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Comment by radres | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that the author uses a forum as a personal blog

I've seen people mocked for it before. I think the people doing the mocking were small-minded idiots who couldn't understand that a forum with one top-level poster is isomorphic to a blog with comments.

But I must admit, the initial impression of a 'forum' where all the topics are from one person looks a little bit like it might be a crazy person debating with themselves. (In this particular case, it looks like people other than Agner also create topics). Ideally you'd maybe re-skin the forum?

I tried to start up a Slack for a hobby decidedly lacking in technophiles. A few people joined, and I put some seed comments into different channels to try to drum up some conversation. Did not work, so I stopped posting so I didn't become that crazy guy talking to himself.

KISS at its finest.

You can inline images and code easily. Easy to self-host, so you can own all the data, and you get solid support for comments so you can avoid data-peddling companies like Disqus.

> KISS at its finest.

It’s certainly an interesting way to do it. I’m not sure id set up a forum just to write notes though, there’s far simpler methods. I think in this case theres already a community on this forum and it’s easier to just write there than anywhere else.

> Easy to self-host

I wouldn't go as far. Forum software is notoriously annoying to configure securely and to maintain.

> you get solid support for comments

... at the price of people having to create Yet Another User/Password Set, and likely bother you at some point for user-admin tasks.

You definitely keep control of the data though, and some people really like forums.

> Forum software is notoriously annoying to configure securely and to maintain.

I'm not familiar with setting up forum servers specifically, are they difficult to setup for just one user? I can totally see how having proper authentication, emails, caching, etc getting complicated, I'm just curious if it's any user for personal use? Obviously you lose the ability to receive comments though.

A lot of forum software is "old school" (i.e. some php, perl, or even vb), which means it's a missed patch away from being compromised. Because they are "standard" engines, they are discovered and attacked often and automatically by tools, like Wordpress - they are a prime spam target for linkfarming. They typically ship a lot of dangerous features like file uploads, and overall security practices are often subpar (integration passwords saved on disk, etc).

Setting a forum up for one user seems like a big waste of time, when there are plenty of perfectly useable blog engines out there that are simpler and more secure to run. Unless, of course, one is already an expert in a particular forum engine.

For similar reasons, I'm probably gonna set up a small wiki instance as my personal blog. Nobody else can edit (unless I feel like extending an invitation), but it's a CMS I already know, markup I already know, has robust history tracking which I value, and makes categorization and linking trivial.

Whatever works? My personal favourite example of "hmm, I guess you can do that" is david tolnay's publishing a blog as a rust crate; all crates have their docs parsed and uploaded to docs.rs, so, well, why not¹:

https://docs.rs/dtolnay/0.0.9/dtolnay/macro._01__await_a_min...

1. lots of reasons, probably.

Ya, that is the first time I have seen that. Interesting idea.

The author also has a standard HTML page for content that doesnt require comments: https://www.agner.org/optimize/

Seems like a reasonable approach to allow and manage comments...and build and manage a community. It's a nice hack.

It works the best if you already run a forum and you want to write some related articles. Just open a subforum, and you get a blog with community traffic.

I did this ages ago for a website for my engineering class (now long gone). The focus of the website was a punbb instance, but it also had a front page with a weather widget, an announcements blog, etc. The announcements were just a date-ordered list of first-posts from threads on one of the forums. It was a simple enough thing, and it was easy to click through to the actual forum thread for the "comments" on any given story.

And as an added bonus, it isn't hosted on that awful medium site.

I did something very similar with Drupal in the past. Everything was in the underlying forum, but it was possible to promote some topics to homepage with full text and create RSS feeds for those. The site since has been shut down, but I think it was a neat solution.

The popular news site https://macrumors.com, for example, also stores its entries in an underlying forum.

He also has an old version of the blog which is also a forum: https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/

The mega-popular webcomic Homestuck also used a phpbb forum to store all of its pages and images.

https://mspaprophet.tumblr.com/post/166690894965/the-mspa-pr...

Interesting how a comment on style takes precedence over other comments on content

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