61–70 of 199 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could still happily roll your own Wordpress site but have it hosted with a managed provider. Also stick something like Headway Theme in there and you get a pretty easy setup even for not technical folks.
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?
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think I'm looking at things over the span of 2 decades of keeping one's presence and information online whether self-hosted or with a service, both of which come and go.
I am curious when this short-lived moment was suppose to be? From the article: "There was a promising short lived moment where smaller, topic-oriented blog networks like Svbtle (amongst others) started appearing, but even those seem to have gone by the wayside and are increasingly being replaced by Medium." Back in 2002 I co-founded a blogging company. At that time we were competing with the likes of Blogger.com and…
When Svbtle first came out it seemed to cater to almost purely tech audiences and allowed new authors on a limited basis - this might have been coincidence due to the creator's roots or connections, but it created a sense of community and credibility within that social sphere (similar to Hacker News in the tech world). Unfortunately, since they've opened signups to everyone it seems like its lost that sense of community and become just-another-blogging-platform.
Also would be extremely curious as to the stats on historical blogging data.
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 you know, I'm running WordPress for one of my sites now, and at least in my experience, the "constant security updates" are about as much of a nightmare as they are for iPhone applications at this point. It updates itself! Every so often I log into the admin panel and make sure the plugins I'm using are updated, too -- which is generally a few clicks. From a user standpoint, rather than a nerdy hacker standpoint, WP is frankly closer to a maintenance-free, turnkey CMS than I really thought possible. The majority of WP users never need to hack their theme and post code, and I'd say of the ones who do, the vast majority need to do it very, very rarely.
I get that when you do look at it from a nerdy hacker standpoint, WP can be mildly to profoundly annoying. I am writing a new theme for my site to do a few specific things and I'm finding it kind of infuriating work. But as far as full-featured, self-hostable tools go, WP is just about impossible to beat. (And on many hosts the installation is pretty close to one-click; even if you have to do it manually, there are fewer steps with WP than with almost any other major web software package out there. Anyone wondering how PHP can possibly be still so popular when its fractal wrongness is so well documented just has to look at how easy installing WP is compared to installing roughly any other non-PHP web app ever written.)
At any rate, the web isn't intrinsically any more difficult than it ever was: if you want to build a static web site, you still can, and you don't need any tools in 2016 that you wouldn't have had in 1996. The reason that hosted publishing solutions are so popular goes back to the difference between "nerd" and "non-nerd," I suspect: whatever else one can say about Medium, getting an article published through it and having it look good by modern design standards is really, really easy. I'd like to see more self-hosting blogging myself, but "just write your articles in your favorite plain text editor in Markdown, process them with Jekyll and push 'em up to your server of choice with rsync" is, for most of humanity, simply not an attractive alternative to "type into this WYSIWYG box and click Publish."
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.
Has anyone ever tried building a standalone desktop writing app that handles everything for you? I'm just imaging an app where I can buy a domain/hosting, give it my user creds if needed, and it automatically sets everything up for me in a clean interface without needing to know anything about servers/DNS/etc.
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.
Here's my review of migrating to hexo http://www.primaryobjects.com/2015/12/15/a-tale-of-migrating...
yes - why self host when I can host my blog at github using jekyll in < 10 minutes ?
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…
Let's compare modern blogging to how you would have blogged in 1996, or when Berners-Lee launched the first documents at CERN, your workflow looked like 'write .html file, FTP to server, Apache serves static files to anyone who visits'. In 2016, your workflow, if you want to, looks like... 'write .html file, SCP to server, nginx serves static files to anyone who visits'. You can still write HTML5 by hand, it's not harder than original HTML (may be easier). You can write Markdown which compiles to HTML with no more fuss than 'markdown.pl foo.md foo.html' or 'pandoc foo.md -o foo.html'.
You don't want to run a server? That's fine, find a host like S3 and instead of 'scp', 's3cmd'. It'll cost you next to nothing compared to back then.
You want some sort of blog software? There must be a million which are not named 'Wordpress' and do not have endless security nightmares. You want static site generators? Likewise, millions. WSIYWG HTML editors? Likewise. Free hosting? At this point almost any large site offers blog-like functionality because hosting is so cheap.
But what is harder? If you want to run your own server, everything is infinitely easy than in 1996. Apt-get may or may not have existed in 1996, but I'm sure it was far less comprehensive and reliable than it is now. You can let your server run for many years without upgrading if you want, and when you do upgrade, it's a few commands. Why, you don't even need to compile a kernel or buy a server edition of your OS. It has never been easier nor cheaper to run your own website in a myriad of different methods. So what exactly has gotten 'so damn complicated'?
The reality is that most people, and especially casuals, do not care that much about high-quality publishing or control or reliability, and instead care more about extreme convenience and network effects, and often either have nothing to say or don't want to say it and so no matter how polished your static site generator is, they couldn't care less. As Yogi Berra said, "if people don't want to go to the ballpark, how are you going stop'em?"