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Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

brandur.org

21–30 of 182 posts

Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

#21
post #12

I started my blog about python/django ( https://simpleisbetterthancomplex.com ) using Jekyll and hosting on Github Pages and it was pretty good to get started because back then I wasn't sure if I would keep it up or not. After a year or so I migrated to a 5 USD droplet on Digital Ocean (back then GH Pages didn't offer https for custom domains) and integrated with Github webhooks to automate the deployment when pushin…

Side note - big fan of your blog. You're killing it at SEO.

Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

#22
post #12

I started my blog about python/django ( https://simpleisbetterthancomplex.com ) using Jekyll and hosting on Github Pages and it was pretty good to get started because back then I wasn't sure if I would keep it up or not. After a year or so I migrated to a 5 USD droplet on Digital Ocean (back then GH Pages didn't offer https for custom domains) and integrated with Github webhooks to automate the deployment when pushin…

Is it slow to regenerate a single post even with Jekyll’s ‘—incremental’ mode?

Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

#23
post #12

I started my blog about python/django ( https://simpleisbetterthancomplex.com ) using Jekyll and hosting on Github Pages and it was pretty good to get started because back then I wasn't sure if I would keep it up or not. After a year or so I migrated to a 5 USD droplet on Digital Ocean (back then GH Pages didn't offer https for custom domains) and integrated with Github webhooks to automate the deployment when pushin…

Something similar happened to me when I was using static site generators. In fact one that I was really enjoying even switched programming languages between 1.x and 2.0.

Since that time I look for the people and community behind the project, and try to find signs of stability and long-term care. After that I look at open formats rather than open and flexible architecture-chains. For example, I'd rather use my LibreOffice HTML template and simple PHP controller on a more monolithic (but open) platform than connect a bunch of technologies together to create a build process with a bunch of moving, quickly developing, interdependent parts.

Not sure it's the best answer, but it has worked better to use more monolithic software, even blogging software that's been in steady, if slow development since the early 2000s...

Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

#24
In terms of extracting the actual blog content from pages, there is a go library that implements the readability algorithm:

https://github.com/mauidude/go-readability

This is the kind of thing pocket/instapaper do to extract the main content from a page in a format that's easier to read (and also probably to programmatically modify)

Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

#25
For all the (deserved) complaints people have about wordpress, it's been around since before git or markdown was even a thing. For all its faults, its been pretty resilient to time.

The real reason most websites disappear is a much more human one.

Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

#26
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why?

"free/opensource" -> !M$

Not really, "free/opensource/selfhosted/alternative" [0] as in "here this minio bucket that behaves like S3 but you can play with it without an amazon bill of death that may or may not be coming".

[0] Also, thanksnotreally for cherry-picking and putting words in my mouth with your use of `!M$`, screw you too.

Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

#27
IMO the biggest barrier to blogging (and the cause of most blogs dying) is inconvenience, and minimizing that if the biggest advantage of Markdown + Git. If there's any inconvenience at all, it naturally drags on the process of writing, and writing takes enough time and focus that if there's any friction it's too easy to push things off to the next day.

My co-author and I use Markdown and Git as the author suggests, and one of the best things is that between simple CI/CD pipelines and effortless scaling of a static site, we don't need to do any technical work so there's no friction on my lifestyle. We've been writing for almost a year now, 4+ posts a month, and 99% of that "work" has just been writing.

Writing with a partner helps a ton as well.

Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

#28

I 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).

> build higher altitude solution that could leverage git/MD/whatever but with free/opensource/selfhosted/alternative tools Not that I disagree with this, but that goes almost directly against "Mak[ing] that source public via GitHub or another favorite long-lived, erosion-resistant host. Git’s portable, so copy or move repositories as you go." Any self-hosted service or solution is going to not be erosion-resistant by…

Yep, it's just that so far a lot of those tools and solutions that hit HN are github centric and I don't see why it can't be a bit more generic.

Of course the end-result is easy to move out but the build pipeline is more dependent on GH.

Not that it matters but it could be cool too to pipe SSG's output through a managed VPS just to show you don't need Github to host your static files.

Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

#29
post #8

I 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?

I only keep the output on github. So the generator folder with my drafts, posts etc is on my local machine, and whatever output it generates is in its own folder that is a git repo.
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