Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#31

Post by ashark » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 10:25 PM UTC

peterwwillis wrote: post #15

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?

Not just you. Before I found out what Medium was, I thought it was some new journalism franchise with a lot of amateur contributors. (I guess in a weird way that's what blogging is?)

Same. They managed to fake me out for quite a while.

Then again, I only interacted with the site by following links on sites like this, reading the linked item, then closing the tab. My entire impression came from the quality of those posts (took time to see bad ones make it to the front page of HN, for example) and the post page design. If I'd ever clicked around the site or visited the homepage I might have figured it out faster.

These days I expect a level of quality slightly better than Tumblr when I see the medium.com domain name in a link, and am occasionally pleasantly surprised. The image/marketing only went so far.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#32

Post by minimaxir » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 10:25 PM UTC

PuffinBlue wrote: post #14

minimaxir wrote: post #6

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.

They deleted your site??? That's pretty extraordinary. Don't they normally just suspend the account, put up a static page indicating so and then ask you to pay some more?

What happened was that they forcibly migrated my Wordpress from shared hosting to a VPS to accept the traffic...but they didn't migrate the MySQL database. And the console showed it had a size of 0KB.

A few emails were sent out that day.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#33

Post by blakesterz » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 10:26 PM UTC

I've been running a small hosting company since 2002. Started hosting just my blog, then friends, then their friends and so on. I used to have about 300 blogs total, now I'm down to about 250, and it's slowly dropping every month. A few of those people moved to other hosting, and kept the blogs, but really most of them just said "I'm giving up, no time to blog when I'm busy on Twitter and Facebook"

I think many people feel like they get out what they needed to get out on Twitter/Facebook. They used to write on their own blogs to get things out, now it's elsewhere.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#34

Post by PuffinBlue » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 10:27 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #2

I use and highly recommend hexo.io with it's S3 deployment plugin. It's as good as Jekyll but easier to modify and theme if you come from a web dev background as it's written in NodeJS rather than Ruby.

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.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#35

Post by dlsx » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 10:28 PM UTC

I think a big point the author is missing is branding.

If you use medium you gain some short-term cred, but in the long term you are missing out by being "in" with a group.

Social networks, any large scale networks stagnate creativity. If you are your own free entity I respect that a lot more. I always appreciate well done websites and I think mobile is passé. It's time to reinvent the web and 4K screens are very exciting tech for me personally.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#36

Post by anonbanker » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 10:29 PM UTC

mig39 wrote: post #3

No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

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.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#37

Post by davnicwil » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 10:29 PM UTC

j45 wrote: post #26

davnicwil wrote: post #20

I own a self-hosted blog and am actually in the process of deciding whether to transfer over to medium. To be honest I'm pretty much decided that I will, because it's just easier, not to mention I can save myself some hosting fees. The key questions of the debate on the cons side of switching, assuming you're blogging for fun and not thinking particularly about advertising or massively customised SEO strategies, seem…

What would you have in place in case Medium went away or lost the data compared to what you already have?

If Medium does go away, I suppose I'd take the backups and just go through and repost everything on another platform, or simply set up my self-hosted blog again.

Yes, that would be immensely annoying, but it's not really that terrible of a downside in a calculated risk offset against how much easier (and, again, free-er!) medium is to use, and to maintain.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#38

Post by PuffinBlue » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 10:29 PM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #32

PuffinBlue wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They deleted your site??? That's pretty extraordinary. Don't they normally just suspend the account, put up a static page indicating so and then ask you to pay some more?

What happened was that they forcibly migrated my Wordpress from shared hosting to a VPS to accept the traffic...but they didn't migrate the MySQL database. And the console showed it had a size of 0KB. A few emails were sent out that day.

Geez, that sounds like a complete PITA. At least you'll now have a nice version controlled setup, small mercy.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#39

Post by HappyTypist » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 10:30 PM UTC

j45 wrote: post #26

davnicwil wrote: post #20

I own a self-hosted blog and am actually in the process of deciding whether to transfer over to medium. To be honest I'm pretty much decided that I will, because it's just easier, not to mention I can save myself some hosting fees. The key questions of the debate on the cons side of switching, assuming you're blogging for fun and not thinking particularly about advertising or massively customised SEO strategies, seem…

What would you have in place in case Medium went away or lost the data compared to what you already have?

Archive.org

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#40

Post by sleepyhead » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 10:30 PM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #6

27182818284 wrote: post #4

I self-host using a static site generator. I've found it to be very nice in the sense that it just takes pennies for the site to run. I think a lot of folks are still running WordPress of some kind on their own Dreamhost, etc, accounts which feels like self-hosting to me.

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.

"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 really have such complex requirements. Most don't really need their site to be dynamic, and what requires some server functionality can be solved with an external service (save data, send email etc).