171–180 of 199 posts
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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/ )
Actually more like http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ :-)
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…
The failure of the Web ecosystem as a readily viable document management system is a pretty scathing indictment. As I write this, I'm desparately trying to winnow my way to "tab zero" (by analog to "inbox zero"). And, at some point, organise the pages I've turned up as interesting to be filed for later research and assimilation. I'm using a tablet as my primary browsing device lately (battery life, weight, portrait a…
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"Static site generators are not a good answer for non-engineers, especially if customizations are necessary." Could be. Content and templates could be hosted on S3. Unfortunately I haven't found a good admin GUI for a static site generator yet. I use Jekyll myself and as a developer that's great, not something I would recommend to normal users though. Which is a shame because most users (or small businesses) don't re…
I recently launched Static Website Manager ( https://www.staticwebsitemanager.com ) which aims bring static sites to a non-technical market. Would love to chat more if you have questions.
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.
Read what 37Signals/Basecamp who has spent 15 years building their (huge) audience on their own site says: https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-moves-to-medium-c8... I think the number 1 reason is reach.
That said, I agree with most of the complaints about Medium as well.
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…
What is complicated about it? I'm not sure what you have in mind - there was never any Edenic period where you could run dynamic web blogs for free on your own server without any configuration or investment of time and dedication. All the old tools still exist, but better and polished by time. Let's compare modern blogging to how you would have blogged in 1996, or when Berners-Lee launched the first documents at CERN…
My original site on Geocities in 98. I would put up dated posts occasionally. A new new item meant editing the index.html and my "archive" was just all the old posts cut and pasted to an archive.html page. Adding a new navigation link meant editing every page.
For a while I was using shtml for "header" and "footer" files which could be tacked on to individual entry files vut it was still a pain to use. Blog platforms and other CMS systems with editors that keep the content sepersted from the design are definitely better.
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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/ )
Actually more like http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ :-)
Actually, your simple design is not the only one to make my day. I have finally found a guy who puts all the HTML5 etc. on the one page. He's a physics lecturer. He has dead easy html files that illustrate Newton's Cannon, using canvas and javascript. Finally, I am "getting" it. See http://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/html5/. (And the bonus was to see that, with uniform circular motion, the acceleration is towards the centre of rotation. I mean I really need things explained simply without any extras getting in the way.) Of course, I had to play with it to understand it. But the beauty was that, with the source code all there on the one page, I could easily make changes and see the effect immediately. Thanks Dan Schroeder.
PS I need to remind myself that posting pdf files is another straightforward way to get information online.
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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…
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In support of betteridge, I still keep a personal blog on a vanity domain, and you can pry it out of my cold dead hands.
I'd be interested to know how you arrived at that phrasing as opposed to "vanity blog on a personal domain." I think it says a lot about why selfhosted blogs are becoming less common!
That said, I'd like to think my personal blog is to document my personal development and progress, even though it probably is ultimately just an exercise in self-aggrandizement. but I _try_ not to make it about vanity.
however, the domain name is very much a vanity thing, just like having LNX4WIN on your licence plate would be.
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The failure of the Web ecosystem as a readily viable document management system is a pretty scathing indictment. As I write this, I'm desparately trying to winnow my way to "tab zero" (by analog to "inbox zero"). And, at some point, organise the pages I've turned up as interesting to be filed for later research and assimilation. I'm using a tablet as my primary browsing device lately (battery life, weight, portrait a…
My mind turns towards a Pinboard archival account with tag searches in browser bookmarks.
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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.
Behind the scenes it's just running the usual packages for templates, markdown, minification etc., so for a fresh build it's about as fast as any typical grunt-based setup. But AFAICT it correctly detects when things don't need to be regenerated, so incremental builds are quite fast no matter what, unless you're editing templates. I recently converted my wordpress blog to hexo and blogged about it, if you're interest…