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Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

brandur.org

121–130 of 182 posts

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

#123
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just can't seem to find a decent static site generator. Maybe you and I have very different ideas of what is required to write a blog, but it sounds like you should be able to use Hugo + the theme of your choice and just go with it. It's /very/ easy, and posts are all written in Markdown.

Thanks for the input. For me a bare-bones blog needs to support simple-to-use images, that is auto-resizing images with link to full etc without a ton of hoopla, syntax highlighter for code and some tex-ish thing for math. From what I can see Hugo does seem to have a lot of that these days, so I'll try that. One immediate issue is the highlighter not supporting my language at work (Delphi/Pascal) but I assume it bein…

The images are going to be the hard part. Nothing out there suited my needs/wants in that regard, so I've been working on my own Jekyll plugin that is still nowhere near production ready https://github.com/okeeblow/DistorteD

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

#124
I currently think that the best option for a personal website / blog is a statically generated site. It’s just the most robust way to build things for the long haul. Minimal maintenance, and easy to move all your files to a new hosting provider. Having static html files is very robust.

I think for business websites it starts to make sense to use something like Wordpress. The fact that it’s open source is amazing, so you can always self host. But it’s more effort. But you get lots of neat plugins and templates. But it’s more complicated.

Both are great solutions, but my current thinking is ssg for personal, for business maybe Wordpress.

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

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wordpress can be configured to receive automatic updates as soon as they're available. Plugins are a different story...

WordPress core yes, and it's pretty safe, but if you use many plugins (which most people do) that gets a lot riskier. Premium plugs are pretty safe but still I've had stuff break.

The kind of person whose needs would be satisfied by a static site generator doesn't seem likely to need 20 plugins, so it doesn't sound like an apples-to-apples comparison.

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

#128

There is a problem in the CMS industry. Everyone wants to build a headless CMS to power Jamstack sites—only the content itself lives in databases and the CMS is usually a proprietary SaaS. Doesn't leverage Git for content in any way. This is deeply problematic. We should have dozens, if not hundreds of contenders for "the next WordPress" that leverage Git as a foundational aspect of content management. Instead we hav…

I'm a big fan of mkdocs. If I were going to build a blog again I'd power it off of mkdocs.

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

#129
This grabbed more my attention: Internet Archive for web pages is not discoverable, hard to crawl and download content from.

I noticed that too. I would be happy to find content directly on the archive (which is a complex search problem) and be able to download a snapshot of a website (and all its assets) from a certain point of time. I would even pay for both services.

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

#130
post #91
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any particular guide or set of docs you recommend for that? I've heard a lot of good things about Netlify as far as hosting, and I've been wanting to set up a blog; seems like as good a time as ever to start learning.

Netlify is great! Just go to their site, sign in, drag your files to their upload window and boom! You have a site. When you feel you want more, you can link a git repo and point a domain name at it. When you update the repo, it automagically updates the site. It's my goto for all new projects. There is great documentation at every step.

Netlify seems to lack basic testing of their client. For example, I found that if you have a repo not hosted on GitHub, trying to publish it will cause the client to dump a stack trace and crash. That, the general whizbang design of the UI, and the state of the docs left me with a poor impression about the quality of Netlify's offerings. "Good" for a free service, maybe, but all their attempts at fancy integrations makes the whole thing less attractive, since it actually creates hassle (for a person needing to dodge it all just to make the most basic, vanilla use out of it).
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