Live data from Hacker News

Why I created Banner Blog

bannerblog.dev

31–40 of 90 posts

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#31
post #19

The page has some weird horizontal scrolling going on. I think it's because the body style has both `width: 100%` and a nonzero margin. You should probably set margin and padding to zero on the body tag if you need width, or just remove the `width: 100%` (which I don't think you need?)

Thanks for letting me know - this is all fixed now

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#33

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… we…

> Well done on inlining the stylesheets. Having zero subresources has a way bigger effect on page load time than people tend to expect.

Is that still true with HTTP/2 (or newer)?

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#34
I just slapped something together with PHP includes and HTML exports from MD files. Slap the right header.php and footer.php to replace everything above and every below the body opening and closing tag and add the .php extension. Upload using an FTP program. Internet as the internet was intended. And PHP remains the best template language ever invented.

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#35

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… we…

> I don’t really get why people bother with JSON-LD—does it actually help anything?

It helps with Google SEO which makes sense, as schema.org is essentially stewarded by Google.

> 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?

Yeah, for basic things like the website metadata it's redundant with meta tags. It becomes more useful when it comes to more rich types like e.g. a recipe.

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#37
That’s cool you made this site.

But I don’t think Wordpress sucks at all. It’s great in that it’s open source, runs everywhere, is easy to use, and super extensible.

I still recommend it to people who want to blog and it works out well. It’s especially nice as it doesn’t lock you into a saas like wix or square space or lots of other $10+/month services.

Personally, I just like markdown and jekyll as it’s easy enough but git is a bit too much for normies while Wordpress works fine.

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#38
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've created a hybrid system as I also was frustrated with how complicated Hugo is. Oogway [1] is a static site generator and framework for creating websites using Go templates. Take a look if you like :)

[1] https://github.com/emvi/oogway

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#39
post #33

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… we…

> Well done on inlining the stylesheets. Having zero subresources has a way bigger effect on page load time than people tend to expect. Is that still true with HTTP/2 (or newer)?

HTTP/2 helps with parallel resource loading, but that’s not the problem in this case—subresources like we’re talking about here are largely going to be loaded serially because that’s how things are. HTTP/2 Server Push might have helped some of the problem, but it’s more or less died because the way it was designed had serious problems and fixing them was going to take more effort than it was worth.

But when I say “having zero subresources”, I actively mean having zero subresources. The bit that really startles people is how much faster a page with inlined scripts and styles is (up to a point, but that point is typically over a hundred kilobytes of each) than a page with subresources present in a warm cache where the browser doesn’t even need to revalidate. Letting the browser just tear through it all rather than having to mess around with caches has, as I say, a bigger effect than people normally expect.

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#40
So, earlier this year I was helping a friend fix their blog. A local news site, run by a middle-aged not very technical woman. She'd taken it over from the previous owners a few years ago, and every now and again things break. She's paying over the odds for hosting, and the support people are .. adequate, but not really going to fix everything for her.

My two thoughts going into fixing it were:

- wow, this Wordpress install kind of sucks

- imagine how much worse it would suck if it wasn't Wordpress

Because it's Wordpress, Google will help me fix all the problems. Update all the plugins and themes; disable the obsolete or broken ones. Sort out the disk space issue. Tweak a few cache settings. And she's back in business.

We (HN) can all build a blog engine. We all seem to have different ideas on how to build a blog engine. And that's fine; we can all have our own little gardens and toy systems to play with. The rest of the world is more concerned with what the actual text of the blog is, if at all. Just as "obsolete iPhone with cracked screen" is the world's most widespread phone by actual use, "slightly broken wordpress" is the world's most popular blogging engine by a long way.

Meanwhile over the horizon, the question of whether any humans will read blogs at all in an AI content / search engine world looms.

Post reply on HN