Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
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Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
#2I hope with the IPFS and nix stuff I've worked on, we could someday have a world where you can distribute and archive the source of a static site, and the thing can be built and rendered on demand without tons of security and reproducibility issues.
Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
#3I think this is an important “feature” but find that people either get or don’t. When I describe how cool it is that the version and history of a post is included in git and therefore reliable, I get sort of pleasant nods. But then people will fixate on having bullet lists in tables or something and give up on markdown.
Not that blog posts are life changing or anything, but having a format that’s durable and reliable seems important.
I lost my blog from college back in 95 when I got my first job and didn’t think to archive my shell account. I wish I had, even as a memento.
One thing I think that factors into it is that age is kind of nice for slowly removing stuff that’s not used from existence. Posts from 20 years ago might not be good to keep around if no one is reading them. No the gradual degradation that comes naturally from new phones, computers, hosts, jobs might be a feature for some people who don’t necessarily want everything around forever.
Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
#4This is pretty much how I do it. I built my SSG using Hakyll and host the resulting binary on my own Debian repo, that way I can write a post in any flavour of text that Pandoc supports (though I go with Markdown for simplicity) and within about 20 seconds my CI pipeline has built and pushed a new version of my site (using scp). Easily done by myself too but at least I know with the CI approach that I'm writing to git first and then publishing.
I'm part way through the implementation of showing the commit history for each post and linking it to the commit hosted on sourcehut. It provides another view on the content the same as hosting a gopher or gemini version would: clone it and read the things in the posts folder however you want.
Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
#5The longest living websites are forgotten accidents. It's always some ancient webserver using maybe a single RAID-1 array of two tiny spinning disks, running forgotten software that is never ever updated. The uptime on those boxes are not uncommonly measured in decades. Somebody's credit card just keeps gets charged $40 a year ($10 for the domain and $30 for the website hosting), and the machine never gets touched.
Typically it sits in the back of a dusty rack for a website hosting vendor (or, rarely, a colo provider) and the gear has long since paid for itself, but also is unmaintainable due to not even having the remotest semblance of a service warranty or service parts (other than what somebody might have ordered as spares years before). If it ever loses power, everything starts back up on boot time and it keeps on chugging, defying the usual laws of computer entropy.
Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
#6I am using Gatsby for my site
https://www.bobbydreamer.com and saving the markdowns at git here https://github.com/bobbydreamer/bdv32
I haven't setup CI pipeline yet.
It true whats said in the post, I used to save links thinking it won't disappear. But most the links, I had saved, it's no more.
Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
#7I wish people would stop using github as a swiss knife CDN (free hosting, hooks, history through git repo, etc) and build higher altitude solution that could leverage git/MD/whatever but with free/opensource/selfhosted/alternative tools (like gitea instead of github and minio instead of S3 for instance).
Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
#8I used to have my blog source on GitHub, but then it turned out I didn't want my half-finished works-in-progress public. To use a private repository would rather defeat the point; using a private repo and a public fork is inviting confusion. Now I just use a private repo on my own server, cloned to my dev machine. Does anyone have a usable solution for that problem?
Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
#9I wish people would stop using github as a swiss knife CDN (free hosting, hooks, history through git repo, etc) and build higher altitude solution that could leverage git/MD/whatever but with free/opensource/selfhosted/alternative tools (like gitea instead of github and minio instead of S3 for instance).
why?
Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
#10I used to have my blog source on GitHub, but then it turned out I didn't want my half-finished works-in-progress public. To use a private repository would rather defeat the point; using a private repo and a public fork is inviting confusion. Now I just use a private repo on my own server, cloned to my dev machine. Does anyone have a usable solution for that problem?
Stop caring about unfinished, public wip. In the end, nobody but you is really bothered by its imperfections.