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.
> It's as good as Jekyll but easier to modify and theme if you could from a web dev background as it's written in NodeJS rather than Ruby.
Er, are you implying that Ruby is not a language for people with a web development background?
Regardless, most of Jekyll tweaking is done with Liquid templates, which are mostly agnostic. (You do use Ruby for plugins, yes, but they are not super important.)
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.
Behind the scenes it's just running the usual packages for templates, markdown, minification etc., so for a fresh build it's about as fast as any typical grunt-based setup. But AFAICT it correctly detects when things don't need to be regenerated, so incremental builds are quite fast no matter what, unless you're editing templates.
I recently converted my wordpress blog to hexo and blogged about it, if you're interested:
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.
Betteridge's law still applies. Most headlines with a question are really trying to convince you that the answer to that question is yes, when it often isn't. Besides, rhetorical questions in headlines are tacky and shouldn't be used.
I'd be interested to know how you arrived at that phrasing as opposed to "vanity blog on a personal domain." I think it says a lot about why selfhosted blogs are becoming less common!
By definition, blogs are about vanity. Even when you're doing something important or documenting progress, blogs are for self-important people trying to express or justify their past actions or current beliefs.
That said, I'd like to think my personal blog is to document my personal development and progress, even though it probably is ultimately just an exercise in self-aggrandizement. but I _try_ not to make it about vanity.
however, the domain name is very much a vanity thing, just like having LNX4WIN on your licence plate would be.
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.
"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).
> 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.
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.
Looks pretty cool. Normally I would want something I could self host on Heroku but this looks like something I could consider recommending to clients who wants a simple CMS.
I like the idea of Jekyll, but I don't like Jekyll itself (I'm pretty sure I have a severe allergic reaction to Ruby).
Something I have yet to see but that I think would be perfect would be a client-side single-page-app that served as a s3-backed static site generator.
Navigate to MyStaticWebsiteGenerator.io (or download it, or self-host it, or clone the repo, it's a simple js-based SPA preferably packaged as a stand-alone ".html" file). AWS credentials (IAM of course) are either stored encrypted in LocalStorage (or Websql or indexeddb or who knows what we are supposed to be using) or queried on demand. It would interact with s3 directly (there is a browser based js api for aws) to manage and modify files directly (multi-user contention and eventual consistency be damned - for small sites it's simply not an issue), and when appropriate, generate/regenerate the static files. Because everything is done client side, the webserver itself never sees or cares about your aws credentials.
Clearly, being a "static site generator", only the admin interface would be JS based, the user-facing generated content would be static. [For some reason every post i've seen doing something remotely similar wants their mostly static content to be rendered at runtime in their js app???]
With prosemirror under active development you should soon be able to have a simple js based WYSIWYG rich text editor that generates nice clean Markdown to feed into your template of choice (à la Jekyll). Your end-users don't need to know markdown or care, they just get a fairly basic rich text editor. Give them a simple interface for defining a website's structure and bob's your uncle.
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who thinks this way.
This. Current static site generators aren't good for non-engineers, but I'd be willing to bet that doesn't need to be the case. Every instance I've seen requires some sort of technical know-how, or integration with Dropbox/Drive/etc (which many non-technical/older people won't necessarily be familiar with).
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 think one could use Github's electron (on which Atom is based) and one of the open source WYSIWYGs (possibly tweaked) to get the standalone app you seem to be indicating. Taking one of the slimmer SSGs and packaging it alongside still may result in quite a large binary (not sure).
As for hosting, Amazon's s3 seems the most appropriate. While you could automate domain registration and DNS records, I'm not sure how.
This seems like it could be an interesting project.
I think that's the gestalt of Live Writer, which has been recently open sourced, but it's still Windows-only, so I can't say for sure because I've never personally tried it.
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...
My first run-in with Medium was with actual journalists (see: War is Boring whom have left Medium to their own site now). So while I understood there were many one-off blogs like mine that shouldn't be considered professional, many were and that lent any blog on the site some level of credibility.
Of course - all of that credibility was lost when a few bloggers were censored and kicked from the platform for wrongthink. I don't use Medium anymore.
I would have to admit this was the case for me as well I didn't really pay much attention to it always thought it was the "print" version of VICE or something similar (and yes I know VICE is technically one or well at least started as a magazine).
I actually thought that Medium was part of VICE media for some time mostly because anytime I got content linked from it was from Motherboard or something else affiliated with them.
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.
I changed my opinion when I checked out their homepage, usually if you go from HN or reddit it's a higher quality post but when you go from the homepage you can get a glimpse of the average post. It just lost that kind of credibility feeling for me.
Funny, after reading the first half dozen or so Medium articles I felt exactly the opposite. It was junk and now I expect junk from Medium and was a bit surprised to read a good article a couple of weeks ago. Since then it's been junk again and unless I'm really really bored or the subject matter is fascinating seeing "Medium" in a HN post means I skip the article altogether.
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/ )
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!
First thing on loading that link was "yuck, the contrast is fucked", and sure enough, item #2 is "less contrast is good".
About the only good point on the list in that link is line width. But all the items about formatting text combine to make it so that there is so much less information on the screen. I'd much prefer to read the other website.
Actually, your simple design is not the only one to make my day. I have finally found a guy who puts all the HTML5 etc. on the one page. He's a physics lecturer. He has dead easy html files that illustrate Newton's Cannon, using canvas and javascript. Finally, I am "getting" it. See http://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/html5/. (And the bonus was to see that, with uniform circular motion, the acceleration is towards the centre of rotation. I mean I really need things explained simply without any extras getting in the way.) Of course, I had to play with it to understand it. But the beauty was that, with the source code all there on the one page, I could easily make changes and see the effect immediately. Thanks Dan Schroeder.
PS I need to remind myself that posting pdf files is another straightforward way to get information online.
I used Ghost for over a year. I was relatively happy with it.
I recently switched to Medium and couldn't be happier. With Ghost I was spending more time tweaking and maintaining purchased themes than I spent writing.
It's really really really fucking hard to run a blog that works well on desktop/tablet/phone and doesn't crash if you get a traffic spike. How many self hosted blogs can handle 500,000 hits in less than a day? Not many.
Medium will probably die someday. That's fine. I own my content and my content URLs. I'll simply port it to a new platform. It wouldn't be the first time.
Those Smash articles were a welcome surprise! Follow'd. :)
I love "owning" my content on my server (since '09) but in the past year I've been thinking of going back to a "serviced" solution. My initial thought was WordPress.com since I run WP, but it's $99 a year! It decreases the hassle of upgrading versions constantly, but still, that's a dealbreaker.
What's attractive about Medium is the same thing that attracted me to Facebook: all profiles/posts use the same theme, and that theme is pretty good. In addition, following people to get their content in your feed feels great.
However, I'm not sure if I'm completely ready to give up control yet. Will probably continue to check into Medium + custom URLs for the next year.
The decision would be much easier if my posts were written for a large audience, but they're mostly just self-involved journal entries I doubt people want to go back and read. :) Right now I just publish short fiction to Medium, which is what I want people to share, like, etc.
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 Typepad.com. There were many other companies, at that time, which I've since forgotten. At one point, around 2003 or 2004, we created a list of all our competitors, and there were at least 100 names on the list.
My point is, the vast bulk of all blogging has always been on 3rd party hosted blogging sites. Self-hosted blogging has always been rare. I self-host my blog, smashcompany.com, on a server at Rackspace, but this has always been a rare option.
All the same, I am intrigued by the question. If anyone has historical data on this, it would be fascinating to know when self-hosted blogs hit their peak. If Technorati.com has survived in its original form, then it would be in possession of this historical data, but sadly, the original Technorati.com is dead.
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 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.
Getting hosted by someone else is incredibly convenient. They take care of all the work of maintenance, security, reliability, and even give you tools to increase your visibility on the web and design your blog. IMHO only hobbyists or people with a very good reason should self-host. If you don't like one company's terms, look into the many other blog providers out there.
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?
You can get auto-updates and we do a pretty good job of protecting WP sites. But the situation is dire. A survey we did recently showed that 38.9% of respondents (out of over 7000 WP site admins) were hacked within the past 12 months.
Hosting at Github with Jekyll is essentially self-hosting. Github Pages has automated deployment, but at the end of the day it's just another hosting option with no (current) ulterior business motives other than to increase exposure of their GH Pages product.
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 to be:
1. do I own my content
2. will my content be accessible forever
As this post highlights, the answer to (1) on medium is YES. So, no problems.
The answer to (2) is also, for all practical purposes, YES, but you shouldn't depend on it.
But is this really such an issue anyway? I certainly assume that the vast majority back up their photographs, just by nature, and how difficult is it to back up the plaintext of your blog pieces too? If you have backups, and the answer to (1) is yes, then really, it starts to look like an easy decision.
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 Medium is nice too and will be doing some writing there.
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.
Before looking at self-hosted blogs it would have to be looked at how many new beginners are being created in self-hosting alone? Before we can self-host blogs, we have to self-host anything.
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 post. Never mind that there doesn't seem to be a decent way to preview posts on mobile.
As others have mentioned, it seems the best way to get more people in control of their own platforms would be with easier static tools.
On that note, I've been really impressed with org-mode and pandoc. I've been writing and generating code within a text based environment lately, but it still feels as though the process hasn't really budged or improved much at all in the past 15 years. With org-mode and pandoc, along with babel, I can write and test code, embed images, and generate decent html/pdf all in one go.
But for the casual user, I think it's become more difficult to self publish over the years, not less. The tools we've built have gotten pretty embarrassing if our goal is to get as diverse of a population as possible speaking and sharing their ideas openly on the web.
Cheers to everyone still working on tools like org-mode, pandoc, and latex. It's still relevant, and it still does a great job. If you haven't checked them out, take a look. I was certainly surprised by how far these projects have been taken.
> 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.
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.)
I'm going to go out on a little bit of a limb here, but I bet you -- like most HN readers, including me -- are kind of, well, geeky/nerdy. (The fact that you're talking about generating content with org-mode and pandoc is kind of a big hint here, honestly.) Our requirements for hosting can be a little more demanding than the target audience WordPress aims at.
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."
What is complicated about it? I'm not sure what you have in mind - there was never any Edenic period where you could run dynamic web blogs for free on your own server without any configuration or investment of time and dedication. All the old tools still exist, but better and polished by time.
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?"
I'm not suggesting there ever was and Edenic period where things were easy, but I do think an argument could be made that things have gotten worse for the non-technical beginner looking to host their own site.
First, they've got to make a decision of which publishing platform to install on their site. They'll probably see some online debates, talking about static site generators vs Wordpress, etc. They'll waste a few hours trying to figure out what choice to make. Once that decision is made, it's next time to find and install a better looking theme, because no platform seems capable of looking decent enough out of the box.
Compare this to handwriting and uploading html files, and it seems like we've gone backwards.
> the reality is that most people... do not care about high quality publishing or readability
I'd argue the opposite. Empires of platforms have been built around being high quality and easily readable. Look at medium, and look at instagram. A slightly better publishing experience dominates.
And to further that note, how would you self host a photo site for mobile? Is that even possible? How would you begin?
What if you wanted to make a self hosted snapchat type site for your friends to see your photos?
I've made a few unfair points, but I think the general idea remains, the self publishing tools haven't kept up with the rest of technology, in general.
> Compare this to handwriting and uploading html files, and it seems like we've gone backwards.
But this isn't apple and oranges; a blog with themes and whatnot is much more sophisticated than the HTML CSS rendering defaults. IMO, a HTML page without any CSS is not that bad looking and you don't really need it. Heck, even a text file written with a little bit of care is perfectly readable.)
And the information overload isn't much of a problem: most people know immediately that static site generators aren't for them.
> Look at medium, and look at instagram. A slightly better publishing experience dominates.
Look at all the blogs using Wordpress, and everything written on Twitter and Facebook.
> And to further that note, how would you self host a photo site for mobile? Is that even possible? How would you begin?
I am not entirely sure what a 'photo site for mobile' is, but I am sure that it has no equivalents from before 2006 or so which you could claim it is harder or more complicated than, and I suspect that you could get 95% of the value from a static HTML page sitting on S3 containing a bunch of <img> tags and a 'viewport' <meta> tag that you copy-pasted from a StackOverflow post you found by googling 'how to make a mobile html page'.
> IMO, a HTML page without any CSS is not that bad looking
There's one exception to this: an HTML page without styling has line width equal to the browser window. Narrow text columns are a dramatic increase in readability.
(And I don't even maximize my browser window... a shocking number of people do, despite the fact that they're using ultra-wide 16:9 screens.)
The old school static pages are a pain and they are ugly.
My original site on Geocities in 98. I would put up dated posts occasionally. A new new item meant editing the index.html and my "archive" was just all the old posts cut and pasted to an archive.html page. Adding a new navigation link meant editing every page.
For a while I was using shtml for "header" and "footer" files which could be tacked on to individual entry files vut it was still a pain to use. Blog platforms and other CMS systems with editors that keep the content sepersted from the design are definitely better.
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. While IPNS (the naming system) does not seem to work reliably yet, hash of the current version of the web site can be published in a special DNS TXT record, and if that same domain points to IP address of a public gateway, the web site will be simply accessible via that domain.
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 !
In a content-addressable network your computer seeds the content rather than serves it. You do not need a properly managed server for that. It does not matter whether the original node is accessible, information can be retrieved as long as it is available somewhere in the network.
In IPFS, if you need to immediately ensure availability of your content, you can request it via a public gateway to force it into the gateways cache. Then the gateway will continue to seed your data even if your node goes offline.
Been feeling this way about hosting for a while now... I'm actually anticipating (wishing?) that "p2p web" (decentralized LAN applications) is going to start taking off soon. I think it's a matter of people building software that makes LANs easier to use for ordinary people. BT Sync is an excellent example of something like this. So is WebTorrent.
I had fantasies when Web Audio and Web Midi first were announced of browser based digital audio tools that people would use in one anothers physical presence, over a small local network. There is no reason that every network application needs to depend on centralized services! I was lucky enough to attend Music Hack Day in Berlin and created this Web Midi/WebRTC chat room as an example. I have no idea if it still works or not: https://github.com/timbresmith/pandemonium
> But for the casual user, I think it's become more difficult to self publish over the years, not less.
No. The exact opposite, in fact. Micro-publishing services like Twitter & Tumbler have enabled millions of casual users to publish and distribute their own content with a few keystrokes and a couple clicks.
In the context of this discussion, 'self-publish' means you control your content and its distribution. In that sense, Twitter and Tumbler are not self-publishing, since they own the software and can do pretty much whatever they like with your content. Also, you can't just pick up your Tweets and move them all to Facebook while retaining the same URL, whereas you can do this moving from self-hosted WordPress to self-hosted Jekyll.
That said, I don't think it's become harder to self-publish, but it hasn't matched the progress made by services like Twitter.
To add to this, it wasn't too long ago that the technical and financial cost of setting up and running a server were too prohibitive for the casual user.
Nowadays, I can set up a public-facing server with a few clicks for $5 a month. We have it too easy.
The security updates are automatic (unless you opt-out) and previewing on mobile is as easy as logging in to the site from your mobile device. (The administration panel is fully responsive.)
It's certainly not dead, but the relation maybe has changed a little. It started off as a public diary service and place for discussions and now it's more of a traffic driver for marketing purposes.
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.
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.
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.
I'm assuming Pelican is a generator. I don't understand why there aren't better, simple solutions to do this and just host the site in a bucket on S3. Most people will fit in the free tier of usage and you stay in complete control of your domain and content.
You needn't be limited to using Pelican themes. Pelican uses Jinja2 for templating, so it's very simple to migrate templates over to the platform with an hour or so (if that!) of tweaking.
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.
The main problem with Web design, I'm increasingly convinced, is that Browser Defaults Suck.
Seriously: if Motherfucking Website, (or Better Motherfucking Website) were the defaults, we'd be ahead of the game. A few other hacks (use "http { font-size: medium }" for example, to default to the user's preferred font size) to further address that.
I'm looking for a browser that defaults to Reader Mode by default. Maybe including comments.
It's fairly straightforward to outline a set of heuristics to use that would trigger automatic reader mode, if you start by looking at the types of pages you'd expect it to work on (e.g., motherfuckingwebsite.com, cr.yp.to, etc) and work backwards. The hard part isn't speccing it out or implementing it, it's convincing Firefox or Chromium that it's a worthwhile thing to roll into the browser.
I've been thinking about this exact thing every other day or so since Maciej Cegłowski's slides[1] for his "Website Obesity Crisis" talk got posted here last month.
Maciej is definitely one of the people whose absolutely dab smack on with his criticisms. Bloat, tracking, annoyances, poor design. Most are a direct consequence of advertising-based content support.
I'm thinking of a Reader-Mode browser, period.
Stock stylesheets. Ignore the site's styles. Maybe provide various themes for the user. Further heuristics to strip other cruft. And a "mercy killing" mode which simply abandons all native markup and presents a page stripped of everything, if it's sufficiently bad.
Say the green text on blue background, with every paragraph individually absolutely positioned, centered justification, H2 headings used for body text, and Microsoft "smart quotes" throughout. I've seen all this (though perhaps not quite all on the same page).
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.
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.
I wish I had chosen github pages as my hosting platform too. Instead I bought a shared hosting on cyber Monday.
I'm using middleman.
Coding the stylesheet for the blog and getting the whole site working was certainly fun but writing handcoded markdown and publishing via the shell surely requires some getting used to.
My advice: use github pages for your blog to avoid the guilt of paying for hosting services that you don't need.
http://unixheaven.com if anyone's interested.
So you didn't had to transfer the DNS control to Kloudsec to get CDN + SSL like with Cloudflare ?
I'm hosting my site on Github Pages as well, but Gandi as my DNS. I considered Cloudflare at the time, but would had to move the DNS from Gandi to Cloudflare and pay 20$ to Gandi for that.
I am working on a project that combines DNS, WWW and WebDav servers to simplify blogs self-hosting, so your blog can always sit connected on a mapped network drive and to add new website, you can just create a directory with new domain name. https://github.com/parkomat/parkomat
Most notably, there's no dynamic content on my site. My blog is generated from source and creating a new blog post just requires me to make a new markdown document in doc/published/. I've never like solutions like Ghost or Medium. They never support specific thing X that I want for my blog.
I've been looking for intelligent conversation online for over 25 years. For a time it was Usenet. I mostly missed the Well, though I caught mailing lists, Slashdot, and for a brief moment, G+ (it's still there, and I've cultivated a useful community, though the reach is small).
The methodology uses the Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers list as a proxy for "intelligent discussion", the string "this" to detect English-language content, generally, and the arbitrarily selected string "Kim Kardashian" as a stand-in for antiintellectual content. Google search results counts on site-restricted queries are used to return the amount of matching content per site, with some bash and awk glue to string it all together and parse results.
As expected, Facebook is huge, as is Twitter. When looking at the FP/1000 ratio (hits per 1,000 pages) KK/1000, and FP:KK ratios, more interesting patterns emerge.
Facebook beats G+, largely.
Reddit makes up in quality what it lacks in size, but Metafilter blows it out of the water. Perhaps a sensible user filter helps a lot.
The real shocker though was how much content was on blogging engines, even with a very partial search -- mostly Wordpress and a few other major blogging engine sites. Quite simply, blogs favour long-form content, some of it exceptionally good.
But blogs suck for exposure and engagement.
This screams "Opportunity!!" to me. I've approached several players (G+/Google, Ello) with suggestions they look into this. Ello's @budnitz seems to be thinking along these lines (I'm a fan of what Ello's doing, but its size is minuscule, and mobile platform usability is abysmal.)
One of the most crucial success elements for G+ is the default "subscribe to all subsequent activity on this post" aspect. Well, that and the ability to block fuckwits (though quite honestly ignore would be more than sufficient). There's a hell of a lot else to dislike, but those two elements are crucial to engagement.
I suspect the patterns would be strongly similar. I've not posted raw data, though they're somewhat in line with the overall trends. A few exceptions -- forums or publications who cater strongly to a specific name. Richard Dawkins is hugely popular, and NY Times is grossly skewed (for obvious reasons) to mentions of Paul Krugman.
More to the point: the FP Global 100 list was simply a proxy for "what's a list of search tokens that's likely to indicate meaningful conversation?". I picked the FP list as it was available, comprehensive, and Not Mine (that is, I didn't select the names, and disagree fairly markedly with several inclusions).
The individuals named cover a range of backgrounds, from natural and social sciences to politics, religion, and a few authors, artists, and other creatives.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadEr, are you implying that Ruby is not a language for people with a web development background?
Regardless, most of Jekyll tweaking is done with Liquid templates, which are mostly agnostic. (You do use Ruby for plugins, yes, but they are not super important.)
Here's my review of migrating to hexo http://www.primaryobjects.com/2015/12/15/a-tale-of-migrating...
I recently converted my wordpress blog to hexo and blogged about it, if you're interested:
http://aphall.com/2016/01/migrating-wordpress-to-static/
The other nice thing about SSGs is emitting modern output (minified, etc). What comes out of wordpress is a horror show...
[1] https://github.com/pawandubey/griffin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
That said, I'd like to think my personal blog is to document my personal development and progress, even though it probably is ultimately just an exercise in self-aggrandizement. but I _try_ not to make it about vanity.
however, the domain name is very much a vanity thing, just like having LNX4WIN on your licence plate would be.
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.
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.
A few emails were sent out that day.
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).
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.
Something I have yet to see but that I think would be perfect would be a client-side single-page-app that served as a s3-backed static site generator.
Navigate to MyStaticWebsiteGenerator.io (or download it, or self-host it, or clone the repo, it's a simple js-based SPA preferably packaged as a stand-alone ".html" file). AWS credentials (IAM of course) are either stored encrypted in LocalStorage (or Websql or indexeddb or who knows what we are supposed to be using) or queried on demand. It would interact with s3 directly (there is a browser based js api for aws) to manage and modify files directly (multi-user contention and eventual consistency be damned - for small sites it's simply not an issue), and when appropriate, generate/regenerate the static files. Because everything is done client side, the webserver itself never sees or cares about your aws credentials.
Clearly, being a "static site generator", only the admin interface would be JS based, the user-facing generated content would be static. [For some reason every post i've seen doing something remotely similar wants their mostly static content to be rendered at runtime in their js app???]
With prosemirror under active development you should soon be able to have a simple js based WYSIWYG rich text editor that generates nice clean Markdown to feed into your template of choice (à la Jekyll). Your end-users don't need to know markdown or care, they just get a fairly basic rich text editor. Give them a simple interface for defining a website's structure and bob's your uncle.
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who thinks this way.
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.
As for hosting, Amazon's s3 seems the most appropriate. While you could automate domain registration and DNS records, I'm not sure how.
This seems like it could be an interesting project.
Or maybe it's just me?
Of course - all of that credibility was lost when a few bloggers were censored and kicked from the platform for wrongthink. I don't use Medium anymore.
(I guess in a weird way that's what blogging is?)
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.
:-)
About the only good point on the list in that link is line width. But all the items about formatting text combine to make it so that there is so much less information on the screen. I'd much prefer to read the other website.
Actually, your simple design is not the only one to make my day. I have finally found a guy who puts all the HTML5 etc. on the one page. He's a physics lecturer. He has dead easy html files that illustrate Newton's Cannon, using canvas and javascript. Finally, I am "getting" it. See http://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/html5/. (And the bonus was to see that, with uniform circular motion, the acceleration is towards the centre of rotation. I mean I really need things explained simply without any extras getting in the way.) Of course, I had to play with it to understand it. But the beauty was that, with the source code all there on the one page, I could easily make changes and see the effect immediately. Thanks Dan Schroeder.
PS I need to remind myself that posting pdf files is another straightforward way to get information online.
The guy who made it is: https://twitter.com/drew_mc
Self-hosted blogging still has a place in this ecosystem!
I've only ever accessed it via hackernews links and they were all to very substantial and well written articles.
I recently switched to Medium and couldn't be happier. With Ghost I was spending more time tweaking and maintaining purchased themes than I spent writing.
It's really really really fucking hard to run a blog that works well on desktop/tablet/phone and doesn't crash if you get a traffic spike. How many self hosted blogs can handle 500,000 hits in less than a day? Not many.
Medium will probably die someday. That's fine. I own my content and my content URLs. I'll simply port it to a new platform. It wouldn't be the first time.
http://blog.forrestthewoods.com/ https://gamedevdaily.io/
I love "owning" my content on my server (since '09) but in the past year I've been thinking of going back to a "serviced" solution. My initial thought was WordPress.com since I run WP, but it's $99 a year! It decreases the hassle of upgrading versions constantly, but still, that's a dealbreaker.
What's attractive about Medium is the same thing that attracted me to Facebook: all profiles/posts use the same theme, and that theme is pretty good. In addition, following people to get their content in your feed feels great.
However, I'm not sure if I'm completely ready to give up control yet. Will probably continue to check into Medium + custom URLs for the next year.
The decision would be much easier if my posts were written for a large audience, but they're mostly just self-involved journal entries I doubt people want to go back and read. :) Right now I just publish short fiction to Medium, which is what I want people to share, like, etc.
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 Typepad.com. There were many other companies, at that time, which I've since forgotten. At one point, around 2003 or 2004, we created a list of all our competitors, and there were at least 100 names on the list.
My point is, the vast bulk of all blogging has always been on 3rd party hosted blogging sites. Self-hosted blogging has always been rare. I self-host my blog, smashcompany.com, on a server at Rackspace, but this has always been a rare option.
All the same, I am intrigued by the question. If anyone has historical data on this, it would be fascinating to know when self-hosted blogs hit their peak. If Technorati.com has survived in its original form, then it would be in possession of this historical data, but sadly, the original Technorati.com is dead.
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.
https://www.wordfence.com/learn/2015-wordpress-security-surv...
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 to be:
1. do I own my content 2. will my content be accessible forever
As this post highlights, the answer to (1) on medium is YES. So, no problems.
The answer to (2) is also, for all practical purposes, YES, but you shouldn't depend on it.
But is this really such an issue anyway? I certainly assume that the vast majority back up their photographs, just by nature, and how difficult is it to back up the plaintext of your blog pieces too? If you have backups, and the answer to (1) is yes, then really, it starts to look like an easy decision.
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.
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.
As others have mentioned, it seems the best way to get more people in control of their own platforms would be with easier static tools.
On that note, I've been really impressed with org-mode and pandoc. I've been writing and generating code within a text based environment lately, but it still feels as though the process hasn't really budged or improved much at all in the past 15 years. With org-mode and pandoc, along with babel, I can write and test code, embed images, and generate decent html/pdf all in one go.
But for the casual user, I think it's become more difficult to self publish over the years, not less. The tools we've built have gotten pretty embarrassing if our goal is to get as diverse of a population as possible speaking and sharing their ideas openly on the web.
Cheers to everyone still working on tools like org-mode, pandoc, and latex. It's still relevant, and it still does a great job. If you haven't checked them out, take a look. I was certainly surprised by how far these projects have been taken.
I came to the conclusion that sometimes hand crafting HTML tags for interesting pages takes less time than fiddling with Wordpress innards and plugins.
(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.)
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."
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?"
Agreed.
I'm not suggesting there ever was and Edenic period where things were easy, but I do think an argument could be made that things have gotten worse for the non-technical beginner looking to host their own site.
First, they've got to make a decision of which publishing platform to install on their site. They'll probably see some online debates, talking about static site generators vs Wordpress, etc. They'll waste a few hours trying to figure out what choice to make. Once that decision is made, it's next time to find and install a better looking theme, because no platform seems capable of looking decent enough out of the box.
Compare this to handwriting and uploading html files, and it seems like we've gone backwards.
> the reality is that most people... do not care about high quality publishing or readability
I'd argue the opposite. Empires of platforms have been built around being high quality and easily readable. Look at medium, and look at instagram. A slightly better publishing experience dominates.
And to further that note, how would you self host a photo site for mobile? Is that even possible? How would you begin?
What if you wanted to make a self hosted snapchat type site for your friends to see your photos?
I've made a few unfair points, but I think the general idea remains, the self publishing tools haven't kept up with the rest of technology, in general.
But this isn't apple and oranges; a blog with themes and whatnot is much more sophisticated than the HTML CSS rendering defaults. IMO, a HTML page without any CSS is not that bad looking and you don't really need it. Heck, even a text file written with a little bit of care is perfectly readable.)
And the information overload isn't much of a problem: most people know immediately that static site generators aren't for them.
> Look at medium, and look at instagram. A slightly better publishing experience dominates.
Look at all the blogs using Wordpress, and everything written on Twitter and Facebook.
> And to further that note, how would you self host a photo site for mobile? Is that even possible? How would you begin?
I am not entirely sure what a 'photo site for mobile' is, but I am sure that it has no equivalents from before 2006 or so which you could claim it is harder or more complicated than, and I suspect that you could get 95% of the value from a static HTML page sitting on S3 containing a bunch of <img> tags and a 'viewport' <meta> tag that you copy-pasted from a StackOverflow post you found by googling 'how to make a mobile html page'.
There's one exception to this: an HTML page without styling has line width equal to the browser window. Narrow text columns are a dramatic increase in readability.
(And I don't even maximize my browser window... a shocking number of people do, despite the fact that they're using ultra-wide 16:9 screens.)
My original site on Geocities in 98. I would put up dated posts occasionally. A new new item meant editing the index.html and my "archive" was just all the old posts cut and pasted to an archive.html page. Adding a new navigation link meant editing every page.
For a while I was using shtml for "header" and "footer" files which could be tacked on to individual entry files vut it was still a pain to use. Blog platforms and other CMS systems with editors that keep the content sepersted from the design are definitely better.
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. While IPNS (the naming system) does not seem to work reliably yet, hash of the current version of the web site can be published in a special DNS TXT record, and if that same domain points to IP address of a public gateway, the web site will be simply accessible via that domain.
[1] https://ipfs.io/ [2] https://github.com/ipfs/examples/tree/master/examples/websit...
In IPFS, if you need to immediately ensure availability of your content, you can request it via a public gateway to force it into the gateways cache. Then the gateway will continue to seed your data even if your node goes offline.
I had fantasies when Web Audio and Web Midi first were announced of browser based digital audio tools that people would use in one anothers physical presence, over a small local network. There is no reason that every network application needs to depend on centralized services! I was lucky enough to attend Music Hack Day in Berlin and created this Web Midi/WebRTC chat room as an example. I have no idea if it still works or not: https://github.com/timbresmith/pandemonium
No. The exact opposite, in fact. Micro-publishing services like Twitter & Tumbler have enabled millions of casual users to publish and distribute their own content with a few keystrokes and a couple clicks.
That said, I don't think it's become harder to self-publish, but it hasn't matched the progress made by services like Twitter.
Nowadays, I can set up a public-facing server with a few clicks for $5 a month. We have it too easy.
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.
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.
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.
Seriously: if Motherfucking Website, (or Better Motherfucking Website) were the defaults, we'd be ahead of the game. A few other hacks (use "http { font-size: medium }" for example, to default to the user's preferred font size) to further address that.
I'm looking for a browser that defaults to Reader Mode by default. Maybe including comments.
I've been thinking about this exact thing every other day or so since Maciej Cegłowski's slides[1] for his "Website Obesity Crisis" talk got posted here last month.
1. http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
I'm thinking of a Reader-Mode browser, period.
Stock stylesheets. Ignore the site's styles. Maybe provide various themes for the user. Further heuristics to strip other cruft. And a "mercy killing" mode which simply abandons all native markup and presents a page stripped of everything, if it's sufficiently bad.
Say the green text on blue background, with every paragraph individually absolutely positioned, centered justification, H2 headings used for body text, and Microsoft "smart quotes" throughout. I've seen all this (though perhaps not quite all on the same page).
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.
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.
Coding the stylesheet for the blog and getting the whole site working was certainly fun but writing handcoded markdown and publishing via the shell surely requires some getting used to.
My advice: use github pages for your blog to avoid the guilt of paying for hosting services that you don't need. http://unixheaven.com if anyone's interested.
I'm hosting my site on Github Pages as well, but Gandi as my DNS. I considered Cloudflare at the time, but would had to move the DNS from Gandi to Cloudflare and pay 20$ to Gandi for that.
I've done some exploration of just where intelligent conversation online lies, and frankly was surprised at the results: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
The methodology uses the Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers list as a proxy for "intelligent discussion", the string "this" to detect English-language content, generally, and the arbitrarily selected string "Kim Kardashian" as a stand-in for antiintellectual content. Google search results counts on site-restricted queries are used to return the amount of matching content per site, with some bash and awk glue to string it all together and parse results.
As expected, Facebook is huge, as is Twitter. When looking at the FP/1000 ratio (hits per 1,000 pages) KK/1000, and FP:KK ratios, more interesting patterns emerge.
Facebook beats G+, largely.
Reddit makes up in quality what it lacks in size, but Metafilter blows it out of the water. Perhaps a sensible user filter helps a lot.
The real shocker though was how much content was on blogging engines, even with a very partial search -- mostly Wordpress and a few other major blogging engine sites. Quite simply, blogs favour long-form content, some of it exceptionally good.
But blogs suck for exposure and engagement.
This screams "Opportunity!!" to me. I've approached several players (G+/Google, Ello) with suggestions they look into this. Ello's @budnitz seems to be thinking along these lines (I'm a fan of what Ello's doing, but its size is minuscule, and mobile platform usability is abysmal.)
One of the most crucial success elements for G+ is the default "subscribe to all subsequent activity on this post" aspect. Well, that and the ability to block fuckwits (though quite honestly ignore would be more than sufficient). There's a hell of a lot else to dislike, but those two elements are crucial to engagement.
As for blogging, I'm a fan of a minimal design (http://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB) and static site generators.
If you ever do a similar analysis using say, science Nobel Prize Winners or some other similar list, I'd love to see it.
The individuals named cover a range of backgrounds, from natural and social sciences to politics, religion, and a few authors, artists, and other creatives.
it costs a bit more than $1 a month to run it.