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Own your work

josem.co

91–100 of 113 posts

Re: Own your work

#93
post #74
post #25

The underlying truth behind all such discussions is that too many people focus on the mechanics of content hosting and delivery but have nothing special to actually share. So they will spend all their time engineering the perfect blog site from scratch or moving from platform to platform looking for an ideological fit while no one really cares about consuming any of their output. My advice is always to forget about t…

But setting up the mechanics of content hosting and delivery is what I do it for. The actual writing is just an afterthought. And after a few years of not writing you have a good excuse to set up some different hosting because you don’t have any content to migrate.

It’s like Skyrim modders making the perfect load order with thousands of mods, but go “meh” after a few hours of playing, and the thing starts all over.

In such a case you are not a writer, you’re a tinkerer/mechanic.

Re: Own your work

#94
post #66

Instead of a Wordpress Blog or something I'd go for something static. There is a couple of software solutions out there from everything to blogs to website. This has the benefit that you can be a lot more independent. As long as you have some copy somewhere you are fine. You can back it up easily and so on. If you use WP (and MySQL) a lot more things can go wrong. If the MySQL server, your wordpress can get hacked fo…

Agreed - my most recent personal site was built using a hand-rolled static site generator (some basic templating using Python) - development is now super easy and it runs just fine as yet another thing on my $5/month VPS.

Re: Own your work

#95
post #66

Instead of a Wordpress Blog or something I'd go for something static. There is a couple of software solutions out there from everything to blogs to website. This has the benefit that you can be a lot more independent. As long as you have some copy somewhere you are fine. You can back it up easily and so on. If you use WP (and MySQL) a lot more things can go wrong. If the MySQL server, your wordpress can get hacked fo…

Agreed - my most recent personal site was built using a hand-rolled static site generator (some basic templating using Python) - development is now super easy and it runs just fine as yet another thing on my $5/month VPS.

You referring to this? https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite

I have ported this to go for myself. Works really well for my use.

Re: Own your work

#96
post #59
post #25

The underlying truth behind all such discussions is that too many people focus on the mechanics of content hosting and delivery but have nothing special to actually share. So they will spend all their time engineering the perfect blog site from scratch or moving from platform to platform looking for an ideological fit while no one really cares about consuming any of their output. My advice is always to forget about t…

In college, I did my calculus homework on blank printer paper using Sharpie markers. I could only fit one integral per page, maybe two if I was lucky, so I’d turn in these 15-page stapled assignments. It was calculus all the same, and I got great grades. I think the purpose of this comment is to reinforce that the medium doesn’t matter — if you focus on the content itself, you’ll progress.

Perhaps your integrals were artistically drawn and deserved the thick strokes and extra pages, but I find it easier to write with thinner ballpoint pens.

This reminds me of an old tip[1] about bringing your own thin dry-erase markers to onsite interviews, because you would get more whiteboard space that way.

[1] https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goo...

Re: Own your work

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed - my most recent personal site was built using a hand-rolled static site generator (some basic templating using Python) - development is now super easy and it runs just fine as yet another thing on my $5/month VPS.

You referring to this? https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite I have ported this to go for myself. Works really well for my use.

No my tool isn't public - it's just a 50 line Python script in my site's repo.

Re: Own your work

#99
post #13

Say this to a non developer. This just isn't realistic for the majority of people, nor do they care, or should they. What we need is interoperability between services so that backups and transfers are much easier. That isn't the case just yet. If we moved to a more API first world then it would be very much possible. With the advent of GPT related stuff it's clear we're going that direction and the interface for ever…

I don't think that it's obvious that that will ever be the case. Service providers have poor incentives to make your content movable, much less your following.

Re: Own your work

#100
post #66

Instead of a Wordpress Blog or something I'd go for something static. There is a couple of software solutions out there from everything to blogs to website. This has the benefit that you can be a lot more independent. As long as you have some copy somewhere you are fine. You can back it up easily and so on. If you use WP (and MySQL) a lot more things can go wrong. If the MySQL server, your wordpress can get hacked fo…

Agreed - my most recent personal site was built using a hand-rolled static site generator (some basic templating using Python) - development is now super easy and it runs just fine as yet another thing on my $5/month VPS.

I did exactly the same, except I used bash and pandoc to generate my site.

There is no friction anymore, and yet I still don't put up new blog posts on a regular basis.

The problem is me, not the tech.

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