Comment by medimikka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by medimikka | Hacker News Reader

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I am not technically qualified. I am a medic. I do medic things. In a pinch can open you up and fix an aortic aneurysm, and I can always make sure you're still alive when the person comes who can do those well. I am not a coder, not a sysadmin, and all I know about "web3" is that it seems to be the CrossFit for nerds.

I run my blog on a $25 (not month, overall cost) Raspberry Pi 2[1]. I use Markdown. I (ab-)use S3 for image storage. I use 11ty[2].

It doesn't take a coder to know how to do this. And it doesn't take a lot of time, either. SSL certificates are free, thanks to Let's Encrypt, nginx is an "apt get" away. That's all it takes if you want to blog(!).

If you want e-Commerce or shill your newsletter or whatever else uses blogging backends like WordPress, then $177/year is a steal. If you just want to blog, the weekend with Eleventy and a free copy of Obsidian[3] are cheaper, less hassle, and you keep your data in a format that's not Wordpress' pseudo-XML abomination.

[1] https://mikka.md/posts/supersmall/

[2] https://www.11ty.dev

[3] https://obsidian.md/

You're profoundly overestimating how 'simple' this is, or even understandable, or how much even most bloggers are interested and/or have bandwidth to understand, what these things are. Whether you're saying they'll need to understand these things is a different matter; so far that hasn't been the case, and is unlikely to be going ahead.

Understanding of technology necessary to self-host a blog (whether it’s a hobby or you’re writing full-time) is not that different from, say, knowing enough about how various components of a motorcycle work to maintain and repair your own ride (whether it’s a hobby or you do pizza delivery full-time). To deem it of no possible interest to and too difficult to understand for anyone not in the chosen minority of experienced software engineers is at best misguided, at worst elitist (when it comes from one).

Sure, some can’t be bothered. Yes, some would rather pay a professional who often (notably, not always) would do a better job. True, some things you fully grasp only after years of experience. Still, it’s not that difficult. You don’t need to know how to write an OS or build an ICE from scratch to do an adequate job. People routinely learn to do quite complicated things out of passion and/or necessity even when it’s far disconnected from their primary profession; spend some time with the right sources of information and you’ll be alright.

I can agree with you and still be baffled by that response. Knowing the tech underlying a blog and saying using an SSG on a Raspberry Pi is simple are different things.

In its core, that Pi is just a small Linux server. You're not touching the parts of it, that are different from, say, a VPS. You install a web server, you edit a file, you are done. Maybe you init a git repo and do some post-update magic, but that's not even necessary if you do it right.

If you're capable of buying a VPS you're capable of sticking a USB cable and an Ethernet cable into something.

I’d say Pi’s easier than a VPS in a number of ways.

With VPS, you typically must know how to SSH and be able to find your way around the system entirely without a GUI (which could be jarring at first). Personally, when starting out, I was always anxious about messing something up so that it makes the server impossible to boot remotely.

Pi, meanwhile, is just another computer you physically have and can do all the normal things you do with a computer you physically have with. It has some hardware peculiarities, but then it’s also simpler to set up than building your own desktop (which, by the way, is another thing non-engineers routinely do).

> Understanding of technology necessary to self-host a blog

Right, but you are comparing your setup and its costs to wordpress.com, which is not self-hosted and does not require that understanding.

Kudos to you!

However, even after reading your comment, I am not convinced an average guy will understand any of those terms. I've seen this. I've seen many many people struggling to set up a blog. Heck, even I struggled about this back in the day.

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