Hacker News Reader

Comment by tremon | Hacker News Reader

... published on a site that accesses 7 different top-level domains. And that's even before allowing any javascript to run.

Oh the ironing.

View on HN

Yes, that's something I'd love to do differently. The problem is I don't have the technical skills to build that website myself. As I said in the cookie banner, I disabled all the trackers I could. Unfortunately, Squarespace doesn't let its customers disable all of them, which is extremely annoying.

You may wish to give Wordpress a look. It's infamously easy to install, and will happily run on a $5/month digitalocean VM. Installing a caching addon (one or two clicks from the store) will make a site that can survive being linked to directly on HN.

Last I knew Squarespace had an export option, so you might be able to just bring all your content over without much hassle.

Unfortunately WordPress is a pain in the butt to maintain, every plugin and even the core is a security liability if you don't auto update everything (which is likely to randomly wreck your blog someday) and Wordpress's default configuration (with its XMLRPC API) is far from perfect.

Thanks! I had a WP site before, but it was getting too complicated for me. I have basic CSS skills, but they weren't enough so I was always asking my SO for help. I had plugins to update but I was never sure of how safe they were, if they were going to break the site, etc. With the skills I have, something like Squarespace is more manageable and easier to tailor

Get a fully managed wordpress from wordpress.com. That will cost you a few dollars per month and you won't have to manage Linux/PHP/SQL or any plugin. There is a bunch of themes included that look pretty good overall.

GitHub Pages are also a good suggestion but they don't come with comments, stats or themes. There's quite a bit of development and design to do to match squarespace/wordpress.

I would have a look at GitHub pages, for a static site it's really all you need (blog, right?)

I haven't actually used it for anything yet but I have a script that turns LaTeX into nice looking HTML pages, saves messing around with the CSS for hours.

Thanks! I've heard of GitHub pages, and yes I just need a static site. I'd have to look if I can allow newsletter subscription with GitHub pages.

You could try MailChimp. I've used it for a few gigs

You may like Quick Site (https://quicksite.stavros.io/), which I made for exactly this purpose.

Thank you! I've bookmarked it, I'll look at it with my SO, he's the more technical one :D

Great, hopefully it won't be too hard to set up.

Nice work, this looks cool!

Thanks!

I liked your article, why don't you check out Ghost? I can help you spin up a VPS and a Ghost blog if you like in an hour, pro bono of course.

https://ghost.org/marketplace/

I would love info on this, I only see their plans. Thank you!

Thank you! I've heard of Ghost but it seemed to be only for blogs, so I didn't think it'd fit. I'll check it again.

Ghost is pretty neat! It's self-hosted solution though, which means that you have to update your OS and the software (Ghost related or not) on it regularly if you don't want it to be vulnerable which isn't ideal if you're not technical and don't want to deal with this.

I guess the cookie banner only shows up after enabling javascript; at least, I never noticed it (reader mode worked fine for rendering the text).

As for the content, I think it's a bit all over the place. You start with references to abuses of vast data stores, and then immediately jump into a technical exposé of personal protective measures, but the introduced concepts have no relation to each other, nor do they appear to protect against the abuses that you started out with.

What was/is your intended audience?

If you value privacy and want to post your voice anonymously online, then don't use or even support tools that you cannot understand. Who cares if things dont look "professional". If they are professional then they probably were created by someone you don't know with intentions you don't know. A perfect blogging site in my mind is one that you own, hosted using a domain with privacy protection and is written in code that you can understand. Basic code knowledge is a must if you want privacy

If you control your own "DNS" this site does not access any of those different domains. I do this, for speed and reliability, not privacy. When I access this site, the only domain my client accesses is "thistooshallgrow.com", which is hosted on squarespace. That hosting company requires a UA in addition to Host and Connection headers otherwise no others are required. Most sites do not require a UA header. I like to control the headers I send, too. Not for privacy; I just like the control and minimalism. This site, like most any site, works just fine for me in a text-only browser. I read the same content as anyone using a "modern" browser, minus the ads, tracking or other nonsense. I see no irony. Except perhaps that you are using a browser that defaults to enabling those automatic accesses to different domains, a browser that is in fact supported by the web advertising industry. You need an extension to modify the program's behaviour to block ads, etc.

uBlock says 9 domains, and the article starts with a "trigger warning". Hard pass.

> trigger warning

I dislike them, but I have met people who genuinely do not want to think about bad things. I can accept the viewpoint, but these are the people that turn a blind eye during genocides. If you really can't handle discussing topics like these I don't mind a warning, at least rather than self-censoring.

However, I'm reminded of the fuss that was made over the term "Joyplot" due to the term Joy Division - ignoring that band is named after the historical term as an artistic statement, it just seems like pandering into the void.

If you saw your family and friends murdered in a genocide and were understandably traumatized, it's reasonable to not force you to relieve that experience unprepared. A trigger warning for genocide would help you emotionally prepare to engage with the topic, or if you're still not ready, to avoid it.

It's not for society at large to dismiss controversial topics (though some people mistakenly use it that way).

> the article starts with a "trigger warning". Hard pass.

You're passing because someone is attempting to help people with mental health problems? Perhaps the problem is with you, not the warning.

It's truly horrific how many people are disdainful of those of us who have PTSD, as though this "weakness" were a moral failing, and therefore also a moral failing to accommodate.

Or perhaps the problem is taking a concept that is poorly understood by most, and running it into the ground until it loses its meaning.

Triggers and warnings are concepts that are absolutely real, but in most usage is instead a fad and a virtue signal. That much is obvious in this case, when the author puts up a warning for authoritarianism. Please.

Ironing?

Are we going to see the same comment on every article about privacy?

If you are writing about the importance of privacy, you might consider what you are doing about it yourself if you want to be taken seriously.

It is 2020, setting up a website that doesn't send off the data of your trusting visitors to third parties should be totally standard. Yet not even people advocating for privacy can get this done.

BTW. one benefit of not collecting and tracking is that you won't have to show that silly cookie banner.

Oh I'm well aware and I wish I didn't have to show the banner. If you know an alternative with which I could build that website, that doesn't force me to use cookies on users, I'm all ears

HTML

This is awfully dismissive. Not everyone with technical skills in one domain or another are capable of building a website from scratch, and that's perfectly fine.

Yeah that's a great theorical piece of advice. But here's the thing. In 2020 if you don't wanna self-host your website and have a resilient and flexible website, you don't have other options than squarespace/wix and other platforms using cookies.

Sure you do. Those may be the easiest ones, but they are not the only options. There is probably a discoverability problem though. It's not great if the best way to learn about the other options is through HN comments...

Your "standard" user without any git or HTML/CSS/JS or command line knowledge hasn't a lot of options imho. Obviously, self-hosting with https://sitejs.org/ or something similar would be ideal but when you don't have a dev/IT background and you're looking for a way to host a blog there isn't a plethora of viable and easy-to-use solutions, especially if you don't want to use a service provided by Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc... I did the research a few months ago and maybe I missed some options though? If you have resources I'm interested!

There are options like GitHub pages (mentioned here) where you write in markdown. But I agree that this is not a priority of the market.

I use Squarespace and you can configure it to disable any tracking and not have to show a consent banner. Not sure about Wix.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com