Not wanting to piss on your RSS feed (I just subscribed and am willing to keep following it), but displaying your complete price list with images and all in the description of your feed (!) looks awful in my reader. One sentence to describe it is enough for me.
Why I created Banner Blog
41–50 of 90 posts
Re: Why I created Banner Blog
#42So, 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…
> ...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...
This is so true! And, as a technologist i tend to get lost down a rabbit hole when helping friends, family, that i forget that lay people simply want stuff that works - even if that stuff is barely working. People say they want "the best", but they'll deal with minimally working crap as long as they can get what they need done. Its a bit of a wake up call to myself and other techies.
Re: Why I created Banner Blog
#43It looks like "the better WordPress" already exists: https://ghost.org/vs/wordpress/ (at least the Ghost makers say so)
Re: Why I created Banner Blog
#44I don't think blog platforms "suck", but I do think there are QoL enhancements that can be made to them the experience better for both the writers and the readers.
I built https://persumi.com for exactly this reason - to replace my own blog with a bit of QoL flare. Things like AI summaries, the optional social aspects (like/follow, etc), and TTS to turn text articles into audio / podcasts, etc, etc.
Re: Why I created Banner Blog
#45Original 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…
Yeah, if you’re actually using it as an alternative to microdata, maybe there’s value. But the only times I think I ever see it it’s just WebSite or Article, at which point I’m dubious if there’s any value. In smaller providers like this they seldom include all of the fields that they reasonably should, too, e.g. datePublished.
(Oh yeah, that’s another point I missed in my comment: the needs to be . Also, 12/01/23 in the text, ugh, yucky USA middle-endian date format, and with a two-digit year at that.)
Re: Why I created Banner Blog
#46I love this writeup.
The solution the author comes to is great, AND, I think it says that as a blogger you should probably always own or create your own tools.
I went down this same path, and Svekyll is my result (combination of Jekyll conventions with Svelte).
(https://svekyll.com or https://extrastatic.dev/svekyll/svekyll-cli/)
Svekyll offers a different perspective to get the same benefits as documented in this great post. I love that we generally reached the same conclusions as to what is important.
* WYSIWYG editor: Svekyll just builds from Markdown files (https://svekyll.com/Markdown)
* Customizable themes: Svekyll lets you configure DaisyUI themes in your _config.yml (e.g.: theme: dracula, https://svekyll.com/Theme)
* SEO out of the box: Svekyll has this too (https://svekyll.com/SEO).
* Runs forever: Svekyll compiles each post to a single independent HTML page (zero JS or CSS links, it is all inlined, https://extrastatic.dev/svekyll/svekyll-cli#technical-notes-on-svekyll-cli)
* RSS Feed Support: add rss: true to the _config.yml and get RSS. And, you can even add RSS feeds for each tag. (https://extrastatic.dev/svekyll/svekyll-cli/-/merge_requests/11, and see an example here: https://webiphany.com/2023-10-16-building-webapps-for-the-amazon-kindle-paperwhite-browser)
* Improved post creation: while not a feature of Svekyll itself, ExtraStatic (my hosting service) let's you create posts as Markdown by sending an email. This is an example where building on a simple foundation like Markdown opens a ton of possibilities.
* Analytics: Add matomo analytics to Svekyll in your _config.yml (https://svekyll.com/Analytics).
* Featured posts: stumped by this, but definitely a problem!Re: Why I created Banner Blog
#47I love this writeup. The solution the author comes to is great, AND, I think it says that as a blogger you should probably always own or create your own tools. I went down this same path, and Svekyll is my result (combination of Jekyll conventions with Svelte). ( https://svekyll.com or https://extrastatic.dev/svekyll/svekyll-cli/ ) Svekyll offers a different perspective to get the same benefits as documented in this…
> as a blogger you should probably always own or create your own tools.
That's all fine and dandy if you're a developer (or have some developer skills). But my mate who wants to blog about wood working isn't a developer and has no interest in building his own blogging tools.
I'm a developer and even I don't want to build and maintain my own blogging tools, I just want to write about the stuff I find interesting (most of which isn't necessarily development related).
Re: Why I created Banner Blog
#48I love this writeup. The solution the author comes to is great, AND, I think it says that as a blogger you should probably always own or create your own tools. I went down this same path, and Svekyll is my result (combination of Jekyll conventions with Svelte). ( https://svekyll.com or https://extrastatic.dev/svekyll/svekyll-cli/ ) Svekyll offers a different perspective to get the same benefits as documented in this…
> as a blogger you should probably always own or create your own tools. That's all fine and dandy if you're a developer (or have some developer skills). But my mate who wants to blog about wood working isn't a developer and has no interest in building his own blogging tools. I'm a developer and even I don't want to build and maintain my own blogging tools, I just want to write about the stuff I find interesting (most…
Agreed. I tried to convey that by saying "own or create" because I feel like Wordpress always "owned" me (not the other way around) and I couldn't stand being forced to use it in a certain way.
Re: Why I created Banner Blog
#49I have seen, used, and have built themes for quite a lot of blogging platforms. I also started all the way from Blogspot, to MovableType, to WordPress to the simplest one (current) written in Markdown with an idea to even further simplify it.
Here is a personal promotional plug for an upcoming idea that a friend and I are working on. Right now, we are reaching out only to my connections, founder cohorts, and people I know. We plan to start release to the public by 2024-Q1.
Blogging or content creation is very segmented and has to start from a niche and stay within a few categories. For instance, a whole set of people primarily aims to create ephemeral content, e.g., the marketing department. They do not care if the content lasts nor is in Markdown or how bloated the underlying HTML/JavaScript/CSS is. There is money to be made there, but on the opposite side of the other who want to squeeze the best out for performance, longevity, simplicity, durability, open formats, etc. It will be really hard to satisfy those two -- you will end up being neither.
We are creating a toolset for early founders and people who want to start. We are doing an export-friendly with the most straightforward format possible as the priority. We hope the startups, projects, etc., succeed and move on from us to their dedicated host and the other players.
We came to this conclusion after talking to many non-technical people on the fence who wanted to try while still at their jobs. Our first feature is a template-powered website or an identity formation place (a URL) where one starts by typing out the content akin to how iA Presenter[1] works.
Re: Why I created Banner Blog
#50Oh 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 currently use Hugo for my personal website, but if I were to start from scratch today, I think I would give Astro a try. https://astro.build/