Where to Blog
monkbent.net
monkbent.net
IMO, very few people are at a loss on "where to blog" or "how to blog", but rather actually writing. If you're a dev, you've got text files you can serve (or convert to html). If you're a non-tech person, you've got a dearth of places to blog on, with nearly a decade of tutorials about how to setup a domain and site. It feels like the demand for these "where to blog" posts are mostly to bikeshed on the tools and not actually the writing part.
"Dearth" means "scarcity"; you probably mean "wide variety" or "plethora" if you like alliteration.
"That led to a number of questions as to where one should create a blog..."
So apparently, enough people are at a loss on where to blog that asked him that he thought it was worth a post.
Cause twitter/social is NOT a great place for promoting a blog.
Each social network has their own algorithm for what they show people. At this point, none of them show you 100% of what is posted by the people you follow. This isn't the worst things, but its annoying.
the question becomes, what DO they show you?
For the most part it's things written IN THE PLATFORM.
These social networks want to keep you within the network, not have you end up on some other site.
The issue being, because of that incentive to keep you on their site, and a preference for on platform content, your blog post that you share generally wont be shown to very many people.
The only real solution to that is federation - reposting the content of the blog on each network. That's what gets you the views.
That brings up a whole host of issues.
Not disagreeing with the main overall point, I have a personal blog for many of the reasons posted, but I don't want people to think that posting a link to their personal site will get much traction on social media unless they already have an absolutely massive following.
It's not as plug-and-play as paying for Wordpress hosting, but you also don't have to deal with all the update pain.
If you want something more advanced, you can easily pivot from it to some other hosting.
A modern blog should be written in Markdown and stored in a git repository. For non-devs, wordpress.com offers a slicker first time experience but companies like Netlify are trying to provide slick WebUIs to bridge the gap.
Why?
Especially considering the dozens of MD variations (Vanilla? Extra? GitHub? CommonMark? pandoc?) preclude any future-proof-ness. And all the ad-hoc extensions you do in your application when you want to support (for example) figure tags with alt text, title and caption (not even really possible in pandoc) make things even worse.
Most people who write and publish on the web, including professional writers, do not know Markdown and have never heard of git.
As someone who works in marketing and publishing, I can tell you that it is enough of a struggle to stop writers using Word—plain text and git are unthinkable for most of them.
How does "someone wanting to blog" add a picture of their cat to their post?
I'm aware that Grav has tackled this but not others.
Comments can be a swamp but with WordPress there is Akismet. Which SSG's provide that?
I suppose it comes down to what you mean by 'blogging'?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60177551/calling-rest-ap...
Want examples of blogs where you'd want to make API calls from your page and not being able to in Markdown would be ruinous? Here's two from my blog.
A pretty much straight-from-Twitter page, nothing but Twitter API calls.
http://www.mediazed.com/bristol-colston-statue.html
Now you could say, that's a pretty artificial blog post structure, most bloggers wouldn't do that. So here's a more harmonious blend - a pretty regular blog post text blended with Twitter API calls.
http://www.mediazed.com/thiel-fellows.html
And lately I've been thinking of mixing in other embeded platform code (Insta, YouTube) - easily done like this, potentially a hassle with Markdown.
Now, maybe you can fight with Markdown and find some way to sprinkle in the embedded code, but if you ask me, it seems like: if I'm dealing with a lot of raw HTML at that point, why not just go all the way and, as a dev, do it all in HTML?
I don't see much value add in Markdown, at that point. And this is a perfectly valid, 'real-world' blog use case.
For any markup that is not covered by Markdown’s syntax, you simply use HTML itself. There’s no need to preface it or delimit it to indicate that you’re switching from Markdown to HTML; you just use the tags.
https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax
* * *
Unrelated to Markdown: CMS like WordPress have quick tags for embeds, e.g. your post with tweets could have been something like
[tweet id="123..."]
[tweet id="456..."]
instead of the massive amount of code that you have to copy and paste, which will break if Twitter stops supporting that API, while this embed style would be easy to update.
IMO Wordpress' biggest advantage is that the growth marketing community really knows how to tune it and make it sing for common use-cases. If you're going to have a team running growth strategies on your blog you'll be able to hire a strong team to run SEO, inbound marketing, and whatever else you need. It's boring technology in the best sense.
I suspect for active users that they boiled this frog slowly, but to me it is not acceptable. Unfortunately running servers for free is also not acceptable.
I think the tech community needs to discover Co-ops. That we haven't already I blame in part on our aversion to hobbies, which is where most of my exposure comes from.
This may actually be a Good Thing. Honestly, I can't think of many things you want to start doing where you want to adapt your existing blog. When you start on something new, create a new sub-domain or buy a new domain, install new software and go from there. I'd much rather focus on doing what you're doing now well rather than make a trade for speculative optionality.
Writing on any platform regularly is not easy for everyone. So it’s less of a platform issue than some people perceive it to be. For most people, a “free” wordpress.com or blogger.com (or gasp, medium.com if you really hate your readers) is good enough to start.
Focusing on writing well and building an audience is the most important thing while starting out.
n.b.: I've been writing at https://reframing.substack.com/ for the past 5 weeks.
Generating a Wordpress blog is easy compared to figuring out how to actually get it discoverable. I think that’s what a lot of these blog service providers are missing is some sort of way to find content being generated on their hosting platform.
Did you mean WP-hosted sites (with the domain xyz.wordpress.com) instead of self-hosted Wordpress?
The profit incentive is far more powerful force in shaping the internet into what it is today than any single product demise.
Profit is powerful but control is far more so. Frankly, Google fucked up and bit the hand that fed it. That strategy has been financially successful, but did so at the expense of hyper-stimulating Facebook and Twitter. I'd go as far to say that if Google invested in what Reader had represented, a marginal business like Twitter would have vanished or been absorbed long ago.
Reader was a niche product albeit an important niche with lots of important users.
If you're a developer, just build a static site. If you're not a developer, you're going to have to pay.
I'd argue the opposite about using managed hosting -- a self-hosted WordPress site is more likely to outlast one on managed WordPress hosting for the sole reason of cost. Managed hosting is significantly more expensive, and justifying that ongoing cost may cause the owner of the site to discontinue it sooner than they would otherwise.
The biggest risk in all of the WordPress ecosystem are third-party plugins. Minimizing the use of those and installing something like Wordfence (free or paid) would go a long way towards mitigating that risk. It wouldn't be non-zero, but it'd be acceptably low.
I've been running WP installations for years and never had a problem with them getting hacked.
That's what I did many years ago, and I'm still there. Wordpress.com is easy and that's why it's big.
(Note: this is not an argument against rolling your own. Do it if you want to!)
Nonsense.
I've been using WordPress since Jan 2004 and followed a huge number of sites. Not a single one has turned into a 'content farm'.
Yes some have stopped blogging. A very very small number have switched to a different way of creating their site. But what you say is nonsense.
>"The only way to not become a content farm is to use commercial hosting"
Junk statement. It's the owner of the blog that determines the content, not the host.
I would suggest that you followed the wrong sites.
I still use WordPress
- All Wrongs Reversed - 4 Color Rebellion - Egalicontrarian - Neojapanisme
There are more but they only get and stay hacked if it’s been dormant for several years, so by the time I see the spam in my RSS reader, I have typically forgotten about the blog.
Wordpress has a powerful ecosystem, great usability, and it's free. Hard to beat.
I'm playing with Webflow for one of my other sites. Content editing capabilities and large scale content management is lightyears behind Wordpress still.
People can just focus on writing.
(Also, I confess a bit of hesitance with any platform whose TOS restricts content for any reason other than legality, which IIRC Substack's TOS does. If I started a fiction newsletter and wanted, with appropriate communication to my audience, to send out a piece that contained graphic sex, I don't really want my hosting provider to tell me that's not allowable. It's surprising how hard it is to find places that close off that possibility: as it turns out, the vast majority of the commercial internet is not, in fact, for porn.)