This is true. I started my blog https://codevscolor.com in wordpress. 5 years later, last year, I moved it to markdown + git with gatsby. I am never going back.
Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
131–140 of 182 posts
Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
#132IMO 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,…
Any suggestions for static site generators / where to host? I'm thinking about starting a new blog with Hugo / Digital Ocean.
I have a popular Spark blog on Wordpress (https://mungingdata.com/) and can relate to your sentiment that any inconvenience can hold up the writing process. Your post is motivating me to streamline my publishing process.
Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
#133This reminds me once more of a piece of the puzzle which we're still missing. Markdown + git is great, but leaving your blog up on Github is just another central point of failure; Github feels like a fact of nature right now, but it's just a website at end of day. Most broadly, it's called content-centric networking. Bittorrent is a piece of that puzzle, but too static, with no obvious way to connect disparate hashes…
A general solution for Wayback-style long-term distribution and archiving has been spec'd out (as part of the Memento Project), but nobody seems to be adopting it.
Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
#134A bit morbid I know, but I've been thinking I would like my blog to outlive me. I have my blog on blogger.com, and while I've been tempted to switch to something more modern and fun in a container on a VPS, I've resisted, because I think blogger.com is not going away in my lifetime. A VPS and a personal domain on the other hand is going to get shutdown when someday I die and my credit card gets closed. At this stage…
Of all the Google services, blogger is surprisingly kept alive for all this time. I don't think it gets any new updates or new features though.
Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
#135I 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…
I wrote my own blogging software, and went through a similar journey. Initially I wrote a simple Perl script which would read all the posts I'd written (as markdown), insert them into a temporary SQLite database, and then using the database I'd generate output.
Having the SQLite database made cooking up views really trivial (so I wrote a plugin to generate /archive, another to write /tags, along with /tags/foo, /tags/bar, etc). But the process was very inefficient.
Towards the end of its life it was taking me 30+ seconds to rebuild from an empty starting point. I dropped the database, rewrote the generator in golang, and made it process as many things in parallel as possible. Now I get my blog rebuilt in a second, or less.
I guess these days most blogs have a standard set of pages, a date-based archive, a tag-cloud, and per-tag indexes, along with RSS feeds for them all. I was over-engineering making it possible to use SQL to make random views across all the posts, but it was still a fun learning experience!
Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
#136I'd like to suggest Fossil SCM[1]. Your content (text, images etc.) is stored in a SQLite database [@] which is great! SQLite is a recommended storage format[2] for datasets according to US Library of Congress. Also, the SQLite developers pledge[3] to support it atleast until 2050.
[2] https://sqlite.org/locrsf.html
[3] https://sqlite.org/lts.html
[@] a single file, not a bunch of files in a directory
Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
#137I actually follow this sentiment with my resume andyhablewitz.com
When I last had mine out I went a step further. Just a single static HTML page, with a little CSS in the HEAD. A single request for a single file, easily saved. No build or deploy process. No javascript, no stack of dependencies, no docker containers, no dependence on github or any other third-party site.
For a full blog, I would use a static site generator, but not for something well-served by a single static page.
Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
#138I'd like to suggest Fossil SCM[1]. Your content (text, images etc.) is stored in a SQLite database [@] which is great! SQLite is a recommended storage format[2] for datasets according to US Library of Congress. Also, the SQLite developers pledge[3] to support it atleast until 2050. [1] https://fossil-scm.org [2] https://sqlite.org/locrsf.html [3] https://sqlite.org/lts.html [@] a single file, not a bunch of files in…
Does [@] mean clarification?
Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
#139I 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…
I made goode experiences with Lektor (a static site generator). If you run it locally using "lektor server" you see your page plus admin backend. Once you click (or type) deploy the page gets statically built and copied somewhere via rsync.
You can still have the sources in a git for quick rollbacks.
What I like about lektor over most CMS solutions is that it is more easily adjustable. Basically Jinja2 and python held together with glue
Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
#140I 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…
Have you thought about hosting it on https://writefreely.org/?