gotten worse for the non-technical beginner looking to host their own site.
First, they've got to make a decision of which publishing platform to install on their site. They'll probably see some online debates, talking about static site generators vs Wordpress, etc. They'll waste a few hours trying to figure out what choice to make. Once that decision is made, it's next time to find and install a better looking theme, because no platform seems capable of looking decent enough out of the box.
Compare this to handwriting and uploading html files, and it seems like we've gone backwards.
> the reality is that most people... do not care about high quality publishing or readability
I'd argue the opposite. Empires of platforms have been built around being high quality and easily readable. Look at medium, and look at instagram. A slightly better publishing experience dominates.
And to further that note, how would you self host a photo site for mobile? Is that even possible? How would you begin?
What if you wanted to make a self hosted snapchat type site for your friends to see your photos?
I've made a few unfair points, but I think the general idea remains, the self publishing tools haven't kept up with the rest of technology, in general.
But this isn't apple and oranges; a blog with themes and whatnot is much more sophisticated than the HTML CSS rendering defaults. IMO, a HTML page without any CSS is not that bad looking and you don't really need it. Heck, even a text file written with a little bit of care is perfectly readable.)
And the information overload isn't much of a problem: most people know immediately that static site generators aren't for them.
> Look at medium, and look at instagram. A slightly better publishing experience dominates.
Look at all the blogs using Wordpress, and everything written on Twitter and Facebook.
> And to further that note, how would you self host a photo site for mobile? Is that even possible? How would you begin?
I am not entirely sure what a 'photo site for mobile' is, but I am sure that it has no equivalents from before 2006 or so which you could claim it is harder or more complicated than, and I suspect that you could get 95% of the value from a static HTML page sitting on S3 containing a bunch of <img> tags and a 'viewport' <meta> tag that you copy-pasted from a StackOverflow post you found by googling 'how to make a mobile html page'.
There's one exception to this: an HTML page without styling has line width equal to the browser window. Narrow text columns are a dramatic increase in readability.
(And I don't even maximize my browser window... a shocking number of people do, despite the fact that they're using ultra-wide 16:9 screens.)
My original site on Geocities in 98. I would put up dated posts occasionally. A new new item meant editing the index.html and my "archive" was just all the old posts cut and pasted to an archive.html page. Adding a new navigation link meant editing every page.
For a while I was using shtml for "header" and "footer" files which could be tacked on to individual entry files vut it was still a pain to use. Blog platforms and other CMS systems with editors that keep the content sepersted from the design are definitely better.
Currently, IPFS [1] looks most promising to me. It's easy to publish a static website to it [2], and public gateways are available to make the site accessible to readers who do not run their own nodes. While IPNS (the naming system) does not seem to work reliably yet, hash of the current version of the web site can be published in a special DNS TXT record, and if that same domain points to IP address of a public gateway, the web site will be simply accessible via that domain.
[1] https://ipfs.io/ [2] https://github.com/ipfs/examples/tree/master/examples/websit...
In IPFS, if you need to immediately ensure availability of your content, you can request it via a public gateway to force it into the gateways cache. Then the gateway will continue to seed your data even if your node goes offline.
I had fantasies when Web Audio and Web Midi first were announced of browser based digital audio tools that people would use in one anothers physical presence, over a small local network. There is no reason that every network application needs to depend on centralized services! I was lucky enough to attend Music Hack Day in Berlin and created this Web Midi/WebRTC chat room as an example. I have no idea if it still works or not: https://github.com/timbresmith/pandemonium
No. The exact opposite, in fact. Micro-publishing services like Twitter & Tumbler have enabled millions of casual users to publish and distribute their own content with a few keystrokes and a couple clicks.
That said, I don't think it's become harder to self-publish, but it hasn't matched the progress made by services like Twitter.
Nowadays, I can set up a public-facing server with a few clicks for $5 a month. We have it too easy.
Or maybe it's just me?
Of course - all of that credibility was lost when a few bloggers were censored and kicked from the platform for wrongthink. I don't use Medium anymore.
(I guess in a weird way that's what blogging is?)
Then again, I only interacted with the site by following links on sites like this, reading the linked item, then closing the tab. My entire impression came from the quality of those posts (took time to see bad ones make it to the front page of HN, for example) and the post page design. If I'd ever clicked around the site or visited the homepage I might have figured it out faster.
These days I expect a level of quality slightly better than Tumblr when I see the medium.com domain name in a link, and am occasionally pleasantly surprised. The image/marketing only went so far.
:-)
About the only good point on the list in that link is line width. But all the items about formatting text combine to make it so that there is so much less information on the screen. I'd much prefer to read the other website.
Actually, your simple design is not the only one to make my day. I have finally found a guy who puts all the HTML5 etc. on the one page. He's a physics lecturer. He has dead easy html files that illustrate Newton's Cannon, using canvas and javascript. Finally, I am "getting" it. See http://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/html5/. (And the bonus was to see that, with uniform circular motion, the acceleration is towards the centre of rotation. I mean I really need things explained simply without any extras getting in the way.) Of course, I had to play with it to understand it. But the beauty was that, with the source code all there on the one page, I could easily make changes and see the effect immediately. Thanks Dan Schroeder.
PS I need to remind myself that posting pdf files is another straightforward way to get information online.
The guy who made it is: https://twitter.com/drew_mc
Self-hosted blogging still has a place in this ecosystem!
I've only ever accessed it via hackernews links and they were all to very substantial and well written articles.
From the article:
"There was a promising short lived moment where smaller, topic-oriented blog networks like Svbtle (amongst others) started appearing, but even those seem to have gone by the wayside and are increasingly being replaced by Medium."
Back in 2002 I co-founded a blogging company. At that time we were competing with the likes of Blogger.com and Typepad.com. There were many other companies, at that time, which I've since forgotten. At one point, around 2003 or 2004, we created a list of all our competitors, and there were at least 100 names on the list.
My point is, the vast bulk of all blogging has always been on 3rd party hosted blogging sites. Self-hosted blogging has always been rare. I self-host my blog, smashcompany.com, on a server at Rackspace, but this has always been a rare option.
All the same, I am intrigued by the question. If anyone has historical data on this, it would be fascinating to know when self-hosted blogs hit their peak. If Technorati.com has survived in its original form, then it would be in possession of this historical data, but sadly, the original Technorati.com is dead.
When Svbtle first came out it seemed to cater to almost purely tech audiences and allowed new authors on a limited basis - this might have been coincidence due to the creator's roots or connections, but it created a sense of community and credibility within that social sphere (similar to Hacker News in the tech world). Unfortunately, since they've opened signups to everyone it seems like its lost that sense of community and become just-another-blogging-platform.
Also would be extremely curious as to the stats on historical blogging data.
http://datagenetics.com/blog.html
Shameless plug :)
Well, not a blog, but my web site.
But I'd love to see a resurgence of a Bricolage- or MovableType-like tool.
WordPress has a concept called "child [1] which shouldn't result in behavior like that.
J/k. But if you are familiar with NPM, install node-ftpsync.
Configuration is really easy. Just one small json file at the root of your site.
One command and your local files are automagically synced. It does file diff checking so it'll only upload the files that have changed.
I originally wrote it because inherited a site located on shared hosting. I got really tired of the cognitive overhead of manually uploading changes via FileZilla then checking, rechecking, and praying that I didn't forget something.
Jekyll and Github Pages keeps the deployment simple and Google Domains has proven to be simple, cheap, and reliable. I tried Kloudsec out last week on a whim after seeing it on HN, and so far it's great - simple, free SSL with let's encrypt.
https://evancordell.com if interested. It needs a little more love before I'd really say I'm pleased with it, but I'm very happy with how cheap and easy it was to set up a personal blog with SSL.
Coding the stylesheet for the blog and getting the whole site working was certainly fun but writing handcoded markdown and publishing via the shell surely requires some getting used to.
My advice: use github pages for your blog to avoid the guilt of paying for hosting services that you don't need. http://unixheaven.com if anyone's interested.
I'm hosting my site on Github Pages as well, but Gandi as my DNS. I considered Cloudflare at the time, but would had to move the DNS from Gandi to Cloudflare and pay 20$ to Gandi for that.
I think many people feel like they get out what they needed to get out on Twitter/Facebook. They used to write on their own blogs to get things out, now it's elsewhere.
I think a lot of folks are still running WordPress of some kind on their own Dreamhost, etc, accounts which feels like self-hosting to me.
I had self-hosted WordPress on Dreamhost until I got kicked off due to a viral post and my site deleted. Recovering my posts and learning how to use Jekyll/GitHub Pages in less than 24 hours was fun.
A few emails were sent out that day.
Could be. Content and templates could be hosted on S3. Unfortunately I haven't found a good admin GUI for a static site generator yet. I use Jekyll myself and as a developer that's great, not something I would recommend to normal users though. Which is a shame because most users (or small businesses) don't really have such complex requirements. Most don't really need their site to be dynamic, and what requires some server functionality can be solved with an external service (save data, send email etc).
Me either but I'm considering using Ghost (which does have a nice frontend) and liberating the content from the SQLite database into static files for generation and serving.
Something I have yet to see but that I think would be perfect would be a client-side single-page-app that served as a s3-backed static site generator.
Navigate to MyStaticWebsiteGenerator.io (or download it, or self-host it, or clone the repo, it's a simple js-based SPA preferably packaged as a stand-alone ".html" file). AWS credentials (IAM of course) are either stored encrypted in LocalStorage (or Websql or indexeddb or who knows what we are supposed to be using) or queried on demand. It would interact with s3 directly (there is a browser based js api for aws) to manage and modify files directly (multi-user contention and eventual consistency be damned - for small sites it's simply not an issue), and when appropriate, generate/regenerate the static files. Because everything is done client side, the webserver itself never sees or cares about your aws credentials.
Clearly, being a "static site generator", only the admin interface would be JS based, the user-facing generated content would be static. [For some reason every post i've seen doing something remotely similar wants their mostly static content to be rendered at runtime in their js app???]
With prosemirror under active development you should soon be able to have a simple js based WYSIWYG rich text editor that generates nice clean Markdown to feed into your template of choice (à la Jekyll). Your end-users don't need to know markdown or care, they just get a fairly basic rich text editor. Give them a simple interface for defining a website's structure and bob's your uncle.
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who thinks this way.
Has anyone ever tried building a standalone desktop writing app that handles everything for you? I'm just imaging an app where I can buy a domain/hosting, give it my user creds if needed, and it automatically sets everything up for me in a clean interface without needing to know anything about servers/DNS/etc.
As for hosting, Amazon's s3 seems the most appropriate. While you could automate domain registration and DNS records, I'm not sure how.
This seems like it could be an interesting project.
The key questions of the debate on the cons side of switching, assuming you're blogging for fun and not thinking particularly about advertising or massively customised SEO strategies, seem to be:
1. do I own my content 2. will my content be accessible forever
As this post highlights, the answer to (1) on medium is YES. So, no problems.
The answer to (2) is also, for all practical purposes, YES, but you shouldn't depend on it.
But is this really such an issue anyway? I certainly assume that the vast majority back up their photographs, just by nature, and how difficult is it to back up the plaintext of your blog pieces too? If you have backups, and the answer to (1) is yes, then really, it starts to look like an easy decision.
Yes, that would be immensely annoying, but it's not really that terrible of a downside in a calculated risk offset against how much easier (and, again, free-er!) medium is to use, and to maintain.
I think I'm looking at things over the span of 2 decades of keeping one's presence and information online whether self-hosted or with a service, both of which come and go.
I recently switched to Medium and couldn't be happier. With Ghost I was spending more time tweaking and maintaining purchased themes than I spent writing.
It's really really really fucking hard to run a blog that works well on desktop/tablet/phone and doesn't crash if you get a traffic spike. How many self hosted blogs can handle 500,000 hits in less than a day? Not many.
Medium will probably die someday. That's fine. I own my content and my content URLs. I'll simply port it to a new platform. It wouldn't be the first time.
I love "owning" my content on my server (since '09) but in the past year I've been thinking of going back to a "serviced" solution. My initial thought was WordPress.com since I run WP, but it's $99 a year! It decreases the hassle of upgrading versions constantly, but still, that's a dealbreaker.
What's attractive about Medium is the same thing that attracted me to Facebook: all profiles/posts use the same theme, and that theme is pretty good. In addition, following people to get their content in your feed feels great.
However, I'm not sure if I'm completely ready to give up control yet. Will probably continue to check into Medium + custom URLs for the next year.
The decision would be much easier if my posts were written for a large audience, but they're mostly just self-involved journal entries I doubt people want to go back and read. :) Right now I just publish short fiction to Medium, which is what I want people to share, like, etc.
I've written about it here https://hugotunius.se/aws/cloudflare/web/2016/01/10/the-one-...
(also, what is S3 adding in your case? As far as I'm aware github.io sites are free, while AWS billing is not a hard limit and you're still liable for potentially huge charges if someone decides to DDOS you while you're away from a computer)
> I've also never been quite clear whether the github Jekyll is supposed to be run locally before push or is run automatically on their side.
Depends on the setup. In all setups you are going to want to be able to run the page locally in a watch mode. `jekyll serve --watch --drafts`. When it comes to deployment it differs a bit, if you use the approach outlined in my post the actual building of the page happens on Travis which pushes the generated site to s3. With Github pages it's all taken care of by Github when you push.
> also, what is S3 adding in your case? As far as I'm aware github.io sites are free, while AWS billing is not a hard limit and you're still liable for potentially huge charges if someone decides to DDOS you while you're away from a computer
When running Jekyll with Github pages there are limitations to what kind of plugins and gems you can use. However it's a perfectly valid approach. I have a billing alert set up at $5 on AWS and to a degree Cloudflare protects me from DDOS. Honestly though most of my pages are extremely lightweight and s3 is cheap enough that even millions of requests is not going to incur huge costs. All my static assets are cached by cloudflare as well.
Jekyll is a bit of a nightmare on Windows at the moment, at least if any significant part of your workflow is based on cygwin. (I helped a colleague get it running a couple weeks ago.)
Cygwin ruby + gem install jekyll -> fail.
rbenv to build ruby from source under Cygwin, gem install jekyll -> fail.
The one solution I found that works is using Chocolatey [1] to install ruby and then gem install jekyll. Even so, I wasn't able to get pygments working for syntax highlighting, and the Chocolatey Ruby does not play nicely with cygwin terminal for interactive programs.
You can point to lots of web sites that are hard to read, but that just proves the point that people are rather finicky about it these days.
Seriously: if Motherfucking Website, (or Better Motherfucking Website) were the defaults, we'd be ahead of the game. A few other hacks (use "http { font-size: medium }" for example, to default to the user's preferred font size) to further address that.
I'm looking for a browser that defaults to Reader Mode by default. Maybe including comments.
I've been thinking about this exact thing every other day or so since Maciej Cegłowski's slides[1] for his "Website Obesity Crisis" talk got posted here last month.
I'm thinking of a Reader-Mode browser, period.
Stock stylesheets. Ignore the site's styles. Maybe provide various themes for the user. Further heuristics to strip other cruft. And a "mercy killing" mode which simply abandons all native markup and presents a page stripped of everything, if it's sufficiently bad.
Say the green text on blue background, with every paragraph individually absolutely positioned, centered justification, H2 headings used for body text, and Microsoft "smart quotes" throughout. I've seen all this (though perhaps not quite all on the same page).
There's already an infinite quantity of interesting content to read, and it seems reasonable to expect rising quantities of worthwhile, as I find writing and creations that I was unaware of when they were being made. With all this stuff, I want to be able to control where and when I read, and how I filter, manage, follow, and store all this stuff. At some point, platform operations reflect a business plan, and that plan may or may not allow for one or more of my preferences, for reasons of $. I guess I just prefer a relationship where a standard or pseudo-standard allows the user control, to select differing vendor options at the very least.
Then again, as I'm barely capable of managing a basic server install, I'm fully aware of why people throw in with hosted systems. I'm hoping for great things from stuff like Sandstorm.
As I write this, I'm desparately trying to winnow my way to "tab zero" (by analog to "inbox zero"). And, at some point, organise the pages I've turned up as interesting to be filed for later research and assimilation.
I'm using a tablet as my primary browsing device lately (battery life, weight, portrait aspect for long-form reading, plus keyboard), but this means hugely stripped down browser capabilities. While I've got bookmarks, there's no tagging or other organisation possible. Even Readability's app (abandonware for the past 3 years) lacks tags. Calibre and Zotero don't have a full-fledged Android apps, Mendeley is owned by Elseveir (no fucking way I'm getting close to that).
And so it goes.
What I've discovered is that having a VPS opens up a world of opportunities for network related things. I've used that site to host Ludum Dare entries, ClickOnce .NET apps, and a Wiki Profile image that I used to see if anyone was looking at my page on a company wiki. An SSH tunnel has allowed me to bypass some firewalls that block the majority of ports.... I've learned a lot on that server. Some of the best $50/year that I spend in terms of hosting stuff.
Right now we are working on an IDE inside SunSed so anyone can create their own template with HTML++ (our own templating/programming language).
Here is a screenshot of of our IDE (I'm working on it right now):
https://cdn.sunsed.com/0/images/shared-on-web/htmlpp-ide-pre...
We are going to announce HTML++ and SunSed 2.0 on HN in the next few months.
Happy hacking & blogging!
Turns out AOL had the right idea the whole time -- people want platform-specific keywords and they want to trust the platform's caretakers to decide what's OK for them to see.
Er, are you implying that Ruby is not a language for people with a web development background?
Regardless, most of Jekyll tweaking is done with Liquid templates, which are mostly agnostic. (You do use Ruby for plugins, yes, but they are not super important.)
Here's my review of migrating to hexo http://www.primaryobjects.com/2015/12/15/a-tale-of-migrating...
I recently converted my wordpress blog to hexo and blogged about it, if you're interested:
The other nice thing about SSGs is emitting modern output (minified, etc). What comes out of wordpress is a horror show...
https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-moves-to-medium-c8...
I think the number 1 reason is reach.
That said, I agree with most of the complaints about Medium as well.
But medium timed things right and opened up to masses sooner. People signed up in droves. 'svtble' stayed elitist for many more months, but were medium forced their hands, but it was already too late.
There's not a good apples to apples comparison of public data, but for instance...
Medium 20k authors per week: http://recode.net/2015/09/28/ev-williams-medium-raises-57-mi...
WordPress.com average 12.7m posts per week: https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2016/01/06/the-2015-wordpress-...
https://www.wordfence.com/learn/2015-wordpress-security-surv...
What about a 3rd option?
Use a web application that can asynchronously fetch markdown files and render them client-side.
That's basically how my site I've been working functions.
Here's the code Http://gihub.com/evanplaice/evanplaice.com
I haven't fleshed out the journal section yet but the majority of the rest of the site is all markdown driven with a clean separation between application. It's also hosted on S3.
In theory, I could change the content directly to be loaded on Dropbox, although it would be preferable to provide inline caching of requests. For example use AWS lambda to frequently check for updates.
Eventually, when it's ready, I plan to extract the journaling portion and release it as a server-less journaling platform.
It's a few {pre,post}-{commit,receive} hooks which generate a static html blog from html articles (though you can configure it with an external parser iirc, so it shouldn't be hard to get Markdown support.) It probably wouldn't suffice for many use cases, but for simple blogs it might be enough.
it costs a bit more than $1 a month to run it.
Let's say you need to put up a simple brochure type site. You can do alot wih just 2-3 MB text/pics. With WP, it takes about 10MB just to get it running.
And let's not forget the DB backend of WP. This alone vastly increases complexity, at least for average users.
Scale this up and you see how bloated WP is. You want to put up 100 brochure sites (each about 5MB). With html/css sites, that translates to what 500MB of data? With WP, that already is 1000MB. And add requirement for a DB backend for 100 websites. The bloatness jumped by at least a factor of 2 with just the requirement for more storage. With DB requirement, the bloatness jumped imo by a factor of 5 or so.
I feel blogging is much more about sharing content, building a community and meeting new people. In my personal experience i met a few people through various blogs and it was worth much more, than a few dollars.
If you're only blogging to make money, you're doing something wrong. It's the same with startups and other things. Do it for the fun, and not for the money!
I've done some exploration of just where intelligent conversation online lies, and frankly was surprised at the results: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
The methodology uses the Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers list as a proxy for "intelligent discussion", the string "this" to detect English-language content, generally, and the arbitrarily selected string "Kim Kardashian" as a stand-in for antiintellectual content. Google search results counts on site-restricted queries are used to return the amount of matching content per site, with some bash and awk glue to string it all together and parse results.
As expected, Facebook is huge, as is Twitter. When looking at the FP/1000 ratio (hits per 1,000 pages) KK/1000, and FP:KK ratios, more interesting patterns emerge.
Facebook beats G+, largely.
Reddit makes up in quality what it lacks in size, but Metafilter blows it out of the water. Perhaps a sensible user filter helps a lot.
The real shocker though was how much content was on blogging engines, even with a very partial search -- mostly Wordpress and a few other major blogging engine sites. Quite simply, blogs favour long-form content, some of it exceptionally good.
But blogs suck for exposure and engagement.
This screams "Opportunity!!" to me. I've approached several players (G+/Google, Ello) with suggestions they look into this. Ello's @budnitz seems to be thinking along these lines (I'm a fan of what Ello's doing, but its size is minuscule, and mobile platform usability is abysmal.)
One of the most crucial success elements for G+ is the default "subscribe to all subsequent activity on this post" aspect. Well, that and the ability to block fuckwits (though quite honestly ignore would be more than sufficient). There's a hell of a lot else to dislike, but those two elements are crucial to engagement.
As for blogging, I'm a fan of a minimal design (http://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB) and static site generators.
If you ever do a similar analysis using say, science Nobel Prize Winners or some other similar list, I'd love to see it.
The individuals named cover a range of backgrounds, from natural and social sciences to politics, religion, and a few authors, artists, and other creatives.
It was more fun than writing actual blog content though.
Half the time I see Medium posts, the other half I'll see something hosted with Jekyll + github pages. Which technically isn't Self Hosted, but still quite different from just writing in Medium or something of the sort.
However I suspect HackerNews readers are not the average, and I do think there's a down trend on self hosting blogs, versus using Medium/Wordpress/Tumblr or even Blogspot.
Terms of Service shouldn't change often enough that this should ever be an issue.