Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr • Hacker News Board

Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr

#71

Post by corin_ » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 9:33 AM UTC

mvkel wrote: post #31

I'll take 99.8% uptime over managing an entire blog infrastructure.

After the initial creation of a Jekyll blog, "managing an entire blog infrastructure" is insanely easy and low maintenance.

It's a static site, so you can host incredibly easily on any number of cloud services, from heroku to AWS S3/CloudFront, many (most?) people keep their Jekyll sites in a git repo (often github) so you won't lose data, and can easily shove it onto another server in no time at all.

Really, it's less maintenance than pretty much anything I've ever had online.

Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr

#72

Post by erikpukinskis » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 9:48 AM UTC

flomo wrote: post #26

citricsquid wrote: post #2

A mistake people seem to make is assuming Tumblr is a blogging platform akin to Wordpress.com, it isn't, it's a different beast entirely. The majority of Tumblr is the "community" of ~teenagers sharing pictures and videos and posts, Tumblr revolves around the dashboard not individual blogs. Sure you can host your company blog there, but do tumblr care about the uptime of that vs. the uptime of their dashboard?

There is enough porn on Tumblr that I would assume it's being blocked by many corporate firewalls. (Not to mention blanket bans on social networking sites.) Probably not a place I would put marketing material.

If you host your blog on something.yourdomain.com, it'll be accessible even if tumblr isn't, right?

Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr

#73

Post by zizee » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 10:43 AM UTC

flomo wrote: post #26

citricsquid wrote: post #2

A mistake people seem to make is assuming Tumblr is a blogging platform akin to Wordpress.com, it isn't, it's a different beast entirely. The majority of Tumblr is the "community" of ~teenagers sharing pictures and videos and posts, Tumblr revolves around the dashboard not individual blogs. Sure you can host your company blog there, but do tumblr care about the uptime of that vs. the uptime of their dashboard?

There is enough porn on Tumblr that I would assume it's being blocked by many corporate firewalls. (Not to mention blanket bans on social networking sites.) Probably not a place I would put marketing material.

Do most corporate firewalls do deep packet inspection? I think that they'd mostly just be blocking domains based on a blacklist, or with a regex.

Since most startups would be using a subdomain of their own domain for their tumblr blog, so I don't think this is an issue.

Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr

#74

Post by leftnode » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 10:49 AM UTC

It does depress me somewhat when I see people writing incredibly insightful or great blog posts on another company's blogging platform. I'd live in constant worry the company could fold up shop one day and your posts would be gone (unless you kept local copies manually).

It's your writing, if it is good and insightful, write it on a server you have control over.

Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr

#75

Post by CJefferson » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 11:43 AM UTC

leftnode wrote: post #74

It does depress me somewhat when I see people writing incredibly insightful or great blog posts on another company's blogging platform. I'd live in constant worry the company could fold up shop one day and your posts would be gone (unless you kept local copies manually). It's your writing, if it is good and insightful, write it on a server you have control over.

I used to have a blog on my personal domain (not saying it was incredibly insightful), and I got tired of updating wordpress. One day the wordpress update failed, and I just took down the blog and now it is gone.

My livejournal blog however, which I set up over 10 years ago (and haven't updated in 7 years) is still there in it's embarassing completeness.

Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr

#76

Post by zizee » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 12:05 PM UTC

SingAlong wrote: post #67

zizee wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you can host PHP on a cedar stack, and I have successfully deployed wordpress to heroku, so that is very cool. It was actually really easy with this: https://github.com/mhoofman/wordpress-heroku But unfortuently, to the best of my knowledge, you can't host both PHP at the same time as Rails. If anyone know otherwise I would love to hear!

I've read about people who use workarounds on the Cedar stack for different purposes. Did you think about running two different heroku instances for the same app? With both on instances on Cedar stack, one instance can be running the rails part while the other instance runs the php. I just read the DotCloud docs and they do a lot of stuff including php and ruby, you might want to check them out to see if they run bot…

Interesting. I'll check out the ability to run two different heroku instances for the same app to see if that can help. If you could point me to any literature on the subject it would be very much appreciated.

I'll ckeckout DotCloud as well. Thanks for the heads up!

edit: added request for more info

Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr

#77

Post by zizee » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 12:06 PM UTC

Leynos wrote: post #68

flomo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is enough porn on Tumblr that I would assume it's being blocked by many corporate firewalls. (Not to mention blanket bans on social networking sites.) Probably not a place I would put marketing material.

It's certainly blocked at my workplace.

But that's just blogs on the tumblr domain. If it is on a subdomain I'd imagine it's not blocked.

Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr

#78

Post by zizee » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 12:08 PM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #64

Sukotto wrote: post #63

Heroku-hosted custom Jekyll setup I thought Heroku only allowed dynamically-generated content (with static assets hosted elsewhere) But the whole point of Jekyll is that it generates a static site. What am I missing? (seriously) I thought a starter Heroku account might work well for a side project I have cooking... Coincidentally, I was reading about Jekyll as something fun to try. Combining both of them would be pre…

Heroku doesn't actively prevent you from hosting a static site. Yeah, heavy assets like images and video should be hosted elsewhere, but with HTML and stuff it's fine to just throw it in a static Git repo and use Heroku.

The main thing that will stop you is the limit on the "slug size", which is 100mb. This is heaps for static text like html, but if your blog is image intensive you could hit the wall after a while. Video would push you over super quick.

Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr

#79

Post by pilom » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 2:50 PM UTC

k7d wrote: post #65

PStamatiou wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had thought about it but - I wanted to use Sinatra to 301 old tumblr urls - Call me weird but I loathe seeing *.html in urls and that's the only thing you can do with S3 root object (when I checked a few months ago) - something I can't remember. maybe it was cf edge server time to update when altering updates.

> I loathe seeing *.html in urls and that's the only thing you can do with S3 root object You can configure name of index file, and that will be displayed for requests against root URL and subdirectories (such as blog posts) as well. No need for having .html in URLs. The only problem I've encountered with S3 web hosting is that it does not let you host naked domains.

Naked domains as in "example.com" without the www? Just name your bucket without the www and it will work. You can then do a javascript redirect from a simple index page at www.example.com (google has said that they now follow javascript redirects. My play example "http://whitewatersearch.com

Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr

#80

Post by mvkel » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 4:55 PM UTC

trickjarrett wrote: post #32

mvkel wrote: post #31

I'll take 99.8% uptime over managing an entire blog infrastructure.

Out of genuine curiosity, what percent of uptime would be worth managing your own infrastructure?

I think it's more important to know _when_ the downtime occurs vs. the percentage itself.

If the site is down from 12am to 6am due to some botched maintenance, I really don't care, as traffic will be minuscule, if not non-existent for our core market. And 6 hours of downtime is a killer for uptime percentage.

The "Jekyll is so easy! It's the easiest thing I've ever maintained!" argument reminds me of Andy Rubin's now infamous quote about the openness of Android: "the definition of open: "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u it://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make"

The point of Tumblr is I don't need to maintain _anything_!