Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

Don't use any 'blogging platform'. Use a static blogging system. The best one currently is probably Octopress[1] which is based on Jekyll[2]. But you could roll your own, and it would still be much better than blogger, wordpress, walmart.com, google+, facebook, tubmlr, etc.

Such systems just render your conveniently created post content into a static HTML website than can be published on various free systems (github pages etc) or $2/month VPS. Or an Amazon S3 bucket.

Why?

1. It is not anyore significantly harder or more inconvenient than using a 'platform' like wordpress.com

2. A static site is 10000000% more resistant to idiotic exploits (which unless you are some kind of PROFESSIONAL blogger, keeping up with is more trouble than its worth on any dynamic 'blogging platform' type of system)

3. A static blog system can serve your blogs with any web server in 2012, and will be able to in 2112, whereas none of the free or even for-money 'blogging platforms' is likely to exist in 2112. Which in terms of your life (unless we are lucky and get the gerontological life-extending technology soon) is essentially 'forever.

4. Why on earth would you cede control of your personal output to walmart.com or google+ or similar?

[1]: http://octopress.org/

[2]: http://jekyllrb.com/

EDIT: meant to mention somewhere in there that comments, one of the raisons d'être for these dynamic blogging systems, can now be superbly handled by off-site add ons like disqus.

re: comments, I strongly disagree that they are handled "superbly". For many important blogs, the comments are central to the whole endeavour. Why on earth would you cede control of your comments to disqus? Why do you keep your content and your comments separate? Will disqus be around in 2112? This is what I mean when I say that a "static blog system" is not a blog system at all. It is a partially thought-out solution which doesn't have the required functionality.

I guess that's a good point if comments are truly important to you. Which they perhaps are, for a tiny minority of blogs.

(I personally don't find comments important at all, and even take advantage of the various browser extensions[1] to hide them on various sites that do have them.)

[1]: e.g. http://stevenf.com/pages/shutup.css.html

I claim that comments are integral to the activity of blogging. In fact, most bloggers are chomping at the bit to get more comments, often they will do anything to get more comments, and not necessarily because there's a financial incentive.

If you look at the best blogs, I mean top blogs in their niche such as

http://www.thesartorialist.com/

http://girishshambu.blogspot.com/

http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/

you will see that they are comment heavy. In fact there are very interesting discussions in the comments.

You may think comments are "unimportant" for most blogs, but that is not up to you, it is up to the blogger, and I guarantee that blogger would rather have some comments. And it might help to have a half-decent comment system.

I hear you, and I more or less understand the arguments for your position, but I don't agree.

I personally am not much of a blogger, so my own proclivities as a blog writer ('fuck no I don't allow comments on any blog for which I am responsible for picking up the dogshit and spam') aren't too relevant. But many of the blogs I find most valuable do not feature comments, or if they do, they are 99.9% what you'd expect: utterly worthless, time-wasting digital turds.

I think the whole comment thing is misguided. If you really had something worthwhile to say, why on earth would you entrust that to whatever crap-ass 'blogging platform' that blogger in question happened to be using at the moment?

Say it somewhere that you control, and link it. That's how the web works.

Of course, I have seen worthwhile comments (especially on blogs where the author takes the time/effort to aggressively police them). But that's far and away the exception, and not the rule.

Rather than a comments system, I'd prefer something which polls around for copies of the link to see if it turns up on HN or whatever, then includes those. Free moderation, better validation.

Comments can be important if you're trying to build a community or what have you and want people to stay on site longer. But most people use aggregators of one stripe or another, whether RSS or a link site or Facebook.

The fact that you don't allow comments because of "dogshit" and "spam" means that your comments system is broken. That's like saying "I don't do email because of dogshit and spam". Spam is manageable in email, so the fact that it's out of control in comments means that noone has thought through a proper comments system.

When you say "Say it somewhere that you control, and link it. That's how the web works." I understand where you're coming from, but this is simply not true. Wanting something to be true doesn't make it so. The web is not made of a collection of interlinked static HTML files. But the root of your complaint, that by commenting on someone's blog you give away your worthwhile thoughts, is also a failure of the bad comment system.

Comments should work a lot more like email does. Imagine if each blog entry had an email address (or sub-address of the blog's email address) and sending a "comment" was really sending an email to that address. The comment box below the blog entry is really a small email composing window which sends the comment to the blog. And it can also send it to your own email address (as a cc for the purposes of the thought experiment). Then it would be in your email archive and not lost, but you would still be contributing to the discussion happening at the blog. A further benefit of this is that the spam filter for the email address would function for comments on a blog. Why reinvent the wheel? /end example.

I have come to this issue from the experience of working with bloggers with quite long-running substantial blogs on Wordpress or Blogger. They have a huge laundry list of complaints and annoyances with the software but I cannot in good faith recommend a jekyll-octopress solution or a wikified solution, or a "static--html" solution etc. These "solutions" are poorly thought out and would represent a severe reduction in functionality for the sake of "that's how it should be done". It is the result of developers who look at a hard problem (how to best implement all these required features) and decide to get rid of the problem by disparaging the features or the requesters themselves.

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