Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#41

Post by PuffinBlue » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 10:33 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #30

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 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/

:-)

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#42

Post by joelgrus » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 10:33 PM UTC

I "self-host" using Pelican + S3. It's super cheap (< $1/month) and pretty easy, the only real downside is that all of the Pelican themes are really ugly, and I'm not good enough at design to make a better one.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#43

Post by skybrian » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 10:34 PM UTC

The hard part is not getting a website to serve an HTML page. It's that modern UI standards for HTML publishing are pretty high. Finding a theme that you like and most other people will like (let alone writing one yourself) is a hassle for most people who aren't front-end developers.

You can point to lots of web sites that are hard to read, but that just proves the point that people are rather finicky about it these days.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#44

Post by onion2k » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 10:34 PM UTC

PuffinBlue wrote: post #34

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.

It's not blazingly fast but it's good enough for me - a blog with about 50 posts takes about 30 seconds to deploy from a clean start. It does sensible things like caching the json database and only generating new posts.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#45

Post by cookiecaper » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 10:38 PM UTC

I think the age of everyone having their own domain running their own code is starting to expire, just like the age of running your own email server. There's just too much spam and bad actors out there, you have to prove your site innocent to the big indexes before you can get anywhere. If you publish on Medium, Facebook, Blogspot, or another platform that has "rep", people assume the spam is filtered out by the platform, and they treat your content less skeptically.

Turns out AOL had the right idea the whole time -- people want platform-specific keywords and they want to trust the platform's caretakers to decide what's OK for them to see.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#46

Post by praveenster » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 10:39 PM UTC

I am surprised nobody seems to mention indiewebcamp.com and withknown.com as alternatives to Wordpress or Ghost.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#47

Post by zimpenfish » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 10:39 PM UTC

sleepyhead wrote: post #40

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.

"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…

> Unfortunately I haven't found a good admin GUI for a static site generator yet.

Me either but I'm considering using Ghost (which does have a nice frontend) and liberating the content from the SQLite database into static files for generation and serving.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#48

Post by evancordell » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 10:41 PM UTC

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 love before I'd really say I'm pleased with it, but I'm very happy with how cheap and easy it was to set up a personal blog with SSL.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#49

Post by johnchristopher » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 10:43 PM UTC

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…

> 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 post. Never mind that there doesn't seem to be a decent way to preview posts on mobile.

I came to the conclusion that sometimes hand crafting HTML tags for interesting pages takes less time than fiddling with Wordpress innards and plugins.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#50

Post by isomorphic » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 10:44 PM UTC

PuffinBlue wrote: post #41

lmm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ :-)

Sure, but the Google Analytics loader code on either of those is larger than all of the HTML boilerplate and CSS combined. At least the first one has snarky HTML comments!