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How to Start Your Blog in 2023

molodtsov.me

181–190 of 257 posts

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#181
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Define exotic? The large company I work for uses .systems

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Always worth considering your national domain if it’s easy to register. I use .ca because really why wouldn’t I?

CIRA's privacy policy is one of the reasons why I've stayed with .ca for my digital presence:

> The registrant name and administrative and technical contact information of non-individual registrants, such as corporations, is displayed by default. The registrant name and administrative and technical contact information of individuals, such as Canadian citizens or permanent residents is not displayed in WHOIS per the CIRA Privacy Policy. Generally non-individuals are public and individuals are private.

https://www.cira.ca/ca-domains/whois

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#183
post #138

Am I the "My mobile git workflow guy"[1]? [1] https://wojteksychut.com/posts/this-domain-is-8-minutes-old/

Mine’s similar but with fewer steps.

- My blog lives in a Git repo I host on my own Gitea server.

- I run Working Copy on my iPad to push to/pull from the repo.

- I use iA Writer to edit files in Working Copy.

- Every 5 minutes, a script on my webserver runs `git pull`. If anything changed, it runs `hugo build`, then rsyncs the output to the webroot for my domain.

What I see in iA Writer is my blog’s contents. When I edit those words and `git commit` them in Working Copy, they magically show up on the web a few minutes later.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#184
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://…

Remember to strip EXIF yourself if you're used to blogging software.

At least don't upload any pics you've taken at home without stripping out the GPS info

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#185
post #157

Really weird that a very obvious choice, Medium, did not make the cut. I'm quite aware of how unpopular it is here on HN, but that's mostly a meme. It doesn't cost anything and there's no ads. Even linking your domain to it used to be free (sadly no longer true). It has a very decent writing experience and the out of the box design is simple but effective. It has a reasonable amount of customization. It has wide supp…

I feel like a lot of people here have moved from medium to sub stack. Also medium just sort of naturally gatekeeps your articles by eventually forcing potential readers to login to medium.

I agree. Some time back I just stopped clicking a link if it was to Medium. Maybe they've changed their practices but because of that past experience I wouldn't know and as a result don't read content that's on Medium.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#186

Can recommend Ghost self-hosted. Really good installation process and fine documentation with a big community around it - hosting with Ghost + Hetzner VPS my blog from my bio.

Heads up, it's failing to let me subscribe ('failed to send magic link email')

Hey, thanks for the info. Seems the SMTP got messed up :/ Will try to fix it soon

EDIT: Fixed. But the battle with the ports and broken default SMTP server settings was hard

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#187
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…

Could you explain how do you do it? I really want to have a blog but I don't want to fuck with wordpress and all that I know is a little bit of html, python and sql.

Wow, I didn't expect so much interest in my comment!

I should start by saying that I'm not averse to a little "manual labor". I know a lot of people feel compelled to automate everything, and if you're like that, then you wouldn't like my methods at all. ;-)

My entire blog is in a git repository.

I use BBEdit for text editing. https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/ It has a full set of HTML tools and templates.

Whenever I want to write a new blog post, I create one from an HTML template that already has a style sheet, header, footer, and other structured info.

All of my blog posts are listed reverse chronologically in a table in the "index.html" file. I just have to create a new table row for the new blog post at the top and fill in the date, filename, and title.

I can preview the blog post in a web browser while I'm writing it, and BBEdit accepts drag and drop of images files, automatically creating img elements.

I also have a template for the RSS feed entries. I use the Atom format FWIW. Each entry has a section where I can copy and paste the HTML from the blog post into the RSS feed:

I use the W3C feed validation service to check the RSS syntax, and I also subscribe to the local copy of the RSS feed file in my RSS reader app. https://validator.w3.org/feed/

That's about it! My system has become slightly more sophisticated over the years. When I started blogging this way, it was even more primitive. The whole point was to just start blogging, and not worry about my blogging system. It seems that worrying about the blogging system stops a lot of people from blogging in the first place.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#188
post #138

Am I the "My mobile git workflow guy"[1]? [1] https://wojteksychut.com/posts/this-domain-is-8-minutes-old/

Mine’s similar but with fewer steps. - My blog lives in a Git repo I host on my own Gitea server. - I run Working Copy on my iPad to push to/pull from the repo. - I use iA Writer to edit files in Working Copy. - Every 5 minutes, a script on my webserver runs `git pull`. If anything changed, it runs `hugo build`, then rsyncs the output to the webroot for my domain. What I see in iA Writer is my blog’s contents. When I…

I have similar with even fewer steps!

Edit directly in working copy

Blog repo is on GitHub

When I push to the main repo Cloudflare Pages does hugo build

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind sharing a link to your blog? I'm also a "tooling minimalist", but I'm curious how you handle things like grouping posts (or do you just not bother?). Assuming everything's not on a single page, how do you avoid tedious duplication?

I'm assuming it's https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/ As noted in my other comment, I looked for it out of curiosity too, and it's incredibly satisfying to see how fast it loads.

The name of the blog is a little joke/pun about how bare-bones the site is. I'm not a designer, obviously!

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#190
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…

I was pleasantly surprised to learn writing raw html is not difficult, at all. I am not doing Rocket Science, though. As others say, static site generators introduce a layer of abstraction. I like writing in markdown too, but if I really cared to, I could write my own scripts to translate. However, I found that html does not introduce undue overhead. I am sure I could churn out content more quickly if I were writing…

I always wondered why browsers do not parse and understand markdown on their own, it would be so easy for thrm to implement it.
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