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Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

robertnealan.com

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Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#141

Post by akerro »

squeakynick wrote: post #123

I'm embarrassed to say that I still hand write my blog directly in HTML using Notepad++ and manually FTP changes to the hosting company. Most of my blog is static HMTL, with a smidgen of script for analytics or occasional interaction. Every now and then I'll use some light PHP (typically when I need interaction with a database on the server).

I'm going to do the same. I modified a wordpress theme to fit better my needs, after an update all my changes were gone (I had a backup ofc), but it's irritating that I have to patch my theme after every update. I'm going to create a few scripts that will host my blog on gitlab and post it automatically on my server. Static pages are the future.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#142

Post by rhizome »

squeakynick wrote: post #123

I'm embarrassed to say that I still hand write my blog directly in HTML using Notepad++ and manually FTP changes to the hosting company. Most of my blog is static HMTL, with a smidgen of script for analytics or occasional interaction. Every now and then I'll use some light PHP (typically when I need interaction with a database on the server).

Yeah, hardcore! I helped run a music review blog in ~1998 that gained at least 10 reviews per week, all handcoded HTML with multiple audio samples. I mean, when markdown is a common enough blogging format on its own, handcoding HTML to get the same effect isn't going to be crazy.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#144

Post by quanticle »

_yosefk wrote: post #122
verusfossa wrote: post #86

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 use WordPress, a huge PHP blob with a database, for my self-hosted blog. I somewhat agree with the parent and sister comments in that, as a programmer, the way these things work irks me out. However, I don't agree with the apparently widespread conclusion that it follows, from this sentiment, that not publishing is better than publishing using a less-than-lovely platform. I also don't agree with the widespread coro…

>However, I don't agree with the apparently widespread conclusion that it follows, from this sentiment, that not publishing is better than publishing using a less-than-lovely platform.

After having had to deal with the aftermath of a hacked Wordpress site that was sending out massive amounts of spam, I would respectfully disagree. I consider Wordpress (and Wordpress plugins, especially) as essentially a security hole that allows malicious actors to gain free access to relatively powerful hardware on fat datacenter pipes, making the Internet worse for everyone around them.

By all means, publish. But don't publish using a platform that allows unauthorized users to misuse your hardware and turn it into a spam zombie/DDOS box/staging box for hacks, etc.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#145

Post by miseg »

verusfossa wrote: post #86

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've hit a roadblock from the other side of things: I have a PHP/Smarty app including a marketing site that would love some new content. But I don't want to go editing stylesheets etc for web site updates.

To make the process not depend on me, I'm considering wordpress.

Hugo and static site generators are nice, but need a developer.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#146

Post by kjaer »

dba7dba wrote: post #121

My observation is that about 90% of the Wordpress sites out there don't need Wordpress. All they really need is html/css.

Wordpress is often chosen because it provides the less technically inclined with a nice management interface. If there were rock-solid web interfaces to edit content on static websites, we'd begin to have a serious contender to Wordpress. In the meantime, static websites will unfortunately be reserved to us technically inclined people.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#147

Post by Fice »

Arcanum-XIII wrote: post #95
Fice wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My computer is not always up, or connected to an open (even moderately) network. What's more, I sometimes have to delay for 2 days an update because it requires an update at the wrong time, if I didn't missed it... And that's without even speaking about the reliability of my internet connection - I don't want to try to reach even 3 9 on it. So yes I have a computer at home, but it's not a properly managed server, and…

In a content-addressable network your computer seeds the content rather than serves it. You do not need a properly managed server for that. It does not matter whether the original node is accessible, information can be retrieved as long as it is available somewhere in the network.

In IPFS, if you need to immediately ensure availability of your content, you can request it via a public gateway to force it into the gateways cache. Then the gateway will continue to seed your data even if your node goes offline.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#148

Post by reitoei »

burningion wrote: post #22

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…

> But for the casual user, I think it's become more difficult to self publish over the years, not less.

No. The exact opposite, in fact. Micro-publishing services like Twitter & Tumbler have enabled millions of casual users to publish and distribute their own content with a few keystrokes and a couple clicks.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#149

Post by blowski »

reitoei wrote: post #148
burningion wrote: post #22

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…

> But for the casual user, I think it's become more difficult to self publish over the years, not less. No. The exact opposite, in fact. Micro-publishing services like Twitter & Tumbler have enabled millions of casual users to publish and distribute their own content with a few keystrokes and a couple clicks.

In the context of this discussion, 'self-publish' means you control your content and its distribution. In that sense, Twitter and Tumbler are not self-publishing, since they own the software and can do pretty much whatever they like with your content. Also, you can't just pick up your Tweets and move them all to Facebook while retaining the same URL, whereas you can do this moving from self-hosted WordPress to self-hosted Jekyll.

That said, I don't think it's become harder to self-publish, but it hasn't matched the progress made by services like Twitter.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#150

Post by K0nserv »

I don't think that it's dead and self publishing I'd argue is easier and cheaper than ever. My blog has all the power of s3 for scaling with free SSL from Cloudflare and I pay peanuts for it. Current bill is $0.03 some months it gets closer to $1.

I've written about it here https://hugotunius.se/aws/cloudflare/web/2016/01/10/the-one-...

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