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

161–170 of 199 posts

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#161

Post by yen223 »

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.

To add to this, it wasn't too long ago that the technical and financial cost of setting up and running a server were too prohibitive for the casual user.

Nowadays, I can set up a public-facing server with a few clicks for $5 a month. We have it too easy.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#163

Post by lmm »

_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 use github pages for my blog, disqus for comments. Pages is just a convenient place to host - I have my entries in a git repo, the pages are statically generated with Jekyll, I'm sure I could run it myself if github started doing anything onerous. For comments it's just become too hard to self-host anything given how much spam there is, so I've given in and use disqus in the same way that I've stopped self-hosting email and use gmail.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#164

Post by nebulon »

lips wrote: post #118

As a blog consumer, rather than producer, I also have reservations about Medium-esque sites, but from the opposite perspective. There's already an infinite quantity of interesting content to read, and it seems reasonable to expect rising quantities of worthwhile, as I find writing and creations that I was unaware of when they were being made. With all this stuff , I want to be able to control where and when I read, a…

Hi. We try to ease the managing of basic server installs with our Cloudron platform as well, but take a different route than Sandstorm. https://cloudron.io/ Personally selfhosting blogs and other things was the main driver why to work towards our product. Playing sysadmin and maintaining those selfhosted apps, taking care of domains and certs...all that is just not very much fun for me after having it done once :-)

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#165

Post by mynewtb »

mmaunder wrote: post #75
peterwwillis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even considering Wordpress probably makes up 50% of the compromised sites on the internet, due to its terrible security track record and that nobody patches their own blogs?

You can get auto-updates and we do a pretty good job of protecting WP sites. But the situation is dire. A survey we did recently showed that 38.9% of respondents (out of over 7000 WP site admins) were hacked within the past 12 months. https://www.wordfence.com/learn/2015-wordpress-security-surv...

Heavy selection bias.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#166

Post by mark_l_watson »

I went from years of using blogger.com to trying Wordpress for a few months. Then I switched to Jekyll and statically generated blog articles. In the end I went back to blogger.com because I figured that if I needed a 3rd party like discus for comments, then I might as well use blogger.com

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#167

Post by tuananh »

primaryobjects wrote: post #67
PuffinBlue wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the generation speed like with Hexo? I'm using Hugo but I'm not really enjoying Go templates so I'm curious as to how Hexo performs.

I run hexo on a blog of almost 100 articles. Great platform btw. It takes about 20s to generate. Here's my review of migrating to hexo http://www.primaryobjects.com/2015/12/15/a-tale-of-migrating...

20s for 100 articles is pretty slow.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#168

Post by PavlovsCat »

CaptSpify wrote: post #119
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 never did find a self-hosted blogging system that I liked, so I just made my own. Basically just githooks+php into a small, mostly html site. I wanted something simple and easy, and could be used from almost any browser (even lynx!) IMO, lots of blogging platforms add completely unnecessary cruft. Some people may want it, and it definitely can be useful, but not for me.

Yeah, I did the same way. In the n-th iteration it's become quite the beast, and it's not static, but it does exactly what I want how I want it, and I would trade nothing I saw so far for it.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#169

Post by mediumdave »

K0nserv wrote: post #155
pjc50 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aut…

> Jekyll should work on Windows because Ruby works on Windows.

Jekyll is a bit of a nightmare on Windows at the moment, at least if any significant part of your workflow is based on cygwin. (I helped a colleague get it running a couple weeks ago.)

Cygwin ruby + gem install jekyll -> fail.

rbenv to build ruby from source under Cygwin, gem install jekyll -> fail.

The one solution I found that works is using Chocolatey [1] to install ruby and then gem install jekyll. Even so, I wasn't able to get pygments working for syntax highlighting, and the Chocolatey Ruby does not play nicely with cygwin terminal for interactive programs.

[1] https://chocolatey.org/

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#170

Post by tehbeard »

verusfossa wrote: post #116
blurbleblurble wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Neat project, good luck with it. I think I'll stick with Hugo, it's freaky-fast and postcss breaking CSS into an AST makes it really modular. Power moved from js into css which I'm okay with (and browsers are too). As for git. The reason these blogs are so heavy is because editing text files for most people requires a text editor interface on the http which in turn means you need dynamic content whicn in tern means y…

> Email clients already have the text editor users want, why rebuild the wheel?

I wouldn't put too much faith in email clients html output being sane, or consistent across clients.

You could do it with markdown, but then you're still having to teach them markdown.

Post reply on HN