Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gys | Hacker News Reader

What would be a good alternative ?

I don’t know if it’s a good alternative, but I blog on GitHub using GitHub Pages. It’s a minimalist experience: I use Markdown (optional), and I have my own domain (critical!)

If they ever shutter the service, it is very easy to generate all the HTML pages with Jekyll, and then throw them up on a static host.

Every single one of Medium’s discoverability and traffic benefits feel like Faustian bargains to me, so I am not going there.

The last time I experimented with publishing in a walled garden was Posterous, mostly because they were a YCombinator startup at a time when that wasn’t some kind of golden ticket, and I wanted to make a gesture of support for them and for YCombinator.

Posterous shuttered, and I republished my work using GitHub Pages, but all the old urls broke, and I’m never doing that again.

I'm curious as to why you say it's 'critical' to have your own domain on Github pages? Is it to do with search engine listings?

Joel Spolsky (if you don’t know him, he was one of the first “Celebrity Bloggers” in tech culture) gave me a piece of advice more than a decade ago: Own your own domain and publish under it, that way you always control your content and the links to your content.

If my blog was raganwald.githubpages.com, GitHub could theoretically decide that githubpages needed to be deeply integrated with Windows or some other foolishness, and I’d be screwed.

But since my blog appears to the world as raganwald.com, I can leave GitHub Pages whenever I like, and all the links will continue to work. It's about long-term control, and for that you need:

1. Control your content, ideally with a copy of the source on your own devices at all time, in an open format with an ecosystem of tooling, and;

2. Control your domain name.

Gitlab has a similar feature. (I haven't used either Github or Gitlab directly to publish a blog, but they're also usefully integrated in the Netlify/Hugo blog workflow.)

Wordpress. I prefer older technology for things that have been long solved already

Rebuilding my blog from scratch at the moment (using my own theme), it's not so bad dealing with PHP and wordpress.

I really dislike not fully owning my content, especially with medium or middle-ware like disqus which is pretty much required with jekyll. Medium has really poor syntax color formatting as well.

Security is not really a big issue for me, especially if you pick a good hosting provider, and follow basic 101 practices.

I'll still use medium to link back to my blog though (not really doing it at the moment though).

You can write posts in Markdown using Gutenberg [0]. Then run `gutenberg build` to get your static assets, and pack those into a docker container with Caddy [1] as the server.

[0]: https://www.getgutenberg.io/

[1]: https://caddyserver.com/

I learned about https://write.as/ recently. Heard about them on Mastodon as it seems it is also federated. The software to self-host is open-sourced as well https://writeas.org/

Ghost (https://ghost.org/) is pretty nice. You can host it yourself or pay them to host it for you, either way there is no nag screen.

After way too many years of running my own web server, about half the time writing raw HTML or Markdown, I started using https://www.silvrback.com/ a while ago. It has a pretty nice editor with special consideration for posts including code or mathematical formulae, and without most of the warts the OP mentions at Medium. Might not be for everyone, but I find it quite pleasant.

Non-disclosure: I have no relationship with Silvrback other than as a plain old customer.

I'm expecting downvotes, but self hosted wordpress could work for you.

Unfortunately you got downvoted because HN is obsessed with static site generators. Meanwhile, Wordpress offers a superior writing and reading experience which you, the owner, totally control.

Wordpress seems to be objectively bloated and messy in terms of the website code that is generated. You can run wordpress blogs through a website speed analyzer and compare it with a static gen site and see this.

The "hate" isn't based solely on being hip.

But this just isn't true.

If you install wordpress, and then grab a bunch of plugins and themes and install them without taking any care, it won't bundle and minify your javascript. It's no different to having a static website and grabbing a load of jquery plugins and throwing them onto a page.

But if you use some techniques such as building your theme and plugins using gulp or similar, you can have your wordpress site outputting bundled and minified javascript.

There are also caching techniques that can be used at the webserver level, just like any other website.

Or perhaps less conspiratorially, complaining about votes is against the guidelines here and pretty much guarantees an automatic downvote from a lot of people. As in this case, it never achieves anything other than derailing the conversation.

And for those who like to post code snippets in (currently still) esoteric languages like Elixir - and from a nice CMS?

Dev.to has been gaining popularity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com