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Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

robertnealan.com

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Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#91

Post by dasil003 »

robertnealan wrote: post #64
lkrubner wrote: post #10

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…

I was referring less to general blogging companies like Typepad/Blogger - IMO those are pretty similar to Medium in functionality but minus the community aspect (blogs only linked to one-another by intentional choice, versus Medium where everything is aggregated and quasi-curated by the application). When Svbtle first came out it seemed to cater to almost purely tech audiences and allowed new authors on a limited bas…

I seem to recall that Medium was initially invite only as well?

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#92

Post by fenomas »

I don't follow the author's complaints about terms and conditions. I suppose language like "we can change these terms any time and your use of the site constitutes acceptance" sounds ominous at a naive level, but what's the alternative? It would amount to some form of preventing users from using the site until they click "agree", and then doing that again every time the T&Cs change, right?

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#93

Post by mbreese »

fenomas wrote: post #92

I don't follow the author's complaints about terms and conditions. I suppose language like "we can change these terms any time and your use of the site constitutes acceptance" sounds ominous at a naive level, but what's the alternative? It would amount to some form of preventing users from using the site until they click "agree", and then doing that again every time the T&Cs change, right?

We're talking about the authors here, not just readers, so yes, having an click-though for a change in Terms of Service seems appropriate.. Sending an email to users when they change is also appropriate.

Terms of Service shouldn't change often enough that this should ever be an issue.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#94

Post by fenomas »

johnchristopher wrote: post #49
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…

The updates and the theme-hacking are what drove me to migrate from wordpress to a static generator a month ago. I still had to do some hacking to get my non-vanilla posts to display right, but generally I found it way easier to hack on the generator templates than to dig into wordpress's crazy innards.

(This might just be due to WP having generations of cruft though - for me the hard part was always figuring out which arcane PHP method I needed to hook, and how WP wanted me to hook it, in order to add something to this or that part of the page.)

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#95

Post by Arcanum-XIII »

Fice wrote: post #72
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…

Another problem is why we at all need to rely on any third-party hosting services while we have our own computers connected to the Internet. In this regard, I have high hopes for content-addressable distributed systems. Currently, IPFS [1] looks most promising to me. It's easy to publish a static website to it [2], and public gateways are available to make the site accessible to readers who do not run their own nodes…

My computer is not always up, or connected to an open (even moderately) network. What's more, I sometimes have to delay for 2 days an update because it requires an update at the wrong time, if I didn't missed it... And that's without even speaking about the reliability of my internet connection - I don't want to try to reach even 3 9 on it. So yes I have a computer at home, but it's not a properly managed server, and I don't want it to become one !

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#96

Post by pcurve »

dberg wrote: post #83

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.

They remained 'elitist' for just the right amount of time, making people grave for the privilege to sign up. Svtble pulled the same stunt.

But medium timed things right and opened up to masses sooner. People signed up in droves. 'svtble' stayed elitist for many more months, but were medium forced their hands, but it was already too late.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#98

Post by pkd »

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.

I wanted the same, ie speed with ease of templating, so I made Griffin[1] which uses handlebars templates and can parse 5000 markdown pages in ~8 seconds on my machine.

[1] https://github.com/pawandubey/griffin

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#99

Post by asteadman »

tedkimble wrote: post #52
sleepyhead wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Looks cool, but at first glance (screenshots) it appears to lean heavily on a "git"-like model with branching and merging and rebasing. These are not concepts that I would expect a so-called "non-technical" market to understand or embrace. Something much simpler may be required for such people.

Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

#100

Post by volaski »

dberg wrote: post #85
rglover wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been wondering this, too, and design/ease-of-use aside, the biggest argument I've heard (and observed) is the network effect. Even trivial Medium posts get at least a handful of favorites and 1-2 comments. A built-in audience is likely an easy sell for the majority of folks.

I guess that makes sense, but there are certainly other platforms with an "audience", like Tumblr, etc?

Medium started out with Twitter sign in, which means their early users were all Twitter "influencers". The way I look at it, it's a blogging wrapper layer built around Twitter social graph. When you sign in with your Twitter account you automatically follow everyone you follow on Twitter on Medium.
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