2) set up the hosting, the blog CMS, its authentication, and all the routing for you
3) show you the cost, and just let you pay it?
Because as much as I can do all this stuff manually, that would be pretty sweet to automate, for the folks who just want to "start a fucking blog" and not have to become sysadmins
And as the middle ground, most reputable web hosters (the kind where you buy a domain with 50GB space on shared hosting that runs mostly PHP) have a one-click Wordpress setup. That way you have a base install up and running in five minutes, but can customize as much as you want if you ever want to. Doesn't come with preconfigured caching though, so maybe spend five minutes setting that up.
OVH or any other "Web hosting" provider usually will let you pick a domain, choose a CMS to install (which is why Wordpress is everywhere) and be online in 5 minutes to post in your blog.
Ah! That is what I thought a few days ago. It is daunting for most people to own a domain and if it becomes just part of the ritual of starting a blog/identity, then it will get interesting.
you can do this from google domains directly. you dont even have to leave your registrar for another host. pay 11 or 12/year to renew your domain thats about it. free whois privacy, too (kinda standard now anyways).
Ghost.org seems to come closest to what you seek, and they include a very important feature, which is paid subscriptions for readers of your blog. People who are serious about blogging/web publishing will after some time need to charge for their content if that's their full time job. Wordpress makes this part very difficult for people who are not sys-admins.
Ghost is self-hostable, and you should be able to get a VPS matching the system requirements for $5/mo unless you get properly popular so need more hosting umph.
Though Ghost would be overkill for a really simple blog, despite its staring point as intending to be just enough tech to host content well (a reaction to what WordPress has/had become).
I’m not sure to understand the point of setting up your own website in 2023.
I mean it’s a fun endeavour by itself but if the point is really to communicate you’re 100% better of using one of the numerous blogging / microblogging option.
you can use those platforms to market your blog. i’m literally doing this and getting thousands of views a month on a 2 month old site. that’s not filling the 99.99% — maybe just the unimaginative
Corr: You’ll benefit from the illusory perception of mass viewership. That bit of psychological crack is the secret sauce of these platforms. I supposedly have 3 digit follower count on tweeter. Now that the view count is in my face in the timeline, all the fun has gone out of tweeting. It was likely always like this but I hadn’t bothered to check. And guess what? I’ve decided to stop wasting my time. Nothing Elon had done to date was as motivating to quit as that view count.
Because platform is interconnected. How many people's blog posts do you check daily? On twitter you just click a button and have everyone's low IQ tweets to get angry/rant about.
I have a personal website for 20+ years and I have seen many services come and go. I have many non-working links on my blog which points to many "cool" services that I wrote about but are now dead.
Yes, it is fun and history has shown a different picture so far than "just use one of the services."
This website is terrible. Blog navbar above the blog's title? The undertitle has a full stop at the end? The first paragraph is unexplainably bigger than the rest and all the spacings are wrong and too wide.
This is very strange since the author of this website actually has his own blog which is nicely designed, but for some reason he really went out of his way to make this page into a mess.
Which is even stranger because you'd think he'd put all his skill into a page dedicated to reaching out and actually convincing people
The point of motherfuckingwebsite is to show that a minimalist page can still look good and be useful. This is because the website has an agenda and wants to convince people.
This page on the other hand looks and feels really terrible, so I don't get how anyone could be convinced of starting a blog from this
>Blog navbar above the blog's title? The undertitle has a full stop at the end? The first paragraph is unexplainably bigger than the rest and all the spacings are wrong and too wide.
And those are objectively bad enough to call the site terrible according to which metric?
I had an Australian manager once. To live to up the stereotypes of Australia, he had two things: a map that was "upside down", with south up and therefore with Australia at the top of the globe. The second was a book of Australian slang and swear words.
One of the words in the dictionary was "dickhead," who definition was this: "A person of no consequence. One's boss is invariably a dickhead."
It's definitely used a lot in the U.S., but to my knowledge it most commonly denotes an unpleasant person (e.g., a jerk or asshole) rather than a "person of no consequence".
Thanks I was having a bit of a moment - one thing I noticed is I have to be very careful if I meet people from the US in a neutral country such as Europe or Asia - the reason is that we speak the same language and are culturally simular enough that when there is a cultural difference it can result in a HUGE misunderstanding all the more because we can relate so easily.
One time I was in Yunnan province in China and it was an americans birthday in the local cafe that served coffee and was frequented by expats and english teachers and so on - he told me this absolutely amazing story about some of his travels and it was so great and such an impressive story, and I felt close to him so I said ...
"You're full of it right?"
"Excuse me?"
"Oh that story is totally full of shit!"
He stares at me a bit. I'm smiling and looking at him.
He begins crying, turns around and begins walking out the door and up the street at a fast pace. I chase behind him. He's saying "go away go away", I say "I'm not sure what's happened are you ok?" "You said Iwas full of shit" "Oh that's an expression I meant I loved your story so much it couldn't be real". Needless to say that relationship did not go anywhere unfortunately. He was a good guy who had some awesome experiences. AND IT WAS HIS BIRTHDAY.
He was from California if that means anything.
Moral of the story: I think it's ok for an australian to be australian in Australia or the US but on neutral terrirtory could lead to misunderstandings wuickly. By the way, I was a grade below in high school with "Nat" from "Nats what I reckon" it was a relatively privileged school in Sydney known for its alternative student lead projects and lack of marks - Nat is a classic at swearing - he grew up in Surry Hills a trendy part of the inner city fringe my dad ran a Graphic Design business there. HE is a an unique character who me and my best male friend looked up to - we caught the same bus home every day - we'd practice guitar and drums and then listen to him drumming on the bus with pencils and it was better than what we could do with drumsticks and a proper kit! my other friend had some success in music too, so its' an alternative kind of school (Steiner/Waldorf) in the sense that if parents could send their kids there they were ok with them getting into arts and so on - and if you are curious - this is what cultured (in the sense of artisanal and developed) swearing is like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WrvFvzdhCo
(he was known already around the warehouse and music scene here as a bit of a character but didn't hit big fame until the pandemic)
From what I understand the misunderstanding I had with "The American" in Yunnan might be ok in like New York or Jersey or something where they have what's called "busting your balls" ... e.g. Elaine in Seinfeld saying "GET OUT" and pushing a guy. I dunno.
I also seem to with some frequency have some big cultural misunderstandings with americans of about the same age, gender and cultural class on neutral territory - to the point I now avoid talking to Americans of the same age and gender! "I'm afraid of americans" by David Bowie, highly relateable hehe I thin of it like siblings - we are actually quite close but those little differences can lead to huge misunderstandings.
Aforementioned comment maker here. My justification is that, per my understanding of the HN guidelines, it's not that interesting to discuss whether folks read the article completely or not.
This is why I phrased it that way - I think it's an important nugget of information but many folks have limited time to read, or were turned off by the style, and may have not scrolled all the way to the footer to see that.
I thought that comment might help more discussion of bloggery by hand waving the controversial style as an imperfect homage to something intentionally crude.
To that end I also figured there was potential discussion in how OP article doesn't quite hit the same poetic cadence as motherfuckingwebsite.
For non-tech folks, I helped a few, and they all loved WordPress. They have simple pricing and a good mobile app with decent support https://wordpress.com/pricing/. Of course, there are other options, too like Ghost Pro https://ghost.org/pricing/
However from a personal level the main two ones for me are the poor quality of its codebase and the lack of care or common sense around the official plugin repository, bordering on outright incompetence on their part for allowing unvetted and highly dangerous plugins to stay on the official repo.
Honestly as a developer for going on 20 years in a professional capacity I physically recoil at the absolute awfulnes of the codebase.
Blogs aren't "realtime", so they don't solve any problems that people went to social media for.
If you're serious about people "just starting blogs" you need a proof of concept that centralizes various blogs into an updating feed of subscribed blogs.
This isn't insurmountable. It's actually pretty simple, in a technical sense. The real trick is to get blogs to play along by providing an api endpoint that will enable a feeds to be generated in the ways that people use them (latest, hashtags, interest relevancy, searchability, etc), as well as endpoints that allow users to interact with them (comments, notifications, etc). Some of that is currently done with RSS, others will need a new (preferably less verbose) form of syndication.
You could even use simple iframes as the delivery mechanism for the blog content, that way the blogs still get their ad-impressions. So long as the posts showed up in a curated feed, without needing to actually click through to anything, it would be fine. The only other thing you would need is a sign-up process that is as simple as facebook or twitter. To the point where you might not even be sure you're creating a "blog", if that wasn't your explicit intention.
So yeah; when that platform/protocol becomes available, I'd say blogs are the silver bullet! Until then, the idea that we should all go back to scouring the net for bookmark-able content, or dealing with the static interaction of an RSS feed, is a non-starter. We didn't make/choose social media because it was useless. We did it because it was easy. That has to be a priority in any suggested alternative.
This is not an alternative for RSS feeds, but rather something build on top of it. The planet site is basically a publicly available read only RSS client. It's useful to show what is going on in given group of people, both for insiders and outsiders.
Don't show me an individual blog, show me that content syndicated into a feed which I can comment on, interact with, create ad-impressions for, and recieve notifications about, all without ever leaving the feed site.
That's what I'm talking about because that's what it will take. No one has shown me anything like that, yet. Screenshots will be fine! But planet doesn't seem to do what I'm asking for, based on my (admittedly brief) look at it.
This is inappropriate. You're not even arguing against anything I'm saying. If there is an aggregation site that lets me subscribe to blogs based on a url (i.e. not something the aggregation site controls), then I AM controlling the feed. I'm just doing it with a much more robust syndication mechanism than RSS.
Actually that is something I was thinking about recently as well, and I wonder whether it already exists somewhere. To have a web forum site which works like a planet, but allows a registered user to comment on the blogs, vote on the posts and comments and provide some mechanism for moderators and invitation of new blogs to join it.
Most of the planets I know are usually maintained by group of people who already have their discussions sorted out in a different ways via mailing lists, forums, subreddits ... (eg. http://fedoraplanet.org/), so this is not something I have seen elsewhere.
It could be a value in this, esp. since people are less and less willing to maintain and moderate comments on their own blog sites, but for the same reason, it would not be that easy to bootstrap a community in this way, as someone will have to be responsible for it's operation, moderation, fighting spam and so on.
Yeah it's kind of strange to think about, honestly. We're so close. All the tech is there and well-understood. Yet nobody seems to have made it, yet.
But I guess I should be more clear about the pitch because I know it's a little obtuse. Rather than thinking about a centralized blogging platform as the solution, I see that as only one part (the lesser part) of the solution. The other part is the aggregation sites.
So, for the centralized blogging, you get seamless, free, hosted (no domain), and ANONYMOUS blogging (no registrations to track you). Easy sign up, collects many users, and broadcasts them to the aggregation sites.
The aggregation site, on the other hand, doesn't do any moderation, doesn't do any comment handling, doesn't do any filtering. It just collects a list of urls that people want to subscribe to (so that those urls can be advertised to others), and negotiates with those blog urls to get the other endpoints that will allow for realtime commenting and interaction with the blog, itself.
The centralized blog would be a lot like twitter, and it would handle its own content moderation, just like any large host would.
But "power users" would have their own blogs which, when rendered as iframes, provides them with the entire publishing power of the internet. That kind of richer content serves as a reason for people who want to make a living on the internet to move away from the centralized blog(s; no reason others couldn't advertise their own apis to the aggregates; twitter included!) and on to their own servers.
So yeah! I see some value there, at least. An 'on-ramp to self publishing', as it were. Without the ever-present threat that your host can de-platform you (without recourse).
I'm not super familiar with Planet and know it's totally different, but this sort of reminds me of Google Reader. I've seen others replicate its newsreader UI, but never the community.
There used to be a lots of these (Aggregators) and I believe quite a few still survived. I remember writing and getting swarms of traffic -- almost all of them via Aggregators.
This Closure Planet is still active - https://planet.clojure.in
I designed the theme about a decade ago as a fork from my website, and it still is holding strong today.
People keep suggesting this, so I have to assume that I might be missing something. Please understand that I'm asking this in earnest:
Does this type of aggregation allow for commenting and interaction?
Does this type of aggregation notify a user when they have commented on a blog in their feed and someone has responded to them?
Does this type of aggregation provide ad-impressions for the syndicated content?
Is this type of aggregation as simple to start with as it is to write your first tweet?
Again, I don't mean to be dismissive. I'm just trying to get across that what I'm talking about is a REPLACEMENT for social media. It's not some libertarian/technologist idea of what would be BETTER. It's harnessing the momentum that we know we have and focusing that into better technologies. But it has to work the same, or it's just another "hey guys, we should try this instead", which doesn't inspire a lot of my confidence (ymmv).
For the social commenting, isn't the likes of erstwhile Digg, Hackernews akin to that? They are indeed aggregation of contents from other websites and we discuss it here.
The notification that my website is discussed in another corner of the Internet is, I believe, what the Fediverse[1] is trying to do.
Ad-impression and revenue share has always been there. I can push ads via my RSS Feed, which used to be very popular and lucrative for good readership blogs.
It is definitely not easy to just start off but now I'm beginning to think, you are making fun. Anyways, it takes a village to build and maintain Twitter.
I'm certainly not making fun! I earnestly mean that. I write consumer apps for a living, which are used by millions of people. GenPop UX is my bread and butter. I don't have the luxury of thinking about how devs will use a product; I have to worry about how your grandmother is going to use it.
Case in point: grandmas use facebook, but they don't use hackernews. Grandmas will use a site that works like facebook, but will not create blogs or do even one extra step other than "sign up" and "write text into a box"/"upload images from their camera".
Social media isn't all journalists and the terminally online. I'm picking on "grandmas", but those dudes that sit in their truck and record political rants on tiktok apply as well. These people need an immediate outlet, and these are the biggest percentage of users (by consumption, rather than content production). MOST people just want to comment. The internet loves a peanut gallery, and god do people love to participate. So comments and realtime interactivity have to be a priority.
Moving on; I'm glad to hear that ads are available via RSS! I genuinely didn't know (though, I suspected they could be snuck in there, if it wasn't 'technically' a feature). I wonder, though, if they're modern enough to be useful? I doubt RSS can do pre-roll video content, or interstitial video ad insertion? If so, that's pretty great! But I think you'd need stuff like that for people who - say - posted webcomics and wanted to monetize that with video ads before and after their "articles". Or news outlets that wanted to share their latest "headline" clip.
As far as the fediverse, I like a lot of what it has done, but my concerns remain there, too. It's close to what we need, as far as decentralization goes, but it isn't seamless, yet, and it's simply NOT being picked up by the general public. My guess on that is because of the extra steps involved (again, grandmas and mirrored-sunglasses-bros). But I don't claim to be an expert there.
Totally with you and I empathize about not having the luxury of how devs will use a product.
I used to design apps/programs for Pocket PC[1] Devices for Physicians in the USA, so they can be paid better and faster with lesser errors in the early part of 2000s. I heard the system being still used 10-15 years later. So, imagine building products for tiny screens with very limited power with lots of regulations/restrictions for grumpy physicians who wants to get paid on time. :-)
And yes, I also build Apps/Programs for Teachers so they can generate unlimited fun lessons for kids in 3-6 grades. Imagine making it easy and fun for the teachers to in turn use the tools to generate fun lessons for kids. I heard that thing won BAFTA and stuffs but I never looked back. :-)
There is this idea, orthogonal to yours, that we do not need to replace social media. The cycle of Eternal September after Eternal September has to be broken at some point. We need to build systems for communities that keeps them small, engaged, and contained. We need to offer an alternative.
Your desire to replicate all the ills of Facebook elsewhere is worse than staying on Facebook.
Doesnt this go against the sentiment of the article? It makes a heavy point about nobody being able to control or censor what you have to say. As soon as you give power to an aggregator, thats a cetral point which can control/censor the content.
Nah. The point, here, is those blog endpoints. That syndicates the blog to anyone with a browser. If one aggregator decides to cut you off, then your audience can always find another aggregator. Or, if you're particularly egregious, and no aggregators will host you, they can always go directly to your blog (aggregators have done the hard work of advertising your content already), or they can build their own aggregator and tell the faithful to join them, there.
It's "freedom of speech without freedom of reach". Or whatever buzz phrase we're using to describe it, these days.
>Blogs aren't "realtime", so they don't solve any problems that people went to social media for.
Curious, what is your basis for this assertion that "realtime" is the primary reason for social media? I think "realtime" has created this incessant need to watch and feed the machine. That has been an interesting diversion for a while, but I can't see it as healthy long term, IMO. I, and many others I know, check up on friends once or twice a day and then got on with our actual lives. With a less frenetic and more sane model of interaction, "realtime" is way down the list of important attributes.
I don't take issue with your assessment of what could be "healthy", but I'm talking about what people engage in. And realtime is, as you noted, behavior-altering. It engenders an "incessant need". That's real. That we don't want it to be so doesn't change it from being real. And the fact that the academically minded want to minimize it is of little importance to the 15 year old girls gossiping about each other. Or the 23 year old dudes trading sports clap backs. Or, or, or...
So yeah. My opinion on the role of constant contact in a healthy society notwithstanding, there is a consumer hunger for it and while I can see it contracting, I can't see it ever going away to a point that it shouldn't be a design priority.
Because people want to know what's up, and there are numerous social and economic rewards for being the first to do or to know about something. That's why newspapers and the like exist in the first place. Should that be everybody's focus or anyone's only focus, no. But since the incentives/payoffs for timeliness are so obvious, expressing indifference to them seems like a counter-signaling strategy.
As asked with other comments:
- interactive commenting with notifications?
- video ad delivery for content gating?
- simple (to the point of obscuring the blogness) sign up and posting?
Show me a site doing this (with rss or without) and I'll be happy to evangelize it!
I certainly understand not wanting them! But I also deeply understand the money that can be made from them. And if that money is going to the owner of the content, rather than some larger corporate entity giving them a small cut, I'm very happy to support that paradigm (even if I, personally, would avoid as much video ads as possible).
Edited to add:
As far as write.as, I like what they've done! I just want more rich content, rather than just text. That's kind of RSS's deal, too. Only text, all the time (exceptions make the rule). There's value in sharing all kinds of content, rather than just text.
Interesting. With Hey Homepage I'm emphasizing image/photo feeds, because only text is a little boring. Providing video is a bridge too far for me now, but with some simple rules like no-autoplay it would be nice to add.
Regarding your request for (interactive) commenting allover this thread (just joking), Hey Homepage will soon enable simple and accessible commenting features (in the background based on simple email).
The point of RSS is that it works just as well when your site is just a static site that you hand-edit the HTML of and push to some cheapo VPS using FTP. (Or, more realistically for the HN crowd, when you use a static-site generator where your CI pushes the result to an S3-API-compatible object-storage-bucket fronted with an edge cache like CloudFlare.)
In such cases, there is no backend to do any of what you're describing. But it's still a blog.
Note that this backend-less approach is actually quite common with blogs; it's one large reason that client-JS-driven embedded commenting systems like Discourse are popular with blogs.
A second button on your website beside the "RSS" button that says "RSS but with fancy features." when you click on it, it is the same content on your blog but via a substack newsletter.
I believe that has all the features you listed as wants.
I am kind of half joking but people do have very specific ways they want to consume content even if it is the same content.
> This isn't insurmountable. It's actually pretty simple, in a technical sense. The real trick is to get blogs to play along by providing an api endpoint that will enable a feeds to be generated in the ways that people use them (latest, hashtags, interest relevancy, searchability, etc), as well as endpoints that allow users to interact with them (comments, notifications, etc). Some of that is currently done with RSS, others will need a new (preferably less verbose) form of syndication.
I feel like this is 99.9% tackled by existing ActivityPub implementations. There are already a wide variety of clients (and servers) out there with lots of different capabilities, ways of reading/browsing, that suit a variety of consuming styles. Interaction is well-goverened in the spec itself & quite capable.
I would like to see a little more richer-media content. I am pretty partial to toot-threads myself but having more than just text+image post-threads seems like a pretty harsh technical limit. That said, my enemy in RSS feeds is when sites publish heavily stylized content; it's so gross having these blobs of content that don't fit well in my feed.
"Real time" has a place but it's severely misapplied as a value for a broad swath of news that just isn't that urgent. Minimizing reporting time and maximizing engagement just ends up optimizing for a discourse with minimal nuance that keeps us reacting by keeping us angry. It's not a new problem; the 24 hour cable news cycle has had the same effect. But social media has made it much worse. We sorely need a cultural shift towards chilling out and waiting for news to develop.
Despite the condescending tone, I think you’re probably right about what people want. Medium focused too much on style and making publishing easy, but it’s the discovery aspect people will appreciate.
The TikTok algorithm but for RSS would be a winner.
Started a blog some time ago with AWS Lightsail... was like 5 USD a month and all you had to take care of (after initial setup) was security updates and cert renewal. Your point is well taken, but I think there are relatively cheap and low maintenance options out there that "normal" people who are technically inclined can handle.
* having/arranging time to write and (if needed) edit
If you have a CI/CD pipeline of any complexity at all for a blog, then either you are sharing infrastructure with other projects¹ or you are overcomplicating things!²
--
[1] perhaps your blog is largely related to dev so shares your dev/documentation resources
[2] no judgement: I'm capable of overcomplicating everything!
What if you want introduce some diagramming or Latex rendering in your blog ? In this case, if your original tooling doesn't support, you need to re-invent somehow .
> What if you want introduce some diagramming or Latex rendering in your blog ?
Then you are starting to step beyond what I was referring to as “a simple blog” (text, formatting, maybe some pictures or SVG).
Though there are options that don't require a CI/CD pipeline. Depending on what Latext you need MathJax may do the trick (just include the JS in your standard page header, and drop the Latex code straight in inline where needed as per their standard example: https://jsbin.com/?html,output. There are similar charting options like mermaid too. I don't know of inline charting options off the top of my head but I expect several exist.
have a look at https://www.monsterwriter.app/ ... it is build for complex content (citations, cross refences, captions, inline and block equations, ...) and it supports publishing to ghost.
I appreciate the spirit of this but the word fuck is all about how you deliver it. This article comes off a bit crass. Personally, as I get older, I realize it's more fun to find substitution words like "fiddlesticks" or the even more colloquial word, "fudge". Especially when youre so upset that all you want to do is say fuck.
Palo Alto has a quick and easy site to recategorize URL and was thinking the same would exist for SOPHOS but... nope. Support forms tell you to put in a feature request - what a joke.
Yes. In Brazil, a single judge can issue an order that makes your website inaccessible to anyone within the country, plus cancel all your social media presence at once. All that in a matter of hours.
There are degrees of everything. At the end of the day, anything can be cut off from the network. But the standards for doing so can differ significantly.
There's a good case to be made that the real service social networks offer is moderation. It seems pretty well established that most people don't want to be in a wild west online, and that's why decentralization fails.
One of the most notorious examples of banning was that of Trump from Twitter. He went and built his own. I've seen news report on his "tweets" (or whatever they're called on his platform) as if they were on Twitter. Banned? Yes. Silenced? No.
Black-and-white thinking leads absolutely nowhere. Maybe in 2023 we can agree to leave it behind?
I think it's pretty obvious that a self-published blog provides more freedom to publish what and how you want, and that's valuable, even if it's not absolute freedom.
Wouldn't surprise me if netlify eventually starts taking down sites based on some content moderation rationale, so have a plan B for that. But everything else I agree with.
It's not the Blog I have a problem with, it's building the audience. I suck at self promotion, and my soap-box isn't close enough to a steady stream of passers-by.
Adjust your goal from "Build An Audience" to "Publishing stuff I myself would want to read if it existed" and the audience will find you eventually, as long as you follow POSSE (https://indieweb.org/POSSE) and have genuine posts.
any idea how good the tooling mentioned there is? its the key to successfully applying this strategy, the best way would be to have it as a part of your blogging software/platform of choice and just working. because no one wants to do the monkey work of reposting everywhere
Not sure you need a lot of tooling unless you publish many articles per week. If you're just doing one article per month, linking them (not reposting, but sharing a link: "syndication") on 5-6 platforms would take you a couple of minutes at most.
If I'm writing for just myself, I could save myself the trouble & just not post.
If you were just writing for yourself, you wouldn't have commented here (and neither would I have).
Because that typically doesn't pay the bills unless you are both talented and fortunate enough to get noticed. Creativity takes time and effort and pouring it into a silent void void is demoralizing for most people.
My approach to blogging comes down to the following principles:
1) Make the content I would like to see more of on the Internet, for its own sake.
2) I think my interests are really cool, a few others on the planet may also think so and find benefit.
3) My blog is a public notebook. So why post publicly? It forces me to organize my thoughts in keeping with the principle that “if you can’t teach it to another, you don’t know it.”
4) The narrow focus will never make me rich or famous so my blog isn’t confused with a job - it’s just a replacement for a lack of a local community that cares as much as I do about something.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] thread1) let you pick an available domain name
2) set up the hosting, the blog CMS, its authentication, and all the routing for you
3) show you the cost, and just let you pay it?
Because as much as I can do all this stuff manually, that would be pretty sweet to automate, for the folks who just want to "start a fucking blog" and not have to become sysadmins
If you go the Netlify route, YMMV.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34067396
($15/mo basic tier, and if I drag the slider to 20k 'members' the 'creator' tier is at $149/mo billed annually).
But that probably means that they are currently not a good fit for someone looking to move their Twitter presence to a blog.
Not speaking for the project here. Just what I understood from conversations with devs.
Though Ghost would be overkill for a really simple blog, despite its staring point as intending to be just enough tech to host content well (a reaction to what WordPress has/had become).
https://www.pikapods.com/apps#blog
I mean it’s a fun endeavour by itself but if the point is really to communicate you’re 100% better of using one of the numerous blogging / microblogging option.
or Reddit? oooopsie... I'm banned again.
If you keep backups you can always go on your own in case that happens, and you also get the controversy to boost interest.
Assuming that's something a blog's author cares about. But even if that is, you can always share a link to social media.
That's because 99.99% of the time people don't break the rules, because they know it's easy to get banned.
> you'll benefit from mass viewership
Probably not. It works for some, but take a truly random sample of Twitter users and calculate the percentage that have more than 10,000 followers.
Several hundred, of which maybe 20 have something to say on any given day.
RSS is awesome.
Yes, it is fun and history has shown a different picture so far than "just use one of the services."
This is very strange since the author of this website actually has his own blog which is nicely designed, but for some reason he really went out of his way to make this page into a mess.
Which is even stranger because you'd think he'd put all his skill into a page dedicated to reaching out and actually convincing people
This page on the other hand looks and feels really terrible, so I don't get how anyone could be convinced of starting a blog from this
And those are objectively bad enough to call the site terrible according to which metric?
> This site was heavily influenced by the geniuses behind Motherfucking Website and Better Motherfucking Website.
One of the words in the dictionary was "dickhead," who definition was this: "A person of no consequence. One's boss is invariably a dickhead."
Lol.
One time I was in Yunnan province in China and it was an americans birthday in the local cafe that served coffee and was frequented by expats and english teachers and so on - he told me this absolutely amazing story about some of his travels and it was so great and such an impressive story, and I felt close to him so I said ...
"You're full of it right?"
"Excuse me?"
"Oh that story is totally full of shit!"
He stares at me a bit. I'm smiling and looking at him.
He begins crying, turns around and begins walking out the door and up the street at a fast pace. I chase behind him. He's saying "go away go away", I say "I'm not sure what's happened are you ok?" "You said Iwas full of shit" "Oh that's an expression I meant I loved your story so much it couldn't be real". Needless to say that relationship did not go anywhere unfortunately. He was a good guy who had some awesome experiences. AND IT WAS HIS BIRTHDAY.
He was from California if that means anything.
Moral of the story: I think it's ok for an australian to be australian in Australia or the US but on neutral terrirtory could lead to misunderstandings wuickly. By the way, I was a grade below in high school with "Nat" from "Nats what I reckon" it was a relatively privileged school in Sydney known for its alternative student lead projects and lack of marks - Nat is a classic at swearing - he grew up in Surry Hills a trendy part of the inner city fringe my dad ran a Graphic Design business there. HE is a an unique character who me and my best male friend looked up to - we caught the same bus home every day - we'd practice guitar and drums and then listen to him drumming on the bus with pencils and it was better than what we could do with drumsticks and a proper kit! my other friend had some success in music too, so its' an alternative kind of school (Steiner/Waldorf) in the sense that if parents could send their kids there they were ok with them getting into arts and so on - and if you are curious - this is what cultured (in the sense of artisanal and developed) swearing is like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WrvFvzdhCo
(he was known already around the warehouse and music scene here as a bit of a character but didn't hit big fame until the pandemic)
From what I understand the misunderstanding I had with "The American" in Yunnan might be ok in like New York or Jersey or something where they have what's called "busting your balls" ... e.g. Elaine in Seinfeld saying "GET OUT" and pushing a guy. I dunno.
I also seem to with some frequency have some big cultural misunderstandings with americans of about the same age, gender and cultural class on neutral territory - to the point I now avoid talking to Americans of the same age and gender! "I'm afraid of americans" by David Bowie, highly relateable hehe I thin of it like siblings - we are actually quite close but those little differences can lead to huge misunderstandings.
If you have an ENS domain you can spin up a quick blog using that and IPFS. For example, mine is werdy.eth.limo
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
FTFY
That's a bit of a useless comment, isn't it?
This is why I phrased it that way - I think it's an important nugget of information but many folks have limited time to read, or were turned off by the style, and may have not scrolled all the way to the footer to see that.
I thought that comment might help more discussion of bloggery by hand waving the controversial style as an imperfect homage to something intentionally crude.
To that end I also figured there was potential discussion in how OP article doesn't quite hit the same poetic cadence as motherfuckingwebsite.
1. https://simplecss.org
https://brajeshwar.com
(I kid of course but would never touch it myself for the obvious problems it has)
However from a personal level the main two ones for me are the poor quality of its codebase and the lack of care or common sense around the official plugin repository, bordering on outright incompetence on their part for allowing unvetted and highly dangerous plugins to stay on the official repo.
Honestly as a developer for going on 20 years in a professional capacity I physically recoil at the absolute awfulnes of the codebase.
But it still works fine for my blogs, and I've not had any issues. I also know a lot of folks that use it for sites.
What are the alternatives?
Remember that most of the folks I work with are far, far from tech wizards.
....Of course, its quite nice that present-day trend is picking it up a tad. :-)
It now powers sites like my own blog (https://breckyunits.com/), knowledge bases like PLDB.com, and our first new public domain daily newspaper called the Long Beach Pub (https://longbeach.pub/1-3-2023.html).
If you're serious about people "just starting blogs" you need a proof of concept that centralizes various blogs into an updating feed of subscribed blogs.
This isn't insurmountable. It's actually pretty simple, in a technical sense. The real trick is to get blogs to play along by providing an api endpoint that will enable a feeds to be generated in the ways that people use them (latest, hashtags, interest relevancy, searchability, etc), as well as endpoints that allow users to interact with them (comments, notifications, etc). Some of that is currently done with RSS, others will need a new (preferably less verbose) form of syndication.
You could even use simple iframes as the delivery mechanism for the blog content, that way the blogs still get their ad-impressions. So long as the posts showed up in a curated feed, without needing to actually click through to anything, it would be fine. The only other thing you would need is a sign-up process that is as simple as facebook or twitter. To the point where you might not even be sure you're creating a "blog", if that wasn't your explicit intention.
So yeah; when that platform/protocol becomes available, I'd say blogs are the silver bullet! Until then, the idea that we should all go back to scouring the net for bookmark-able content, or dealing with the static interaction of an RSS feed, is a non-starter. We didn't make/choose social media because it was useless. We did it because it was easy. That has to be a priority in any suggested alternative.
https://planet.debian.org/
That's what I'm talking about because that's what it will take. No one has shown me anything like that, yet. Screenshots will be fine! But planet doesn't seem to do what I'm asking for, based on my (admittedly brief) look at it.
Most of the planets I know are usually maintained by group of people who already have their discussions sorted out in a different ways via mailing lists, forums, subreddits ... (eg. http://fedoraplanet.org/), so this is not something I have seen elsewhere.
It could be a value in this, esp. since people are less and less willing to maintain and moderate comments on their own blog sites, but for the same reason, it would not be that easy to bootstrap a community in this way, as someone will have to be responsible for it's operation, moderation, fighting spam and so on.
But I guess I should be more clear about the pitch because I know it's a little obtuse. Rather than thinking about a centralized blogging platform as the solution, I see that as only one part (the lesser part) of the solution. The other part is the aggregation sites.
So, for the centralized blogging, you get seamless, free, hosted (no domain), and ANONYMOUS blogging (no registrations to track you). Easy sign up, collects many users, and broadcasts them to the aggregation sites.
The aggregation site, on the other hand, doesn't do any moderation, doesn't do any comment handling, doesn't do any filtering. It just collects a list of urls that people want to subscribe to (so that those urls can be advertised to others), and negotiates with those blog urls to get the other endpoints that will allow for realtime commenting and interaction with the blog, itself.
The centralized blog would be a lot like twitter, and it would handle its own content moderation, just like any large host would.
But "power users" would have their own blogs which, when rendered as iframes, provides them with the entire publishing power of the internet. That kind of richer content serves as a reason for people who want to make a living on the internet to move away from the centralized blog(s; no reason others couldn't advertise their own apis to the aggregates; twitter included!) and on to their own servers.
So yeah! I see some value there, at least. An 'on-ramp to self publishing', as it were. Without the ever-present threat that your host can de-platform you (without recourse).
This Closure Planet is still active - https://planet.clojure.in I designed the theme about a decade ago as a fork from my website, and it still is holding strong today.
Does this type of aggregation allow for commenting and interaction?
Does this type of aggregation notify a user when they have commented on a blog in their feed and someone has responded to them?
Does this type of aggregation provide ad-impressions for the syndicated content?
Is this type of aggregation as simple to start with as it is to write your first tweet?
Again, I don't mean to be dismissive. I'm just trying to get across that what I'm talking about is a REPLACEMENT for social media. It's not some libertarian/technologist idea of what would be BETTER. It's harnessing the momentum that we know we have and focusing that into better technologies. But it has to work the same, or it's just another "hey guys, we should try this instead", which doesn't inspire a lot of my confidence (ymmv).
The notification that my website is discussed in another corner of the Internet is, I believe, what the Fediverse[1] is trying to do.
Ad-impression and revenue share has always been there. I can push ads via my RSS Feed, which used to be very popular and lucrative for good readership blogs.
It is definitely not easy to just start off but now I'm beginning to think, you are making fun. Anyways, it takes a village to build and maintain Twitter.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
Case in point: grandmas use facebook, but they don't use hackernews. Grandmas will use a site that works like facebook, but will not create blogs or do even one extra step other than "sign up" and "write text into a box"/"upload images from their camera".
Social media isn't all journalists and the terminally online. I'm picking on "grandmas", but those dudes that sit in their truck and record political rants on tiktok apply as well. These people need an immediate outlet, and these are the biggest percentage of users (by consumption, rather than content production). MOST people just want to comment. The internet loves a peanut gallery, and god do people love to participate. So comments and realtime interactivity have to be a priority.
Moving on; I'm glad to hear that ads are available via RSS! I genuinely didn't know (though, I suspected they could be snuck in there, if it wasn't 'technically' a feature). I wonder, though, if they're modern enough to be useful? I doubt RSS can do pre-roll video content, or interstitial video ad insertion? If so, that's pretty great! But I think you'd need stuff like that for people who - say - posted webcomics and wanted to monetize that with video ads before and after their "articles". Or news outlets that wanted to share their latest "headline" clip.
As far as the fediverse, I like a lot of what it has done, but my concerns remain there, too. It's close to what we need, as far as decentralization goes, but it isn't seamless, yet, and it's simply NOT being picked up by the general public. My guess on that is because of the extra steps involved (again, grandmas and mirrored-sunglasses-bros). But I don't claim to be an expert there.
I used to design apps/programs for Pocket PC[1] Devices for Physicians in the USA, so they can be paid better and faster with lesser errors in the early part of 2000s. I heard the system being still used 10-15 years later. So, imagine building products for tiny screens with very limited power with lots of regulations/restrictions for grumpy physicians who wants to get paid on time. :-)
And yes, I also build Apps/Programs for Teachers so they can generate unlimited fun lessons for kids in 3-6 grades. Imagine making it easy and fun for the teachers to in turn use the tools to generate fun lessons for kids. I heard that thing won BAFTA and stuffs but I never looked back. :-)
It was fun.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_PC
Your desire to replicate all the ills of Facebook elsewhere is worse than staying on Facebook.
It's "freedom of speech without freedom of reach". Or whatever buzz phrase we're using to describe it, these days.
Curious, what is your basis for this assertion that "realtime" is the primary reason for social media? I think "realtime" has created this incessant need to watch and feed the machine. That has been an interesting diversion for a while, but I can't see it as healthy long term, IMO. I, and many others I know, check up on friends once or twice a day and then got on with our actual lives. With a less frenetic and more sane model of interaction, "realtime" is way down the list of important attributes.
So yeah. My opinion on the role of constant contact in a healthy society notwithstanding, there is a consumer hunger for it and while I can see it contracting, I can't see it ever going away to a point that it shouldn't be a design priority.
its called rss
Show me a site doing this (with rss or without) and I'll be happy to evangelize it!
but video ads? none for me thanks.
Edited to add:
As far as write.as, I like what they've done! I just want more rich content, rather than just text. That's kind of RSS's deal, too. Only text, all the time (exceptions make the rule). There's value in sharing all kinds of content, rather than just text.
Regarding your request for (interactive) commenting allover this thread (just joking), Hey Homepage will soon enable simple and accessible commenting features (in the background based on simple email).
In such cases, there is no backend to do any of what you're describing. But it's still a blog.
Note that this backend-less approach is actually quite common with blogs; it's one large reason that client-JS-driven embedded commenting systems like Discourse are popular with blogs.
I believe that has all the features you listed as wants.
I am kind of half joking but people do have very specific ways they want to consume content even if it is the same content.
I feel like this is 99.9% tackled by existing ActivityPub implementations. There are already a wide variety of clients (and servers) out there with lots of different capabilities, ways of reading/browsing, that suit a variety of consuming styles. Interaction is well-goverened in the spec itself & quite capable.
I would like to see a little more richer-media content. I am pretty partial to toot-threads myself but having more than just text+image post-threads seems like a pretty harsh technical limit. That said, my enemy in RSS feeds is when sites publish heavily stylized content; it's so gross having these blobs of content that don't fit well in my feed.
The TikTok algorithm but for RSS would be a winner.
https://srht.site/quickstart
* having something to blog about
* having/arranging time to write and (if needed) edit
If you have a CI/CD pipeline of any complexity at all for a blog, then either you are sharing infrastructure with other projects¹ or you are overcomplicating things!²
--
[1] perhaps your blog is largely related to dev so shares your dev/documentation resources
[2] no judgement: I'm capable of overcomplicating everything!
What if you want introduce some diagramming or Latex rendering in your blog ? In this case, if your original tooling doesn't support, you need to re-invent somehow .
Then you are starting to step beyond what I was referring to as “a simple blog” (text, formatting, maybe some pictures or SVG).
Though there are options that don't require a CI/CD pipeline. Depending on what Latext you need MathJax may do the trick (just include the JS in your standard page header, and drop the Latex code straight in inline where needed as per their standard example: https://jsbin.com/?html,output. There are similar charting options like mermaid too. I don't know of inline charting options off the top of my head but I expect several exist.
My point is, the "hard" part, is mostly master your tooling right ? Because you want simplicity in customizing your output .
b)First invent the universe
Imagine believing this in 2023.
I think it's pretty obvious that a self-published blog provides more freedom to publish what and how you want, and that's valuable, even if it's not absolute freedom.
1) Make the content I would like to see more of on the Internet, for its own sake.
2) I think my interests are really cool, a few others on the planet may also think so and find benefit.
3) My blog is a public notebook. So why post publicly? It forces me to organize my thoughts in keeping with the principle that “if you can’t teach it to another, you don’t know it.”
4) The narrow focus will never make me rich or famous so my blog isn’t confused with a job - it’s just a replacement for a lack of a local community that cares as much as I do about something.