101–110 of 199 posts
Half the time I see Medium posts, the other half I'll see something hosted with Jekyll + github pages. Which technically isn't Self Hosted, but still quite different from just writing in Medium or something of the sort.
However I suspect HackerNews readers are not the average, and I do think there's a down trend on self hosting blogs, versus using Medium/Wordpress/Tumblr or even Blogspot.
yes - why self host when I can host my blog at github using jekyll in < 10 minutes ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Static site generators are not a good answer for non-engineers, especially if customizations are necessary. I had self-hosted WordPress on Dreamhost until I got kicked off due to a viral post and my site deleted. Recovering my posts and learning how to use Jekyll/GitHub Pages in less than 24 hours was fun.
This. Current static site generators aren't good for non-engineers, but I'd be willing to bet that doesn't need to be the case. Every instance I've seen requires some sort of technical know-how, or integration with Dropbox/Drive/etc (which many non-technical/older people won't necessarily be familiar with). Has anyone ever tried building a standalone desktop writing app that handles everything for you? I'm just imagi…
My problem with Medium is that it lends this amazing aura of credibility to everything that is published on it. I think they've hit on the design equivalent of the brown note (of South Park fame) which makes readers mentally incontinent vis-a-vis the credibility of the source of the actual text... Or maybe it's just me?
I think they've just managed a good design - mostly by resisting the temptation to show off as so many designers do. It's very minimal - if anything it looks similar to the hand-written no-styles websites that academics often write (that look like http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ )
The hard part is not getting a website to serve an HTML page. It's that modern UI standards for HTML publishing are pretty high. Finding a theme that you like and most other people will like (let alone writing one yourself) is a hassle for most people who aren't front-end developers. You can point to lots of web sites that are hard to read, but that just proves the point that people are rather finicky about it these…
The main problem with Web design, I'm increasingly convinced, is that Browser Defaults Suck. Seriously: if Motherfucking Website, (or Better Motherfucking Website) were the defaults, we'd be ahead of the game. A few other hacks (use "http { font-size: medium }" for example, to default to the user's preferred font size) to further address that. I'm looking for a browser that defaults to Reader Mode by default. Maybe i…
I've been thinking about this exact thing every other day or so since Maciej Cegłowski's slides[1] for his "Website Obesity Crisis" talk got posted here last month.
The intimidating thing for me was always how heavy blogging software was. Never really liked the idea of centralized hosting, but hosting some huge PHP blob with a database never felt like it was worth it. I'm hosting my own site now running Hugo and I love it. I agree that most people have moved to centralized hosting, but I'm seeing a resurgence of self-hosting with static site generators like jekyll, middleman or…
Well, stuff like hugo, nanoc, ikiwiki... inspirational!
My static site generator is using rake for file rules to do stuff with git hooks. It's going to depend on Ruby, but won't be a "Ruby framework". Rake might as well run php, perl, a bash script or a binary. Rake is just a wonderful tool for the job, and Ruby is about as ubiquitous as Perl these days.
Here's some inspiration: http://patshaughnessy.net/2015/1/8/using-rake-to-generate-a-...
Be sure to check out the "power rake" talk he mentions if you haven't already.
Edit: one more thought. On the idea of teaching casual users "git", I think that's an amazing idea. It touches on tip of an iceberg: computer/scientific/technological literacy gaps. If our technologies continue down the path of "black magic," with the ever extreme dichotomy of priests who know the secrets vs. ordinary/"dumb" people who are locked out of the inner knowledge, it's just not going to be conducive to a bright future.
Remember, regular people are dependent on technology, but have begun to develop superstitions about how it works. It's magic to people!
This is such a deep issue.
The intimidating thing for me was always how heavy blogging software was. Never really liked the idea of centralized hosting, but hosting some huge PHP blob with a database never felt like it was worth it. I'm hosting my own site now running Hugo and I love it. I agree that most people have moved to centralized hosting, but I'm seeing a resurgence of self-hosting with static site generators like jekyll, middleman or…
I'm working on a little static site generator now for my own site. The PHP/SQL wordpress kind of option just annoys me and have held me back from publishing altogether (don't even get me started on publishing services and social media sites. Well, stuff like hugo, nanoc, ikiwiki... inspirational! My static site generator is using rake for file rules to do stuff with git hooks. It's going to depend on Ruby, but won't…
Is there any way to install Ruby and required tooling correctly that comes anywhere near to installing JDK?
It's amazing that the web, which was really originally built primarily as a distributed publishing platform, has gotten so damn complicated to publish to. Right now I've got my own self hosted platform, running Wordpress on a Digital Ocean droplet. The constant security updates for Wordpress are a nightmare, and it seems I have to hack both my theme and my post code every time I want to make a slightly interactive po…
Another problem is why we at all need to rely on any third-party hosting services while we have our own computers connected to the Internet. In this regard, I have high hopes for content-addressable distributed systems. Currently, IPFS [1] looks most promising to me. It's easy to publish a static website to it [2], and public gateways are available to make the site accessible to readers who do not run their own nodes…
I had fantasies when Web Audio and Web Midi first were announced of browser based digital audio tools that people would use in one anothers physical presence, over a small local network. There is no reason that every network application needs to depend on centralized services! I was lucky enough to attend Music Hack Day in Berlin and created this Web Midi/WebRTC chat room as an example. I have no idea if it still works or not: https://github.com/timbresmith/pandemonium
honest question, how did Medium become so dominant for all blog posting so quickly ? The design is no doubt beautiful but there is nothing special. Curious why so many bloggers magically decided to publish there all of a sudden. I see tons of tech posts there now.
There's not a good apples to apples comparison of public data, but for instance...
Medium 20k authors per week: http://recode.net/2015/09/28/ev-williams-medium-raises-57-mi...
WordPress.com average 12.7m posts per week: https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2016/01/06/the-2015-wordpress-...