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Comment by buscoquadnary | Hacker News Reader

Doom Emacs + org-mode. Export as HTML upload to webpage, lasts forever, doesn't require a bunch of upkeep, and don't get distracted by all the other things.

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This is what I was going to suggest, except Vim. Use your favorite editor, learn basic HTML and CSS, get a domain, rent a VPS, set up Apache, rsync your HTML files to your server. You might already know how to do some or all of this, and none of it is difficult.

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.

This seems more difficult than pushing the static files to netlify via GitHub.

I know that it seems so. When I started doing this I think the dominant browser was called “Mosaic”. In the intervening couple of decades I’ve seen many people, who relied on “simpler” solutions, suffer data loss, exploits, sites disappearing when some company disappeared, sites being disappeared because a company decided they violated a TOS or just didn’t like their content, discovering that their articles were being used to track and advertise to their readers, and so on.

Most of what you said also applies to VPS providers.

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.

I realize that, and there may be no rational reason for you to switch to a setup like mine. But, aside from avoiding such things as Wordpress exploits, my approach turned out to have other advantages. Over the years I added to my knowledge and taught myself how to provide things other than static files. Today my readers can use gnuplot in a Jupyter notebook, and interactive Pluto¹ notebooks backed by Julia running on a VPS. No canned solution exists for this, and in fact I had to work with the Pluto developers to iron out some kinks. This is only possible because I have total control over the servers. If you know will only ever want to serve static files, there are simpler options (with potential pitfalls). But those options are also limiting, in case one day you want to do something unusual.

[1] https://github.com/JuliaPluto/PlutoUI.jl

How is that easier than writing markdown or any other language and export to static html using a generator?

More convenient. In doom emacs it’s a single keybinding for exporting. Bugger-all setup required. Org also has good support for re-ordering and structuring of headlines.

In fact that’s what I do, using a generator that I wrote that relies on Pandoc. But you still need to understand basic HTML and CSS.

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