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Comment by munmaek | Hacker News Reader

It's not a bad idea, aside from putting your blog entirely on a third party like github. Utterances is the alternative to disqus that uses github issues.[0]

Personally I think the best solution is using a static site generator like Hugo or Zola to control how you generate your content, and then host that using Caddy + Docker. A database is overkill.

You can also use caddy's git plugin to kick off automatic builds build from any git repo, not just a github one. It just needs to support webhooks, I believe.[1]

[0]: https://utteranc.es/

[1]: https://caddyserver.com/docs/http.git

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raganwald.com uses github’s md-to-html thingy, which is jekyl.

But there is nearly zero walled garden downside. I own the domain, I don’t use github.io, so I don’t fear link rot if I move.

Because it’s git, I always have a copy of everything locally, I don’t depend on github for storage.

Because it’s jekyll, I can generate my blog on my own system and upload it somewhere else whenever I want.

I don’t support comments at all, but that’s a personal choice. I’m not in the community business, I outsource comments to Hacker News. Which is also how most of my readers want to discuss my writing.

Yeah, you're always going to be reliant on third parties in a complex world. What is important is how beholden or locked in you are in any given arrangement. If you are free to move from one contractor to another because they are all interoperable, then you're independent in a more important sense.

I suppose that works, I guess I just like hosting my own services over trusting an external service to stay the same and/or play nice in the future. That kicks the bucket to the VPS hosting providers, but with docker it's trivially easy to set up a new server.

With the setup I mentioned above, I just build, commit, then git push, which triggers a pull on both of my servers due to webhooks.

If you use the static-generator approach, how do you do comments? If you just allow posts you open yourself up to many fun attacks.

I don't have comments. Not every website needs comments.

Getting linked to reddit or hn and being discussed is fine enough.

I like that... subcontract to a better or audience-specific comment platform. If it does get on those, and there is value, one could edit and put a 'Follow discussions on [HN link], [Reddit link]'.

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