Google, nobody asked for a new Blogger interface
tenfourfox.blogspot.com
tenfourfox.blogspot.com
If you post on someone else's domain, then it's their content, and they're in control of it, not you. No matter what is claimed otherwise.
Yes, it's harder. Getting visibility is also harder. It's still the only solution if you want to be in control.
It's okay to pay someone to run the blogging platform, etc., as long as you own the domain name & can decide what it points to. You can then switch providers, switch systems you use, or whatever you want to do. But if you don't control the domain name, someone else is in control.
Thankfully, we've tossed all that old stuff out and simplified things with Docker and k8s.
They are a simplification in practice, because I can toss everything into a bunch of Pis that stay on 24/7 rather than worry about the power use (and the power bills) that would come with using a more fully-featured rack server/old PC that has enough RAM to deal with multiple VMs.
It likely will have a better uptime too and require less maintenance over the years
If you can't tab complete you are out of diskspace.
Migrating for additional storage? Why not add additional storage..
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
but you know hike your own hike and all that.
Also, I run my company's website on it (https://assembl.net) and my blog (https://blog.slm.space). Very different sites, but they all run through Netlify. I haven't had a single problem with them.
I think even the most tech-illiterate could use it with their drag+drop site hosting feature + https://forestry.io CMS.
Netlify does a great job of simplyfing to a small number of likely paths. At some point I'd surely break out of its use case and be forced to swim in the much deeper pool of a more general provider, but at least I'll have some grounding to start from.
Wordpress or drupal will generally end up easier as long as nothing goes wrong. From my experience with inexperienced use and users stuff will go wrong at some point and then it can be a bit more of a hassle.
I've worked as an IT volunteer in a small org, and there was no dedicated tech beyond me. Any kind of setup that I built for authoring the website would have to be as usable by non-technical users as possible, so I went with Wordpress. I had no replacement and there was no-one with enough technical know-how to handle authoring and troubleshooting a cheap static site, so I deliberately chose WP to minimise problems. The cost was 2-3x larger than the cheaper alternatives, but ultimately it was keeping the website up that mattered.
Other than that, Docker has simplified things a lot in the self-hosting space. It's not quite as plug-and-play as Lego bricks yet, but it's made experimentation and sustainable self-hosting much easier as long as you're running on a supported platform. It's much easier to version the environment, much easier to keep the application runtime configuration clean, and much easier to move service instances across machines if you're too small to invest time in orchestration like K8s.
Another feature we have is being able to add any URL you like to your posts or even redirects to the "main URL". So for example if you migrate from WP and some post had this URL:
domain.com/posts/123
domain.com/hello-world
Are there other features you'd like to have to feel "in control"?
In the end I just did my own github pages, with good ol fashioned html and css that I manually coded
Can you go to another instance of the platform, upload your zip backup, and restore everything?
I've had that feature on my blog for years[0], and backup/restore feature has come in handy so many times, from setting up a dev environment to outright saving my bacon.
[0] https://github.com/theandrewbailey/toilet
Example backup: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HUkiovCL-lRZa7DTc1JVPhDGxxu...
We would also like to have a WP plugin so you can import the zip into a WP install, although there's so much to do right now that this is not really a priority.
You can own your own domain and use Wordpress self-hosted, then find they updated the UI constantly as you upgrade it keep it up to date for - you know - security.
The only way to get the level of control long term is probably sadly a static site generation kind of a thing.
There was a HN post about "software that is no longer changed but still used" as I am paraphrasing and this is an interesting idea.
A GUI blogging platform that ends it's life and stays as-is forever would be cool, even if it lack funky features, maybe you enter the HTML yourself.
I own my own domain name, and then pay others to take care of my website. I chose a cheap one for now. If I don't like their service, I can move my content somewhere else in the future. I could even have it hosted for free on GitHub, if I'm willing to live with him there constraints on static servers.
But I own the domain name, so no one can just take it down without any recourse. If someone decides to stop providing me a service, I can just take my stuff somewhere else.
Of course, you have to have a backup of the data, and use tools that are available elsewhere. But that really isn't that difficult. Static sites are really easy to manage this way. If you want something beyond the static site, it's not hard to use tools like WordPress which are open source software and widely available elsewhere. (Be cautious about adding plugins to Wordpress, some of them are security disasters, but at least you get to choose what you use.)
I look at software as a solution to a problem. When I have a problem and software solves it, I’m happy. The better the software, the more thoroughly it solves my problem without creating new problems for me (by being annoying or inefficient). The best software seems to hit a sweet spot with the right set of features targeted at solving a particular problem or small class of problems with minimal fuss.
Really good software becomes extremely difficult to improve on. But services can’t deal with just hitting the sweet spot and calling it a day. They need to grow, which means they need to evolve. The constant cash flow seems to burn a hole in the manager’s pocket. Eventually they cross a threshold and exit the sweet spot. Maybe they release a major version with an awful new UI. Like a TV series which has gone on too long, they jump the shark [1].
Perhaps this problem of SaaS may be analogous to network decay [2], though the latter is more gradual.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JumpingTheShark
[2] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay
Maybe OSS is the best bet, as long as the project is popular enough.
Even Free Software is vulnerable to this problem - Gnome is a good example. But fortunately in these cases people can take things into their own hands, and sometimes they do - and eventually we have such nice projects like Mate and Cinnamon.
1) Control - SaaS usually ingest my data and silo the results of my work, so that I don't own the output. This is often unacceptable. It also makes solving problems harder. With a local application, I can always hack around its deficiencies, or easily post-process its output. Can't do that with a webapp owned by someone else.
2) Reliability - While a SaaS will be more incentivized to support a paying subscriber, pay-once software with no auto-updates is more reliable once it solves your problem. That's because it's frozen in time. It doesn't get new features (which usually aren't needed if you have a working solution already), but it also doesn't break. In the context of your whole computing system, pinning to a version of a local piece of software lets you freeze one component of your system - which reduces complexity, and gives you one less thing to worry about.
(Longer term you may need to worry about the rest of your system becoming incompatible with the version-pinned program - but VMs essentially solve that these days.)
3) Relationships - Every SaaS I subscribe to is another relationship I enter with a third party that needs to be consciously tracked. I don't want that, it's anxiety-inducing and cognitively exhausting in the long run. What I want is to pay money in exchange for solving problems. I don't want new relationships on top of that. I tend to use the following example: when I go out to buy some bread in the morning, I exchange money for bread, and that's it. I don't enter into an ongoing relationship with the store, the bakery, the flour supplier or the wheat farmer. I like my software like my bread.
(To be more accurate: I actually do enter into a bunch of relationships when I buy food or trinkets in stores, but they're all governed and fully handled by various business and consumer protection laws - which means that I don't have to care about them. They only matter if something goes wrong with the goods I bought - and then all I need is to keep a proof of purchase and know who to e-mail about it, and I can even CC the government to force-handle things for me. Meanwhile, SaaS creates relationships you do have to track yourself.)
The problem with the free market is that "sweet spot" is usually defined as what the majority wants. That's why I think we need open-source, so small companies can deal with the long tail.
SaaS is eating the B2B (Busines to Business) software market. Companies small or large are much happier not having to manage servers, installation, updates and security.
I don't particularly like SaaS either, but what is the alternative? It is impossible to self-install a web app on a server in a way that is easy and simple to do particularly for non-techical users. Until that happens (which may be never), SaaS will continue to grow and dominate the B2B market.
Imagine if installing a web server app was as easy as installing a desktop app. It would unlock countless opportunities for developers. My impression is that developers think it's a non-issue or have simply never thought about it.
(And no, before someone mentions it, Docker, Sandstorm, Cloudron, command-line installations etc are not easy-to-use options for non-technical users.)
Other zero-value improvement was with Transit iPhone App. They made cosmetic GUI changes which make no sense (cover 50% of the map, swipe interaction target too big, transit line notifications screen gone) and they made zero improvements to transfer scheduling.
Weather Underground iPhone App took a compact and information rich GUI and turned it into a garish nightmare with 'speedometer' temperature graphic.
I've said it here again and again--I don't understand the point of ruining a good iPhone App. Why not treat it like a video game--just make a new one and support the old one with security updates? Heck. I get it. Double the code base, without the _perceived_ possibility of a revenue boost from the _new and improved_. At the very least make improvements very carefully (1Password), and if you have a hit don't redesign. Maybe --- make the old version the subscription and the new software ad-based? Maybe then you'd at least have a real measure of _new and improved_.
> You can then switch providers, switch systems you use, or whatever you want to do.
Switching from say blogspot to medium is much more easier than even switching between two regions of AWS. Switching cloud provider is tough.
You don't need to! Managed Hosting is cheap as it can get!
2 €/month will get you 25 GB of web storage + 25 GB of mail storage, a .de domain (in my case at least), SSL through "Let's Encrypt", PHP, MySQL, 100 mailboxes, full control over the DNS records and whatnot else.
For 3 €/month you get three times of that.
Hosting is really dirt cheap and competent people will take care of all the messy stuff you don't know about.
I've been a happy customer of all-inkl.com for like 10 years or so, mainly switched to netcup because they were cheaper.
But all-inkl is great for business, 24/7 phone support and you talk to REAL people and technicians call you back for no extra cost and things like that.
These guys look interesting, but I've never used them: http://www.nosupportlinuxhosting.com/VPSHosting.html
You can also choose hetzner.de, which I think is somewhat of a "higher level" hoster and it's still pretty cheap: https://www.hetzner.de/webhosting
2 or 5 €/month is just worth it for me. Even if I could get a VPS for free, patching it, making sure everything runs just fine would take more time than it costs me with any (German) hoster who takes care of all the things I don't know about.
1) There shouldn't already be any obvious search engine results associated with it
2) It should be unique and easy enough for the common person to recall (aim at least to be recalled when you see the name on a list of multiple names but ultimately to be recalled from fuzzy memory directly or by means of searching for a key word)
Likewise, if you are paying for hosting and a domain to any corporation, they effectively control your published content. Isn't that so? A hosting company can remove your account; a domain registrar can ban you, too. Isn't that what had been happening to Gab?
The only way you can be in full control of your own content is publishing a hidden service on Tor, an eepsite on I2P, a site on ZeroNet--provided you use it with Tor--, etcetera. Sure, it's availability at the expense of visibility, but that's how it is right now.
I don't think anyone's capacity to publish anything online should rely on trust nor gatekeepers.
Given how the problem of free expression is becoming in the West, there is a business opportunity on medium-term I think.
To quote Karl Popper:
"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
In any case, and even though I'm not advocating here for "unlimited tolerance"--only freedom of speech, which is not one and the same--I'll bite:
>But we should claim the right to suppress them [the "intolerant"] if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument.
Who is "we" and "us", here? Who gets to decide which community or group, which kind of action or speech, do "we" have the right to supress, "even by force"? What criteria are "we" going to use to do so? Will it be chosen through a majority vote? Sociocratic consensus? A deliberative process, perhaps? Where do we put the limit on when to act? There may be groups of people or ideas that "we" could consider dangerous enough to supress them long in advance--you know, take some risks with potentially innocent people. Let's supress political dissidents, as well; "they" could be dangerous for "us".
Look, most of what is deemed "intolerant" or "offensive" isn't a clear-cut example of an existential threat to anyone or an evident danger one has to extirpate before it's too late. Moreover, the criteria is highly unstable, prone to rapidly change over media manipulation, corporations' interests, historical circumstances, culture, etcetera. I'd prefer letting everyone speak and act freely, acting with the full force of law when anyone's integrity is clearly and directly at risk, and never before.
Similar thing with paypal's redesign
I think you underestimate the number of people involved in these kinds of projects.. guarantee there were multiple product managers, a host of UX designers, engineering managers, and devs. It's much harder for a developer to get a thing like this through than a product person.
To be fair, if it was a project to get promoted it wasn't really a vanity project. If it was a vainty project I suspect they wouldn't have quite half way through.
> Really bad redesign for no reason at all, ending in a frankenstein solution of mix of old and new interface.
From the looks of it, it's just applying Google's design that is everywhere else to Blogger. While for many people here this isn't needed. But we're for the most part considered advanced users of majority of things we use. This seems like a change that would make it easier for people who aren't that computer savy and are used to gmail and the other Google products and want to start blogging.
The Reddit one is another perfect example.
Both infiniscroll and automatically expanded images were possible with the old reddit by using a browser extension and the site still felt lightweight and kept the same look.
It’s more likely that someone somewhere was told to drag the UI forward for some internal-corporate-governance reason. Blogger had a bunch of features that were clearly built in different “eras” and looked terribly mismatched, they’ve probably realigned some of them too.
Not to promote snark as a primary means of comment here on HN, but this sarcastic little nugget of a sentence really had me chuckling for quite some time.
Thankfully, the architecture of Sandstorm turns many types of vulnerabilities in the installed applications into non-events. This means that the lack of updates is not so alarming.
https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/using/security-non-event...
https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-h...
At least other companies sometimes let you keep the old theme/skin for awhile.
the most benign explanation for google's constant UI redesign is that it is, as the GP said, some "guy on blogger team who's role is to make up bullshit OKRs and get promotions". as a user of these products, that pointless churn is incredibly frustrating.
The less benign explanation is that it's about increasing my eyeball time for advertisers. as a human being, that's incredibly infuriating; especially when the "redesign" doesn't offer me anything in return (I'm looking at you google music / youtube music)
There are three things Google could have done with Blogger:
1) destaff the team maintaining it and let it die. Result: people complaining Google killed yet another project
2) staff the team and give them some freedom to actually do interesting work instead, instead of hiring someone to baby sit a closet of frozen servers. Result: "Who moved my cheese?"
3) Hire a babysitter, and charge a fee for running a blog or divest it to someone who wants to run it. Result: "Bait and switch! Google offered a free product for years and years, and now they want to charge money for it!"
In any of the scenarios, people will be upset Let's face it, a lot of us through Blogger was dead, like Tumblr, a distant memory. The fact that there's engineers actively working on it should give those depending on it some comfort, vs a baby-sitter project where it could die at any moment once the last team member leaves for greener pastures.
Blogger was launched in 1999, it's 20+ years ago now. Are people really asking a company not to change the UI and make large changes to something 20 years old?
Option 4: Just keep it running as is.
Unless you mean "it dies" in some other, more unusual sense?
Scrollbars: Why is Apple eradicating a linchpin of user interface design? | 20 points | Nov 10, 2011 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3218291
Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard | 1183 points |June 28, 2018 | 912 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17413572
MacBook Pro Keyboard Drives Me Crazy | 655 points | Aug 28, 2019 | 580 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20824984
Apple faces class action lawsuit over failing MacBook butterfly keyboards | 322 points | May 12, 2018 | 271 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17054710
Although I don't use Blogger/Blogspot anymore and I render my blog using a static site generator [1], I too write my posts in raw HTML [2].
In the past, the differences in how various tools interpret and render some of the corner case scenarios like nested lists, code blocks or blockquotes nested within lists, etc. caused issues in porting my Markdown files from one system to another. Granted, there is CommonMark now and I think it is a pretty good specification but it is not a standard like HTML5 is. I prefer standards, so that I know with a reasonable degree of confidence that what I write now would look the same 10 years from now.
[1]: https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite (Disclosure: My wife developed this project)
[2]: https://github.com/susam/susam.in/tree/master/content/blog
But, blogging is not that important enough for me to set up a my very own dedicated web server.
So, these days, I'm simply using GitHub Pages for the blog. I realized all I need is to host static HTML files. I can write locally with my favourite text editor, git commit & git push to publish it. No need to use web browser at all.
Even if GitHub is gone, I have entire data on my multiple storages I owned and rented.
I can do this with other Blog services but I have to automate the web browser operation to copy&paste the writings for each blog services, which is not necessary if I simply use GitHub.
If for some reason you wind up wanting to move off of GitHub, I've found Linodes bottom tier to be great for hosting a small static site. You do have to configure the webserver yourself of course, but it's a step down in complexity from self hosting.
https://twitter.com/PierB/status/989630991051476992
It doesn't show up anymore so they probably obfuscated it.
Since blogger is such a stable platform and hasn't seen much change feature wise for sometime now, why does one have to rewrite it if some framework that is uses has been deprecated.
Just asking.
Ensuring somebody in your org still knows how it works and could fix stuff in a pinch, is another.
Seems to me there's far too much of that sort of thing going on in the software economy (not just UI designers!) -- far too much redeveloping existing wheels (and usually not for the better) and far too little actual advancement of the state of the art, far too little actual innovation.
To adapt another adage, users don't leave products, they leave communities. The idea of starting a new blog on blogspot doesn't really register for me anymore. Or maybe I'm out of touch?
I have switched 3 or 4 times between using blogger and using a static site generator. This is easy to do because tools like Jekyll easily import blogger data dumps. Moving back from a static generated blog to blogger is a few copy and paste operations.
I like having everything in my domain, but using blogger is convenient. Right now, I am using blogger again, but periodically generate a static blog that I also link on my domain as a backup.
Seriously though, I'd love to see some stats on Blogger traffic today and what level of ad revenue it contribute to Google. It's got to be a cash cow for them to keep it running for so long.
... and new Google Sites interface too.[0]
Recently I've also started a new personal project which mainly consists in posting a new "article" every few days with 5 to 10 photos attached to it, I've found blogspot a lot more handy to use than doing all that on my linode instance (I hate being in the "image managing" business) or on any other blogging platform. I could have chosen wordpress, but I'm not sure how much "free" hard-disk space they provide by default.
We're past the 90's when "the code stopped executing" was the only valid reason for an update :-)