Are personal blogs dead? Medium? Substack? Something else entirely?
I’ve been on WordPress, Blogger, Medium, a custom Vue site, a custom Go server, a Raspberry Pi, the works. Each was either a platform that could rot, or a hobby that could distract me from writing. Raw HTML on GitHub Pages has solved both these problems for me.
* Similar problem statement by Stavros in this website: https://notes.stavros.io/ He’s using Joplin [1] to write and then exports everything in an mdbook [2].
Do you plan to offer other domain names? Mataroa may or may not be easy to communicate orally, depending on the user’s location.
Do you have any plans for multiple users (authors) on a single blog? I realize this may go against simplicity, but there is a segment for such blogs where posts are authored by different people.
Multiple authors might be too much for mataroa. But it could be inspiration for another project. Like a mataroa-style Notion alternative.
Set up a mailchimp mailing list account and have the RSS feed publish a newsletter.
You didn't mention wanting to monetize your content, but if you do, then that's when I'd look at substack. In my experience, it's far easier to monetize your content by showing proof of authority for a better job or consulting than by selling access to knowledge. But your niche may be more monetizable than my experience.
Personal “blogs” can never be “dead” unless the internet stops working.
Every canned solution, such as Medium, is inferior to this setup in some way: less control and a far worse experience for your readers, at least. And the suggestions here to use GitHub as a platform for publishing your articles? Good lord.
There are more scalable ways to host static files without needing to maintain a VPS. You could also move to S3 + cloudfront if you had issues with netlify. I’ve had 0 issues with netlify for years though.
For an intranet, something like Atlassian Confluence does the trick (with LucidCharts for complex graphics).
Public web-based consumption, a markdown doc on github usually does the trick, unless you need something fancy, in that case, you kind of need to fall back to HTML.
I've played a bit with Jupyter notebooks, but I haven't done anything serious with it. I need to look at https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite for complex embeddings.
Edit - I did buy the app, I have not tried publishing thru it.
Something that you like to use regularly.
Feel free to check the links in my profile if you want to see what it looks like.
1. Substack - as it is a nice combination between a blog and a newsletter. So anyone that wants to subscribe can do it but also you can just share the article like a normal blog. It supports bringing your own domain which I would recommend from the beginning and also they can export your data but in HTML files. It has basic support for syntax highlighting.
2. Hashnode - it has more support for syntax highlighting, it saves your blog post if you want as markdown directly in Github and it also supports bringing your own domain. The only thing that I don't understand about Hashnode is their business model :)
I'm thinking about either
- containerising an older Emacs version configured just for this,
- hosting something like WordPress on my own, or
- looking for a hosted alternative.
I heard Drutopia was run as a co-operative which seems like a great idea for a writing platform. However, it doesn't seem that way from their website.
If you know of a co-op in this space, let me know!
Build an email newsletter.
People can clone/fork it, open PR's, see revision history, and its very portable. Probably a terrible choice for natural search discovery though, I assume so maybe not ideal if you want people to be able to just stumble across it while searching.
Self-publishing is not always the best option. Maybe you can start writing for a well established magazine/blog. This may help you to build your 'audience'.
If you want to go on your own, I think the best is first to define what are your goals, from that you can choose if your best option is a blog, a newsletter or a book.
Every platform has its advantages and big disadvantages but choosing one is a matter of your audience's preferred channel to stay in contact with your work.
I keep my repos on GitHub. For deployment I use AWS Amplify, which is dirt cheap and incredibly convenient. No maintenance needed at all. It just works (once you have learned Hugo).
Addendum: If you don’t like GitHub, you can self-host your Git repos instead. If you don’t like AWS, you can instead use a small VPS at whatever provider you prefer.
GitHub has one CI but is only output is to GitHub Pages (username.GitHub.io) and only with Pelican SSG.
For blog writing Medium is decent. Wordpress isn’t bad either.
So, writing will become screenwriting, or make presentations.
Podcasts, are for people, who listen them while commute, or while waiting in queue, or while do gym exercises, or something like these.
For just text format, I think, just upload to github is good enough for many cases.
But if you want to see real value of your texts, mind about make small books for read on Amazon Kindle, or other reading platform (now Apple have such service, and Google, and many smaller companies). May be good fit Patreon. Mean, if people pay for your work, they really value your work.