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Why I created Banner Blog

bannerblog.dev

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Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for me, too. I honestly love https://mataroa.blog it ended my paralysis for searching a blog platform, and every page is bog standard HTML. It accepts Markdown, plus it has its own anonymous analytics, so it's nice. On the other hand, everyone has different needs, and I wish Banner blog the best of luck!

Thanks! Glad to hear there are other platforms out there.

I'm aware of four in total, excluding yours. Writing them down, so maybe you can get some inspiration from them.

- mataroa.blog - My favorite. Pretty minimal, but well thought out.

- smol.pub - Another favorite of mine, but a little too minimalistic for me.

- prose.sh - A part of pico.sh ecosystem. Very interesting, but I started with mataroa when they started, so I didn't migrate.

- bear.blog - A more comprehensive package, a bit too heavy for my taste.

Again, good luck. We need more small web. Not less!

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#22
> No lonely text box, nor a bloated Gutenberg editor in sight. Just a simple WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor so you can write to your heart's content

Have written daily for the last 20+ years. At this point I refuse to use any CMS that doesn't have an editor that is not at least as good as Gutenberg.

What WYSIWYG editor do you use?

_Edit_: it's Suneditor. Not my idea of a good editor, and I don't really like the default font either -- see https://imgur.com/TNT44Bp

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#23
post #12

Can it be self-hosted? Is it open-source? Is the WYSIWYG editor custom-built, or does it use CKEditor or similar projects? What about media management? Is there a place for a simple CMS? E.g. developers usually prefer simple static site generators, such as Eleventy.

Totally agree with this... If you say it will live forever, but _you_ are doing the hosting, it can not, by default, live forever. I need to own the HTML, then it will live as long as I will.

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#24
post #9

I began blogging in the early 2000s when blogging on blogspot.com, wordpress.com, livejournal.com, etc. was quite popular. While they were pretty good for quickly writing and publishing content using their built-in layout templates, I also cared about customising the HTML templates to suit my taste. To my disappointment, I found working with their HTML templates clumsy. For example, with blogspot.com, I would spend a…

Do you write your content directly in Lisp/HTML?

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#26
post #10

> SEO Optimized Out Of The Box To me this is a bug, not a feature. Google is so broken now that I assume any website in their first page of results is likely worthless.

Chasing Google ranks is an abysmal practice, but a basic level of SEO goes a long way in making content discoverable and accessible. As for the rest of the practices of the SEO industry, I believe in the saying "if you provide good content, you don't need to SEO".

We should rename legitimate SEO to Search Engine Usability.

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#27

> SEO Optimized Out Of The Box To me this is a bug, not a feature. Google is so broken now that I assume any website in their first page of results is likely worthless.

A number of my blog posts appear on Google's first page. I have some SEO tags but I don't optimise for it, nor do I make content that is purely built to feed the algorithm, I just write content that is applicable to people, and has some of the basic tags in it.

Although I can see why you may do that, it also does discount things that are relevant

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#28

Oh and I was hoping for something to selfhost / open source :(

I suggest hugo: https://gohugo.io/

Generates a completely static website from MD (and other formats) files; also handles themes (including a lot of them rendering well on mobile), and different types of content - posts, articles, etc. - depending on the theme.

You can edit posts with any editor you care to for wysiwyg features.

It's open source and, being completely static, cheap as fuck to self host.

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#29
Original article title: “Why I Created Banner Blog”. But I honestly don’t think it explains why. You establish the problem, but don’t remark on a couple of existing alternatives that might satisfy your requirements, and more importantly, you don’t explain why you’re making it a platform, rather than just something for yourself. Because honestly, if you want to blog, running a platform for everyone and their dog… well, that’s something completely different, and something which will take away from your blogging opportunities.

Current HN title: “Why Blogging Platforms Suck”. This would honestly be a completely different article, and one I’d generally agree with (which is why I will always insist on controlling my own site stack). Yet you appear determined to get into running a blogging platform, and I would be curious why.

Some more remarks:

• Well done on inlining the stylesheets. Having zero subresources has a way bigger effect on page load time than people tend to expect. (Want bonus marks? Strip unused styles from the sheet, and inline custom properties where possible (currently always)! You can save hundreds of bytes! Hundreds, I say!)

• You’re not compressing responses, but generally might as well; though thanks to TCP slow start stuff, it’s unlikely to make any meaningful difference at this scale. (You can get it down from just under 11KB to about 3.5KB.)

• The JSON-LD block is all wrong. It claims it’s a http://schema.org/website (which I believe must be spelled http://schema.org/WebSite to be interpreted correctly; aside: uh oh, the JSON-LD spec uses lowercase schema.org slugs in examples, sigh) but it should be an Article, and then has a nonsense `about` field that puts the title as the @type. Which is something I’ve seen once before, on Bear Blog. Are your tech stacks similar and it’s the same library doing it, or did you copy it, or is it sheer coincidence that you did the same wrong thing? (Aside: I don’t really get why people bother with JSON-LD—does it actually help anything? In theory it’s neat, sure, but in practice does anything actually use it and wouldn’t use the traditional meta tags if it weren’t there?)

• `body { width: 100% }` needs removing. It means that the page always overflows horizontally. If you removed the default 8px margin, it’d merely become unnecessary rather than harmful. `body { min-height: 100vh }` is also not what you want, though the situations that expose the problems are likely to be rare; but the normal trick for getting what you’re going for (… if you even decide it’s worth it) involves setting a minimum height of 100% on html and body.

• : type="image/x-icon" is superfluous since it’s the only icon, `shortcut ` is superfluous (that’s a matter of ancient history), … and in fact the entire tag is superfluous given it’s the only icon and the URL is /favicon.ico.

• Your font size is significantly too large on large screens. It’s extremely too large on small screens. I recommend not exceeding 1.25rem (typically 20px) as a :root font-size, and sticking to 1rem (typically 16px) on smaller viewports.

• Please don’t use a base font-weight of 300. On some very common configurations (generally involving Windows and low-DPI screens), it can be fairly difficult to read. Body text should always use weight 400. (From this and the scrolling things, I’m getting the sense you use macOS.)

• `font-family: Roboto;` means that most of your viewers will get the default font, which defaults to a serif like Times. Honestly, I recommend sticking with it. Serifs are generally cooler. But if you actually care for what you specified, then make sure a generic family is included.

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#30
post #28

Oh and I was hoping for something to selfhost / open source :(

I suggest hugo: https://gohugo.io/ Generates a completely static website from MD (and other formats) files; also handles themes (including a lot of them rendering well on mobile), and different types of content - posts, articles, etc. - depending on the theme. You can edit posts with any editor you care to for wysiwyg features. It's open source and, being completely static, cheap as fuck to self host.

I've taken a look at Hugo multiple times, and... it more complicated than I'd like. For me it really does way to much and customizing themes is way more work than I care for.

Maybe it's time to see if I can make SSG (https://romanzolotarev.com/ssg.html) run on my Mac again, for some reason it won't render anything.

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