You Should Start a Blog • Hacker News Board

Re: You Should Start a Blog

#21

Post by hengheng » Thu, Mar 06, 2014, 9:57 AM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #14

ekianjo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wordpress as default does not handle lots of traffic without crashing. You need to use cache plugins to make it work well with lots of visitors. Not a "solid" solution out of the box.

If your blog crashes from too many hits, congratulations. Few people write that well. Their audiences tend to forgive them. Most blogs die from loneliness- even more never launch because it's so much easier not to write.

I've seen default wordpress installations on simple vhosts crash at 50 daily visitors, basically every time two people visited at the same time. You do need caching, and you need to set it up manually, and that's probably Wordpress.com's sales pitch nowadays.

Re: You Should Start a Blog

#22

Post by weavie » Thu, Mar 06, 2014, 10:01 AM UTC

dagw wrote: post #15

unethical_ban wrote: post #2

I'd love to. What platform should I use? Requirements: * No Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal * Easy to configure and deploy * Internal comments subsystem preferable I was looking at rigging up Dokuwiki. It obviously has the ability to publish data/articles, it has plugins to give a discussions page, user/ACL support and it's pretty simple to deploy. Drawback is it's not designed by default with the "reverse chrono" orderi…

Focus on writing, not on platform. Sign up for a blogger (or whatever) account and just start writing. Once you've published a dozen posts or so and gotten into the habit or writing, then you can go back and consider what you want/need in a blogging platform going forwards. Focusing on setting up the perfect blogging platform before you've written anything is just procrastination.

I tried this many times, but could never get the enthusiasm up to finish anything. This time round I bought a domain name, paid for hosting, setup the server and customized the theme.

Now that I am much more heavily invested I am finding myself writing more and more.

Re: You Should Start a Blog

#23

Post by aytekin » Thu, Mar 06, 2014, 10:09 AM UTC

unethical_ban wrote: post #2

I'd love to. What platform should I use? Requirements: * No Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal * Easy to configure and deploy * Internal comments subsystem preferable I was looking at rigging up Dokuwiki. It obviously has the ability to publish data/articles, it has plugins to give a discussions page, user/ACL support and it's pretty simple to deploy. Drawback is it's not designed by default with the "reverse chrono" orderi…

Write on Medium. I know it will not be on your own land (domain name) but Medium gives you readers and that's very motivational when you are starting out. My guess is that most blogs get abondened because there are no readers. https://medium.com/blogging-information-advice/fc6cceead8ef

Re: You Should Start a Blog

#24

Post by brudgers » Thu, Mar 06, 2014, 10:56 AM UTC

hengheng wrote: post #21

brudgers wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your blog crashes from too many hits, congratulations. Few people write that well. Their audiences tend to forgive them. Most blogs die from loneliness- even more never launch because it's so much easier not to write.

I've seen default wordpress installations on simple vhosts crash at 50 daily visitors, basically every time two people visited at the same time. You do need caching, and you need to set it up manually, and that's probably Wordpress.com's sales pitch nowadays.

If your blog is getting 50 daily visitors, congratulations.

Re: You Should Start a Blog

#25

Post by bprieto » Thu, Mar 06, 2014, 1:30 PM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #10

edent wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use WordPress? It's simple to install, configure, and deploy. Works on any web host. Internal comments. Auto-updates to keep you running on the latest version if you want.

wordpress as default does not handle lots of traffic without crashing. You need to use cache plugins to make it work well with lots of visitors. Not a "solid" solution out of the box.

I had a "wordpress as default" blog hosted at DreamHost and it handled up to 1.000 visits a day without crashing. More than that, and DreamHost turned it off to prevent it to impact other users.

Now it lives in a Digital Ocean's $20 VPS, fine tuned to serve WordPress and with W3 Total Cache plugin. Blitz.io tests say it could handle 80 million pages served a day. I know that's not really true, but it handles 60.000-80.000 real visits (more than 100k pages) every month without problems.

Re: You Should Start a Blog

#26

Post by dmos62 » Thu, Mar 06, 2014, 1:38 PM UTC

unethical_ban wrote: post #2

I'd love to. What platform should I use? Requirements: * No Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal * Easy to configure and deploy * Internal comments subsystem preferable I was looking at rigging up Dokuwiki. It obviously has the ability to publish data/articles, it has plugins to give a discussions page, user/ACL support and it's pretty simple to deploy. Drawback is it's not designed by default with the "reverse chrono" orderi…

Just use Jekyll, it's quite wonderful. If you use Github, Github Pages is a very straightforward way to host as well.

Re: You Should Start a Blog

#27

Post by unethical_ban » Thu, Mar 06, 2014, 2:02 PM UTC

middus wrote: post #18

unethical_ban wrote: post #2

I'd love to. What platform should I use? Requirements: * No Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal * Easy to configure and deploy * Internal comments subsystem preferable I was looking at rigging up Dokuwiki. It obviously has the ability to publish data/articles, it has plugins to give a discussions page, user/ACL support and it's pretty simple to deploy. Drawback is it's not designed by default with the "reverse chrono" orderi…

I'd love to write. Which pen should I use? Short answer: it does not matter. Writing matters.

If some of the pens didn't let me keep possession of the words I wrote, or limited the number of people that could read my manuscripts, I'd choose a different pen.

Perhaps it's not terribly important, and I'm to the point where I'll capitulate, but I want something I can self-host, and I want something easy to run. You don't own what you don't host.

Re: You Should Start a Blog

#28

Post by ekianjo » Fri, Mar 07, 2014, 6:45 AM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #14

ekianjo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wordpress as default does not handle lots of traffic without crashing. You need to use cache plugins to make it work well with lots of visitors. Not a "solid" solution out of the box.

If your blog crashes from too many hits, congratulations. Few people write that well. Their audiences tend to forgive them. Most blogs die from loneliness- even more never launch because it's so much easier not to write.

Here's an example from a couple of months back when I received too much traffic from HN on my wordpress install and it made the server explode: http://pandoralive.info/?p=2243

It went up to 133 simultaneous visitors and then... poof!

After that I installed a Cache plugin, and since then I've had a couple of articles hitting HN again and going over 200 simultaneous visits with the CPU remaining at low levels. So yeah, Wordpress can scale, with the right plugins :)

Re: You Should Start a Blog

#29

Post by ekianjo » Fri, Mar 07, 2014, 6:46 AM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #24

hengheng wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen default wordpress installations on simple vhosts crash at 50 daily visitors, basically every time two people visited at the same time. You do need caching, and you need to set it up manually, and that's probably Wordpress.com's sales pitch nowadays.

If your blog is getting 50 daily visitors, congratulations.

Really ? That's kind of low, though. I would have thought most blogs get at least a couple of hundred visits (and not bots) every day.

Re: You Should Start a Blog

#30

Post by bilalq » Sat, Mar 08, 2014, 12:42 AM UTC

pkhamre wrote: post #8

bilalq wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What errors are you running into? Jekyll is actually a great choice. Deployment to S3/Cloudfront can net you a highly performant blog at a very low cost. Comments can be brought in using a service like Disqus.

Or just deploy it to GitHub.

Yeah, I forgot about that. Github Pages work great for this.