Show HN: How I put together a lightweight blog in a few hours

#1

Post by bbrennan » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 10:33 PM UTC

Show HN: How I put together a lightweight blog in a few hours
bbrennan.info

Re: Show HN: How I put together a lightweight blog in a few hours

#2

Post by fiatjaf » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 11:40 PM UTC

It's cool that you made an experiment here, but I wanted to say that whenever I see people hosting blogs with expensive software (NodeJS with Express, or a PHP CMS, or other complete stack) I think it will be complicated to host those things forever, so probably the content will vanish some time in the near future. This could apply to experimental setups also, but perhaps experimental people are totally different from people that use the same tools for all kinds of jobs and will perhaps be able to migrate their data from the experimental tools if they prove to not be as good as first imagined.

Re: Show HN: How I put together a lightweight blog in a few hours

#3

Post by fiatjaf » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 11:43 PM UTC

fiatjaf wrote: post #2

It's cool that you made an experiment here, but I wanted to say that whenever I see people hosting blogs with expensive software (NodeJS with Express, or a PHP CMS, or other complete stack) I think it will be complicated to host those things forever, so probably the content will vanish some time in the near future. This could apply to experimental setups also, but perhaps experimental people are totally different fro…

Totally forgot about my own experiment: I created this GitHub-based (somewhat similar to GitBack) blogging platform: https://github.com/fiatjaf/coisas and started my blog and my girlfriend's on it.

The development of the tool proved to be complicated and I wouldn't be able to maintain it, but I have managed to migrate my blog to Jekyll and my girlfriend's to https://websitesfortrello.com/, keeping content and URLs.

Thanks to me, the internet is a better place.

You can stop clapping now.

Re: Show HN: How I put together a lightweight blog in a few hours

#4

Post by bbrennan » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 2:34 AM UTC

fiatjaf wrote: post #2

It's cool that you made an experiment here, but I wanted to say that whenever I see people hosting blogs with expensive software (NodeJS with Express, or a PHP CMS, or other complete stack) I think it will be complicated to host those things forever, so probably the content will vanish some time in the near future. This could apply to experimental setups also, but perhaps experimental people are totally different fro…

Curious what you mean by "expensive"...are you talking about monetary or maintenance cost?

I keep a cheap bottom-tier ec2 instance alive to run my website, stand up demos, etc. Keeping a node instance alive is pretty easy, and one of the reasons I used GitBack was so I wouldn't have to stand up a MongoDB instance...the content just lives with the code on GitHub.

Given that all my content lives in Markdown files, I'm not too afraid of migrating to GitHub pages, Medium.com, etc

Re: Show HN: How I put together a lightweight blog in a few hours

#5

Post by bramgg » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 8:13 AM UTC

Haha classic http://i.imgur.com/kzza281.gifv

Might wanna spend more than a few hours.

Re: Show HN: How I put together a lightweight blog in a few hours

#6

Post by fiatjaf » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 11:36 AM UTC

bbrennan wrote: post #4

fiatjaf wrote: post #2

It's cool that you made an experiment here, but I wanted to say that whenever I see people hosting blogs with expensive software (NodeJS with Express, or a PHP CMS, or other complete stack) I think it will be complicated to host those things forever, so probably the content will vanish some time in the near future. This could apply to experimental setups also, but perhaps experimental people are totally different fro…

Curious what you mean by "expensive"...are you talking about monetary or maintenance cost? I keep a cheap bottom-tier ec2 instance alive to run my website, stand up demos, etc. Keeping a node instance alive is pretty easy, and one of the reasons I used GitBack was so I wouldn't have to stand up a MongoDB instance...the content just lives with the code on GitHub. Given that all my content lives in Markdown files, I'm…

Computing cost, or maintenance, whatever. It takes a machine running a memory-intensive NodeJS process, more if it uses a memory-intensive database.

It is much cheaper to host a static site, that's why GitHub offers it for free.

Re: Show HN: How I put together a lightweight blog in a few hours

#7

Post by fiatjaf » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 11:46 AM UTC

bramgg wrote: post #5

Haha classic http://i.imgur.com/kzza281.gifv Might wanna spend more than a few hours.

Please fix 99haskell, I'm on problem 10 and want to make progress.

Re: Show HN: How I put together a lightweight blog in a few hours

#8

Post by wheresvic1 » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 12:35 PM UTC

Pretty cool idea to use git-back! However I can recommend React for your MV* framework and I guess you can use disqus for your comments and save yourself from comment spam on your github repo!

Re: Show HN: How I put together a lightweight blog in a few hours

#9

Post by bbrennan » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 2:15 PM UTC

bramgg wrote: post #5

Haha classic http://i.imgur.com/kzza281.gifv Might wanna spend more than a few hours.

Hahaha thanks guys, great way to wake up in the morning.

I'd thought my markdown parser was stripping tags...turns out I was wrong. Probably should have tested.

Fortunately, it took about 30 seconds to find and delete the malicious comments using GitHub...point for GitBack. A quick fix is in place with a better one on the way.

Next post: How I got hacked by hacker news

Update: markdown is now sanitized. Malicious comments restored for posterity

Re: Show HN: How I put together a lightweight blog in a few hours

#10

Post by timdavila » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 8:23 PM UTC

I'd add an RSS feed at a minimum, and probably email/twitter notifications as well. I'm not going to check your blog daily, but I would add you to my feed reader.