Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

robertnealan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 199 posts

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#151

Post by zapt02 »

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…

The security updates are automatic (unless you opt-out) and previewing on mobile is as easy as logging in to the site from your mobile device. (The administration panel is fully responsive.)

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#152

Post by verusfossa »

miseg wrote: post #145
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.

There are quite a few themes out there already and growing rapidly. Adding a CSS theme is almost as easy as a wordpress theme. If you wanted a theme catered to your website, I would expect you'd have to get someone to style it up regardless.

The main two things Wordress has on static generated blogs at the moment are their current community and the editing experience. The editing is of course by design. I have heard that prose.io[0] is nice, but have never worked with it. Essentially webhooked github for cms-free blogs. To me, that seems like the way we should be going.

edit: add link, their site is mainly for access [0] https://github.com/prose/prose

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#153

Post by tdkl »

evancordell wrote: post #48

I've recently settled on a mostly-free self-hosting platform: Jekyll + Github Pages + Google Domains + Kloudsec. Jekyll and Github Pages keeps the deployment simple and Google Domains has proven to be simple, cheap, and reliable. I tried Kloudsec out last week on a whim after seeing it on HN, and so far it's great - simple, free SSL with let's encrypt. https://evancordell.com if interested. It needs a little more lov…

So you didn't had to transfer the DNS control to Kloudsec to get CDN + SSL like with Cloudflare ?

I'm hosting my site on Github Pages as well, but Gandi as my DNS. I considered Cloudflare at the time, but would had to move the DNS from Gandi to Cloudflare and pay 20$ to Gandi for that.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#154

Post by pjc50 »

K0nserv wrote: post #150

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-...

This is going to sound like a stupid question, but how does one use Jekyll on Windows? I've also never been quite clear whether the github Jekyll is supposed to be run locally before push or is run automatically on their side.

(also, what is S3 adding in your case? As far as I'm aware github.io sites are free, while AWS billing is not a hard limit and you're still liable for potentially huge charges if someone decides to DDOS you while you're away from a computer)

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#155

Post by K0nserv »

pjc50 wrote: post #154
K0nserv wrote: post #150

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-...

This is going to sound like a stupid question, but how does one use Jekyll on Windows? I've also never been quite clear whether the github Jekyll is supposed to be run locally before push or is run automatically on their side. (also, what is S3 adding in your case? As far as I'm aware github.io sites are free, while AWS billing is not a hard limit and you're still liable for potentially huge charges if someone decide…

Jekyll should work on Windows because Ruby works on Windows. The reality of it is that many library developers are very bad at making sure their stuff work on Windows. http://rubyinstaller.org/ might be something to look into. Another option is to use some other static site generator instead of Jekyll.

> I've also never been quite clear whether the github Jekyll is supposed to be run locally before push or is run automatically on their side.

Depends on the setup. In all setups you are going to want to be able to run the page locally in a watch mode. `jekyll serve --watch --drafts`. When it comes to deployment it differs a bit, if you use the approach outlined in my post the actual building of the page happens on Travis which pushes the generated site to s3. With Github pages it's all taken care of by Github when you push.

> also, what is S3 adding in your case? As far as I'm aware github.io sites are free, while AWS billing is not a hard limit and you're still liable for potentially huge charges if someone decides to DDOS you while you're away from a computer

When running Jekyll with Github pages there are limitations to what kind of plugins and gems you can use. However it's a perfectly valid approach. I have a billing alert set up at $5 on AWS and to a degree Cloudflare protects me from DDOS. Honestly though most of my pages are extremely lightweight and s3 is cheap enough that even millions of requests is not going to incur huge costs. All my static assets are cached by cloudflare as well.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#156

Post by bnastic »

scandox wrote: post #5

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'm in the opposite camp - having medium.com in the url substantially decreases the article's chances of ever being read by me.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#157

Post by liotier »

_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…

> I don't agree with the apparently widespread conclusion [..] that not publishing is better than publishing using a less-than-lovely platform

And moreover, I don't agree that not communicating is better than communicating using a less-than-lovely platform... Static generators are fine for publishing but taking into account the requirements for blog-style bidirectional communication (comments, trackback, pingbacks etc.) excludes static sites unless one surrenders control to third parties such as Discus & al.

Wordpress is fine - as long as one carefully selects plugins and culls the unmaintained ones mercilessly.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#158

Post by Esau »

cperciva wrote: post #120
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'm seeing a resurgence of self-hosting with static site generators I never stopped: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/

And that's why I like you.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#159

Post by miseg »

verusfossa wrote: post #152
miseg wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are quite a few themes out there already and growing rapidly. Adding a CSS theme is almost as easy as a wordpress theme. If you wanted a theme catered to your website, I would expect you'd have to get someone to style it up regardless. The main two things Wordress has on static generated blogs at the moment are their current community and the editing experience. The editing is of course by design. I have heard…

Thank you. You're right that I'd need a developer in any case to first customise the theme, but then also to add customisations over time.

It's still holding us back, though, having a PHP app that a developer needs to edit, instead of allowing any of the team to add content to the site.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#160

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

quanticle wrote: post #144
_yosefk wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I see

"GET /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1"

about eight times a day on my lowest traffic sites. And I don't even have WP installed. (Or PHP.)

WP is a distributed botnet farm. I know people who have given up reseller hosting businesses because keeping customer WP installs clean was becoming a 24/7 job for them.

Unfortunately Hugo, Jekyll, etc are a poor substitute for WP, because they're much too difficult for non-coders to use. They're also a poor substitute economically - the WP template & plug-in market is huge.

It must surely be possible to build a blog engine that's secure, easy to use, and easy to customise?

Post reply on HN