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Why I created Banner Blog

bannerblog.dev

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Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#81

Post by fmajid »

__jonas wrote: post #67
fmajid wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a good static blog like Hugo or Jekyll will effectively last forever or as long as the hosting bills are paid.

I love the idea of statically generated sites, I just want a nice to use CMS for authoring content that goes along well with the static site generator. I'm using a SSG for my personal website, where it's no problem for me to manually write markdown files and run a command to build and deploy, but this will not work for sites I'm making for and/or with other non-technical people. In those cases I'll have to set up som…

Cloudflare Pages has the GitHub integration and CI, but no the GUI front-end. There is a git CMS frontend called Sveltia CMS that could be a good option but I haven't tried it myself.

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#82

Post by pjc50 »

fmajid wrote: post #61
pjc50 wrote: post #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…

And a good static blog like Hugo or Jekyll will effectively last forever or as long as the hosting bills are paid.

""Normies"" do not use static blog systems because they use the WYSIWYG editor in Wordpress to make (& live preview etc) posts.

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#83

Post by Kye »

hoosieree wrote: post #58
gsa wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Would you mind elaborating a little on where you draw the line? In my mind "SEO" means adding the correct meta tags to the html, but I suspect that's because I have approximately zero wisdom on the subject.

SEO and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) get mixed up a lot. SEO vs SEM is like aesthetics (color theory, composition, etc) vs a billboard ad. The latter cares about the former, but the former is innocent.

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#84

Post by reddalo »

prepend wrote: post #79
reddalo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WordPress sucks if you're writing a custom theme or plugin. Their codebase is old and it follows outdated standards (e.g.: they use array() instead of []... in 2023, really?). But , if you're using WordPress to publish a simple website, I think the most recent versions are great. The new Guntenberg full site editor is easy to use and it lets you customize your entire website easily, without the need to rely on custom…

That sounds like a personal problem. It’s not the sexiest, but it gets the job done. I’m chalking this kind of sentiment up to people who think PHP isn’t good enough. 1 million times to one, PHP is good enough and my imagined unique snowflake idea doesn’t really need anything special.

I love PHP and I think it's one of the best languages. But I can't stand WordPress. It's written like we're still in the PHP 4 age.

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#86

Post by susam »

emadda wrote: post #24
susam wrote: 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?

I write the content in HTML. I know many like to write it directly in Lisp where Lisp macros that correspond to HTML tags do the work of generating the HTML. However, I began blogging long before I learnt Lisp, so I had a lot of content written in plain HTML, so I stuck with HTML for the content.

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#87

Post by chrismorgan »

rambambram wrote: post #41

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.

Ouch, 6.7MB feed: it’s including all the pages (is this a blog engine or a CMS?) and then it’s inlining all images (um… who decided that made any sense as an action?).

Yeah, that feed sure ain’t ready.

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#88

Post by __jonas »

fmajid wrote: post #81
__jonas wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the idea of statically generated sites, I just want a nice to use CMS for authoring content that goes along well with the static site generator. I'm using a SSG for my personal website, where it's no problem for me to manually write markdown files and run a command to build and deploy, but this will not work for sites I'm making for and/or with other non-technical people. In those cases I'll have to set up som…

Cloudflare Pages has the GitHub integration and CI, but no the GUI front-end. There is a git CMS frontend called Sveltia CMS that could be a good option but I haven't tried it myself.

I am using Cloudflare Pages to deploy my personal website, where I author the content by hand in markdown – it's great!

My point is though that unfortunately there is nothing that's as "all in one" as traditional Wordpress hosting for the static site generator world. Sveltia CMS seems to be like Decap / Netlify CMS – my biggest problem with those were always support for media files, like lots of images, maybe videos etc., they just don't fit well into a git repository, and you end up having to bolt another solution on top of it to make it work, like git lfs or an external object storage host. From the Sveltia CMS docs it seems like that's not even an option yet:

> External media storage services are not supported yet. Deprecated Netlify Large Media won’t be added.

And even if you are building a website that's mainly text and small images, I don't really love the flow of all the content going into the the git repository, with huge amounts of commits that are just "X updated blogposty-y.md", especially with lots of collaborators.

I realize I'm asking for a lot with this 'all-in-one' solution, maybe it's just a problem noone else has, I often think about trying to build it myself, although I am aware it would be a really complex undertaking..

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#89

Post by fmajid »

pjc50 wrote: post #82
fmajid wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a good static blog like Hugo or Jekyll will effectively last forever or as long as the hosting bills are paid.

""Normies"" do not use static blog systems because they use the WYSIWYG editor in Wordpress to make (& live preview etc) posts.

I know, my wife and daughter are still on WP for that reason.

Re: Why I created Banner Blog

#90

Post by gsa »

hoosieree wrote: post #58
gsa wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Would you mind elaborating a little on where you draw the line? In my mind "SEO" means adding the correct meta tags to the html, but I suspect that's because I have approximately zero wisdom on the subject.

Some things that qualify for essential SEO in my book:

- (Basic) meta tags

- Alt attributes

- Mobile friendly content (always required for a blog)

- Loading speed, optimised images etc.

- No JS rendered content

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