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How to Start Your Blog in 2023

molodtsov.me

131–140 of 257 posts

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#131
post #106

I am the "weird dude who writes raw HTML" LOL. I had a self-hosted WordPress blog from 2006-2010, but security updates become a burden, especially since I had to modify the WP source code a little to do exactly what I wanted with the RSS feeds. After a few years of not blogging at all, I decided to use the simplest possible "system", which is writing blog posts in raw HTML in a text editor, as well as writing the RSS…

[deleted]

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#132
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just gave it a (very) quick look > a static site is a site with no fancy clicky things, signups, comments, just plain html Technically I think you can have comments via some embedded widget. Each page is still static, but there's a script tag in there that embeds a widget into the page that gives you commenting, usually via some SaaS I think Disqus was the big one for a while. There was one I saw recently that uses g…

Cactus Comments [1] is another option. It uses Matrix under the hood. [1] https://cactus.chat/

oooh I like that, thanks!

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#133

1. What you use or wherever you host, make sure that you can export your content in either plain text or a universal format that can be used by another tool or host it yourself. In short, own the content and use whatever tool it fits your current situations and limitations. 2. Possibly, try to get a domain of your own, and preferably a `.com`. Point that to whichever server you use (if they don't allow you to point,…

There's so many better options better than .com (commercial) .net .org .me .io .blog .info You can make it topical too .expert .engineer .doctor .camera .software Or have fun with it .lol .wtf .foo

I'd advise against using "exotic" TLDs if you plan to send mail from this domain.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#135
Have been running the same blog, on and off, since 2001. It has gone through many iterations, including being nuked and restarted several times, using archive.org as my backup.

The current iteration is optimized around not having it be a source of stress or anxiety for me. Here is my setup:

* I just use self-hosted Wordpress site on a Digital Ocean droplet.

* I made my own theme that strips pretty much everything out: it's one big page with 500+ posts on it, all text. No comments, images, video, anything like that. Minimal markup. Takes less than a second before the page can be interacted with.

* There are no post pages, and no archives (again, just one big page).

* Consequently, you search by pressing cmd-f in your browser, which is so much better than a search widget (and is the main reason I went with this design).

* I make entries whenever I want to, and then queue them up with a plugin that releases 1 post every 4 days, on a schedule. I have 112 posts in the queue, so I could not touch this thing for a year and it would be still running.

* My main goal for the blog is to record things that have happened: diary, commonplace book, repository for movie and book reviews. Not to make money or be a famous thought leader and influencer. I recognize that's not everybody's goal, but with those simplifying assumptions in place, it became super easy to make and maintain a blog.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#136
post #72
post #16

For the combination of Hugo and GitHub Pages, images are pretty effortless as well. For example, for a post with a path of `content/posts/post-title.md`: 1. Add the image at `content/posts/post-title/image-name.png` 2. Add markdown that references it, like `![alt-text](image-name.png)` 3. Build and push to main, and then the image is available in minutes at ` /posts/post-title/image-name.png" rel="nofollow">https://…

Hugo and Cloudflare Pages is basically free, but you need to find somewhere to host your search.

Cloudflare workers?

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why add another layer? Right now the only tool he needs is an editor. That's it. Can't get any simpler than that. He also probably has a set of templates by now.

> Why add another layer? The answer given: > to take out some of the drudgery

At the end of the day the drudgery they are doing is writing the post, something they'd have to do anyway on a static site generator. Writing the raw html likely takes no friction at all, since they are probably copying and pasting some template or at this point know all the tags they use by heart so its no harder than a more abstract method.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not pretty, but it's zero maintenance. I've been doing that for 10 years now, and I don't think I'd ever go back to a third-party dependency. SSG is third-party dependency in one way.

It seems to me that a text editor is the same sort of dependency as a static site generator. Especially if you store the resulting site as rendered.

You can drop in whatever text editor you like though. It's only a dependency like saying a keyboard is a dependency to writing code. There will always be new editors or you can use a 40 year old one just fine too. Can't say the same about the static site generator though, maybe your setup works when you swap one generator for another maybe it doesn't.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#140

I ran into the exact same issues as the author of this post the other day. I have a static site built on Hugo that I (amateurishly) set up a year or so ago, and would like it to have better support for photos & galleries, but lack the time + skill to implement that. I spent a late-night research session a few weeks back running through many of the main options they mention only to settle on the conclusion that there…

It would be pretty easy to make your own photo gallery in raw html. have photos in a directory you want to link on your server. pick your favorite language, write some code to iterate through that list of files, and generate html pages for each containing the image, a previous hyperlink to go to the page for the last item iterated, and a next hyperlink to go to the next page. Throw in some button graphics and now its as sexy as any other static site generator, and you can now throw the entire codebase on github and put it on your resume and call yourself a webdev. get fancy, make a cron job that looks for new content added to that directory and runs your html generator, now all you do is drag and drop files and the site builds itself.
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