WriteFreely: An open source platform for building a writing space on the web
writefreely.org
writefreely.org
As to why people would prefer Go over PHP...I think there's plenty of reasons to be found on HN's search :)
I know what you’re getting at and the world you want to live in. Listen, why do people care if some story they read was written by a bot, for example? The people reading Reddit’s top creative writing venues (AITA comes to mind) clearly don’t know and don’t care. But many people do care. It’s arbitrary. It’s just aesthetic. Nobody needs this stuff, nobody needs Fediverse or ActivityPub.
Would also note it works pretty well for microblogging -- here's an example (with some custom styling)[0]. Small posts with a single paragraph also get federated out as `Note`s instead of `Article`s, which makes them show up on Mastodon pretty nicely.
That seemed to diminish in emphasis a few years ago, stopped accepting accounts that didn't give you a credit card end of 2021, and some year recently (last year? I forget…) seemed as though the warrant canary missed a couple updates. (It's up to date now, with an assertion of no warrants ever.)
Are the anonymous speech principles of write.as still as important as when it was launched? Or did the business model for that just not work?
There aren't a lot of options in this class (which I love seeing make it):
And… that's about it? While these other two talk about "no trackers", and mataroa emphasizes ethical (and non-SEO!) speech, only write.as seems to have had had the emphasis around importance of anonymity.
TIA for any story you can comment on.
But the price kept going up, updates were slow, and I think the project lacks some focus. I switched to OMG.LOL. I want a blog that is pretty constrained and forces me to make decisions. And keeps things pretty cheap.
Edit pages mostly in regular markdown (+ a few simple Blot-specific tags), drop some images into a Dropbox folder, done. Site built. :)
But I gave up on it. Sorry. It's not a viable project.
It's backed by a one-man team, and so the support is unresponsive. The API is bad, and they impose ridiculously low rate limits. Like, less than 0.1 request per second. I understand the need to protect against bots, but hey, Cloudflare exists, and I'm paying for a subscription.
I then tried to self-host it. There is no official Docker support, but I cobbled it up. It works ok-ish, but the open source version is NOT the same as the one running on Write.as! For example, there is no support for drag&drop image uploads.
I then looked at the source code, and it's just a mess. There is no layering, the view makes direct requests to the database, and there is very little customization potential. For example, you can't even insert a script reference at the bottom of the page, without patching the source code.
Works fine for static sites. Works fine for anything PHP. PHP versions are kept up to date.
But the cost of an additional site is effectively cost-free, so I'm hosting several small sites for small organizations and individuals.
It has always been very peculiar. You either had very stripped off permissions of what you could do: FTP comes to mind first, and then you still need to understand how Unix permissions work, and then you wish you had SSH; or you get SSH with some stripped off permissions, and then you do need to have the skills to use the Unix system inside; or you find that the underlying PHP/webserver has 6-month-old zero days and someone keeps owning all tenants all the time, but the sysadmins are prima donnas on power trip who know better.
And you are still in a firmly DIY area most of the time, with enough footgun to do you harm.
Oh, and if you want a custom domain, welcome to the special hell.
Maybe I had bad experiences 15 years ago, but in my opinion, they should be called "mismanaged services".
Not sure what you mean by stripped off permissions. Yes, I'm not root, but most VPS providers don't give me root access either (at least not for cheap).
SFTP has always worked, and continues to do so.
Of course you need to understand UNIX permissions. You also need to understand what a directory is, what a file is, etc. It's not asking too much.
I've tried 3 different providers, and they all had SSH access. I've not heard of one that doesn't.
The only problems I had with PHP servers is that the admins are doing their job and removing old vulnerable versions. Which is a pain for me but it's why I pay them. The whole point of shared hosting is they're taking care of the zero day exploits for me.
Custom domains? Not sure what you mean. Every provider I looked at it made it painless to use.
Having a simple LAMP stack is dead simple to use (yes, as long as you know basic UNIX). VPS: I suddenly need to set up the web server, and manage DOS attacks, etc? And keep track of all the security vulnerabilities and keep upgrading? I don't want to deal with that pain. With shared hosting, I need to "fix" things less than once a year. My web apps happily work without my needing to log in.
With a VPS, I have to pay more only so that I have to do more work? No thanks.
The only non technical people using shared hosting now are people who paid to have a site built for their small business twenty years ago and don't need to update anything, so they just keep paying the bills
The whole industry has been on life support for a long time. just look at all the brands Endurance has bought up. That hasn't happened because all of those hosts were making a ton of money
How do the remaining people create a blog?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demograph...
I used to run Ghost for this, but at some point the pervasive push to use Ghost's paid features for an internally hosted blog irked me enough to rip it out.
I tried looking at the Snap.as repo ( https://github.com/snapas ) and Snap Freely organization ( https://github.com/snapfreely ) on GitHub, respectively; but both seem empty.
- is AGPL-licensed
- supports themes
- requires JS (to post)
- supports ActivityPub
Bearblog:
- is MIT-licensed
- doesn't support themes
- doesn't require JS
- uses RSS/Atom for syndication
I see now that the Bearblog landing page lists "free themes". I'm having trouble, though, making sense of the "no stylesheets" selling point(?) at the top of the page, especially given what you are now saying.
Apparently not.