13 ms·

Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

193 points by robertnealan 11y ago

onion2k 11y ago
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.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  > 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.)
  - onion2k 11y ago
    Not at all. Just that more web developers know JavaScript than Ruby considering front end devs use it too.
- PuffinBlue 11y ago
  What's the generation speed like with Hexo? I'm using Hugo but I'm not really enjoying Go templates so I'm curious as to how Hexo performs.
  - onion2k 11y ago
    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.
    - PuffinBlue 11y ago
      Thanks, I will probably give it a try.
  - primaryobjects 11y ago
    I run hexo on a blog of almost 100 articles. Great platform btw. It takes about 20s to generate. Here's my review of migrating to hexo http://www.primaryobjects.com/2015/12/15/a-tale-of-migrating-to-a-static-web-site/ http://www.primaryobjects.com/2015/12/15/a-tale-of-migrating...
    - tuananh 11y ago
      20s for 100 articles is pretty slow.
  - fenomas 11y ago
    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: http://aphall.com/2016/01/migrating-wordpress-to-static/ http://aphall.com/2016/01/migrating-wordpress-to-static/
    - PuffinBlue 11y ago
      I like the full width code blocks you have in your design. Your site looks great, and all the better to know it's static!
      - fenomas 11y ago
        Thanks very much! Yeah, there's a kind of peace of mind that comes from knowing there are no updates pending, SQL server to configure, etc. The other nice thing about SSGs is emitting modern output (minified, etc). What comes out of wordpress is a horror show...
  - pkd 11y ago
    I wanted the same, ie speed with ease of templating, so I made Griffin[1] which uses handlebars templates and can parse 5000 markdown pages in ~8 seconds on my machine. [1] https://github.com/pawandubey/griffin https://github.com/pawandubey/griffin
- mfukar 11y ago
  One doesn't really have to know Ruby to publish with Jekyll. Case in point, I haven't written half a line of Ruby code for my Jekyll blog yet.
mig39 11y ago
No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- minimaxir 11y ago
  This article is correctly using a rhetorical question for discussion. (The answer to the headline is "maybe")
  - thescriptkiddie 11y ago
    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.
- anonbanker 11y ago
  In support of betteridge, I still keep a personal blog on a vanity domain, and you can pry it out of my cold dead hands.
  - stonogo 11y ago
    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!
    - anonbanker 11y ago
      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.
27182818284 11y ago
I self-host using a static site generator. I've found it to be very nice in the sense that it just takes pennies for the site to run. I think a lot of folks are still running WordPress of some kind on their own Dreamhost, etc, accounts which feels like self-hosting to me.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  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.
  - PuffinBlue 11y ago
    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?
    - minimaxir 11y ago
      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. A few emails were sent out that day.
      - PuffinBlue 11y ago
        Geez, that sounds like a complete PITA. At least you'll now have a nice version controlled setup, small mercy.
  - sleepyhead 11y ago
    "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).
scandox 11y ago
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... Or maybe it's just me?
- fweespeech 11y ago
  I think it might be you. I treat it like I would Wordpress.com
  - scandox 11y ago
    This calls for an experiment
    - Skunkleton 11y ago
      You do the experiment, and blog about it on Medium. I will probably believe anything you put up there.
  - Nadya 11y ago
    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.
- peterwwillis 11y ago
  Not just you. Before I found out what Medium was, I thought it was some new journalism franchise with a lot of amateur contributors. (I guess in a weird way that's what blogging is?)
  - dogma1138 11y ago
ThomPete 11y ago
No of course it's not dead. Just like the desktop isn't dead just because mobile is exploding.
forrestthewoods 11y ago
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. http://blog.forrestthewoods.com/ http://blog.forrestthewoods.com/ https://gamedevdaily.io/ https://gamedevdaily.io/
- Andrex 11y ago
  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.
lkrubner 11y ago
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.
- robertnealan 11y ago
  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.
  - dasil003 11y ago
    I seem to recall that Medium was initially invite only as well?
peterwwillis 11y ago
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.
- PuffinBlue 11y ago
  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.
  - peterwwillis 11y ago
    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?
    - mynewtb 11y ago
      Wordpress auto-updates. Most exploits are in plugins.
    - mmaunder 11y ago
      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. https://www.wordfence.com/learn/2015-wordpress-security-survey/ https://www.wordfence.com/learn/2015-wordpress-security-surv...
      - mynewtb 11y ago
        Heavy selection bias.
misiti3780 11y ago
yes - why self host when I can host my blog at github using jekyll in < 10 minutes ?
- volaski 11y ago
  You'd be lying if you say it took you less than 10 minutes the very first time you attempted it.
- robertnealan 11y ago
  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.
davnicwil 11y ago
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.
- j45 11y ago
  What would you have in place in case Medium went away or lost the data compared to what you already have?
  - davnicwil 11y ago
    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.
    - j45 11y ago
      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.
  - HappyTypist 11y ago
    Archive.org
j45 11y ago
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.
burningion 11y ago
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.
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  > 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.
  - fenomas 11y ago
    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.)
erikb 11y ago
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.
blakesterz 11y ago
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.
dlsx 11y ago
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.
joelgrus 11y ago
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.
- dexterdog 11y ago
  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.
- ShinyCyril 11y ago
  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.
skybrian 11y ago
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.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  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.
  - carussell 11y ago
    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. 1. http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
    - dredmorbius 11y ago
      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).
cookiecaper 11y ago
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.
praveenster 11y ago
I am surprised nobody seems to mention indiewebcamp.com and withknown.com as alternatives to Wordpress or Ghost.
- welly 11y ago
  I'm not. Who are either of those?
evancordell 11y ago
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 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.
- terminalcommand 11y ago
  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 http://unixheaven.com if anyone's interested.
- tdkl 11y ago
  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.
elcct 11y ago
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 https://github.com/parkomat/parkomat
Zyst 11y ago
In this particular ecosystem (HN)? Probably not. Half the time I see Medium posts, the other half I'll see something hosted with Jekyll + github pages. Which technically isn't Self Hosted, but still quite different from just writing in Medium or something of the sort. However I suspect HackerNews readers are not the average, and I do think there's a down trend on self hosting blogs, versus using Medium/Wordpress/Tumblr or even Blogspot.
stolk 11y ago
What's wrong with blogger.com ?
cyphar 11y ago
Nope. I run my own blog, which I implemented myself (using some nice Flask markdown thing as a base). https://www.cyphar.com/blog https://www.cyphar.com/blog
- cyphar 11y ago
  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.
dredmorbius 11y ago
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). 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/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/ 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 http://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB) and static site generators.
- FiatLuxDave 11y ago
  Very interesting post. I've also been looking for interesting content online since Usenet days, although my interests are a bit more .sci than .soc. If you ever do a similar analysis using say, science Nobel Prize Winners or some other similar list, I'd love to see it.
tuananh 11y ago
I still self-hosted my site (jekyll) on a tiny instance (128mb ram) from RamNode. free ssl by cloudflare. it costs a bit more than $1 a month to run it.
dberg 11y ago
honest question, how did Medium become so dominant for all blog posting so quickly ? The design is no doubt beautiful but there is nothing special. Curious why so many bloggers magically decided to publish there all of a sudden. I see tons of tech posts there now.
- rglover 11y ago
  I've been wondering this, too, and design/ease-of-use aside, the biggest argument I've heard (and observed) is the network effect. Even trivial Medium posts get at least a handful of favorites and 1-2 comments. A built-in audience is likely an easy sell for the majority of folks.
  - dberg 11y ago
    I guess that makes sense, but there are certainly other platforms with an "audience", like Tumblr, etc?
    - volaski 11y ago
      Medium started out with Twitter sign in, which means their early users were all Twitter "influencers". The way I look at it, it's a blogging wrapper layer built around Twitter social graph. When you sign in with your Twitter account you automatically follow everyone you follow on Twitter on Medium.
- hboon 11y ago
  Read what 37Signals/Basecamp who has spent 15 years building their (huge) audience on their own site says: https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-moves-to-medium-c8083ce19686#.lka3ttxc8 https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-moves-to-medium-c8... I think the number 1 reason is reach.
  - adajos 11y ago
    Reach is exactly right. Also good for audience building. That said, I agree with most of the complaints about Medium as well.
verusfossa 11y ago
The intimidating thing for me was always how heavy blogging software was. Never really liked the idea of centralized hosting, but hosting some huge PHP blob with a database never felt like it was worth it. I'm hosting my own site now running Hugo and I love it. I agree that most people have moved to centralized hosting, but I'm seeing a resurgence of self-hosting with static site generators like jekyll, middleman or hugo. Things like static search[1] and static comments[2] are possible with some thought. Really neat and lightweight and with gitolite, I can keep my git repo containing the blog code on the server too, setup commit hook to rebuild the site and I'm maintenence free. I have some npm postcss scripts that build my scss, autoprefix it, etc and dump it into the assets for hugo to build from all in one go. A lot of this is unncessary, I could just be using css. I like that there's not all this asset-flow magic built out, just simple npm with bash cli. Unix philosophy and very little heavy lifting. I think there's still hope. Now if we can just teach casual users git... [0]https://gohugo.io/ https://gohugo.io/ [1]http://www.blevesearch.com/news/Site-Search/ http://www.blevesearch.com/news/Site-Search/ [2]https://tlvince.com/static-commenting https://tlvince.com/static-commenting
- macawfish 11y ago
  I'm working on a little static site generator now for my own site. The PHP/SQL wordpress kind of option just annoys me and have held me back from publishing altogether (don't even get me started on publishing services and social media sites. Well, stuff like hugo, nanoc, ikiwiki... inspirational! My static site generator is using rake for file rules to do stuff with git hooks. It's going to depend on Ruby, but won't be a "Ruby framework". Rake might as well run php, perl, a bash script or a binary. Rake is just a wonderful tool for the job, and Ruby is about as ubiquitous as Perl these days. Here's some inspiration: http://patshaughnessy.net/2015/1/8/using-rake-to-generate-a-blog http://patshaughnessy.net/2015/1/8/using-rake-to-generate-a-... Be sure to check out the "power rake" talk he mentions if you haven't already. Edit: one more thought. On the idea of teaching casual users "git", I think that's an amazing idea. It touches on tip of an iceberg: computer/scientific/technological literacy gaps. If our technologies continue down the path of "black magic," with the ever extreme dichotomy of priests who know the secrets vs. ordinary/"dumb" people who are locked out of the inner knowledge, it's just not going to be conducive to a bright future. Remember, regular people are dependent on technology, but have begun to develop superstitions about how it works. It's magic to people! This is such a deep issue.
fenomas 11y ago
I don't follow the author's complaints about terms and conditions. I suppose language like "we can change these terms any time and your use of the site constitutes acceptance" sounds ominous at a naive level, but what's the alternative? It would amount to some form of preventing users from using the site until they click "agree", and then doing that again every time the T&Cs change, right?
- mbreese 11y ago
  We're talking about the authors here, not just readers, so yes, having an click-though for a change in Terms of Service seems appropriate.. Sending an email to users when they change is also appropriate. Terms of Service shouldn't change often enough that this should ever be an issue.
pcurve 11y ago
Remember Movable Type?
torbit 11y ago
nah. people (content marketers) post on medium in hope they click on their personal link in the author bio, which has their blog and content they wouldn't put on medium.
tronathan 11y ago
https://s3.amazonaws.com/f.cl.ly/items/072W0F1l3Q1C2b3u3T2r/xs2nv.jpg https://s3.amazonaws.com/f.cl.ly/items/072W0F1l3Q1C2b3u3T2r/...
ne01 11y ago
At sunsed.com we are 100% dedicated to create the best blogging (and in the near future, a full CMS) platform. We hope to re-energize the world of self-publishing with a managed solution that lets you import/export to any other CMS/Blogging platform! Right now we are working on an IDE inside SunSed so anyone can create their own template with HTML++ (our own templating/programming language). Here is a screenshot of of our IDE (I'm working on it right now): https://cdn.sunsed.com/0/images/shared-on-web/htmlpp-ide-preview.png https://cdn.sunsed.com/0/images/shared-on-web/htmlpp-ide-pre... We are going to announce HTML++ and SunSed 2.0 on HN in the next few months. Happy hacking & blogging!
lips 11y ago
As a blog consumer, rather than producer, I also have reservations about Medium-esque sites, but from the opposite perspective. There's already an infinite quantity of interesting content to read, and it seems reasonable to expect rising quantities of worthwhile, as I find writing and creations that I was unaware of when they were being made. With all this stuff, I want to be able to control where and when I read, and how I filter, manage, follow, and store all this stuff. At some point, platform operations reflect a business plan, and that plan may or may not allow for one or more of my preferences, for reasons of $. I guess I just prefer a relationship where a standard or pseudo-standard allows the user control, to select differing vendor options at the very least. Then again, as I'm barely capable of managing a basic server install, I'm fully aware of why people throw in with hosted systems. I'm hoping for great things from stuff like Sandstorm.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  The failure of the Web ecosystem as a readily viable document management system is a pretty scathing indictment. As I write this, I'm desparately trying to winnow my way to "tab zero" (by analog to "inbox zero"). And, at some point, organise the pages I've turned up as interesting to be filed for later research and assimilation. I'm using a tablet as my primary browsing device lately (battery life, weight, portrait aspect for long-form reading, plus keyboard), but this means hugely stripped down browser capabilities. While I've got bookmarks, there's no tagging or other organisation possible. Even Readability's app (abandonware for the past 3 years) lacks tags. Calibre and Zotero don't have a full-fledged Android apps, Mendeley is owned by Elseveir (no fucking way I'm getting close to that). And so it goes.
  - lips 11y ago
    My mind turns towards a Pinboard archival account with tag searches in browser bookmarks.
    - dredmorbius 11y ago
      That seems to be the standard solution, and speaks to Maciej's results. It doesn't lessen the indictment any.
dba7dba 11y ago
My observation is that about 90% of the Wordpress sites out there don't need Wordpress. All they really need is html/css.
- KhalilK 11y ago
  This! They are so boated and for no reason whatsoever.
  - dba7dba 11y ago
    The bloat caused by even a bare minimum WP site versus html/css is breathtaking. Let's say you need to put up a simple brochure type site. You can do alot wih just 2-3 MB text/pics. With WP, it takes about 10MB just to get it running. And let's not forget the DB backend of WP. This alone vastly increases complexity, at least for average users. Scale this up and you see how bloated WP is. You want to put up 100 brochure sites (each about 5MB). With html/css sites, that translates to what 500MB of data? With WP, that already is 1000MB. And add requirement for a DB backend for 100 websites. The bloatness jumped by at least a factor of 2 with just the requirement for more storage. With DB requirement, the bloatness jumped imo by a factor of 5 or so.
- kjaer 11y ago
  Wordpress is often chosen because it provides the less technically inclined with a nice management interface. If there were rock-solid web interfaces to edit content on static websites, we'd begin to have a serious contender to Wordpress. In the meantime, static websites will unfortunately be reserved to us technically inclined people.
squeakynick 11y ago
I'm embarrassed to say that I still hand write my blog directly in HTML using Notepad++ and manually FTP changes to the hosting company. Most of my blog is static HMTL, with a smidgen of script for analytics or occasional interaction. Every now and then I'll use some light PHP (typically when I need interaction with a database on the server).
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  Why be embarrassed? If it works it works. And I bet those pages load faster than most other blogs out there.
  - squeakynick 11y ago
    Try it out; select an article from here ... http://datagenetics.com/blog.html http://datagenetics.com/blog.html Shameless plug :)
- Tomte 11y ago
  Me too! Well, not a blog, but my web site. But I'd love to see a resurgence of a Bricolage- or MovableType-like tool.
- axx 11y ago
  It's a good solution if it's what you need. Focus on the content, not on the tech behind it!
- akerro 11y ago
  I'm going to do the same. I modified a wordpress theme to fit better my needs, after an update all my changes were gone (I had a backup ofc), but it's irritating that I have to patch my theme after every update. I'm going to create a few scripts that will host my blog on gitlab and post it automatically on my server. Static pages are the future.
  - moepstar 11y ago
    This is most probably because you've done it wrong ;) WordPress has a concept called "child [1] which shouldn't result in behavior like that. [1] https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes
z3t4 11y ago
I guess there are as many static site generators as there are blogging developers :P
manuw 11y ago
Medium & Co. are good for write stuff down in a simple way. I prefer self-hosting with jekyll.
zwischenzug 11y ago
I used Docker recently to host my own blog, in an attempt to put ads on it and whatever Wordpress extensions I wanted. Despite getting a healthy number of views (nothing extraordinary) the income was basically 0. It just wasn't worth the candle.
- axx 11y ago
  Does it always have to make you money? I feel blogging is much more about sharing content, building a community and meeting new people. In my personal experience i met a few people through various blogs and it was worth much more, than a few dollars. If you're only blogging to make money, you're doing something wrong. It's the same with startups and other things. Do it for the fun, and not for the money!
KhalilK 11y ago
I spent a couple of weeks developing a blogging system in Django last summer. Doing so allows for great customization and fits exactly my needs. It was more fun than writing actual blog content though.
yumaikas 11y ago
I host my own blog (http://junglecoder.com http://junglecoder.com) on a VPS at the moment. But I went rather overboard with it, as I built my own CMS-lite in go. I was in college, wanted to learn how the web worked at a decently low level (lower than wordpress or rails). What I've discovered is that having a VPS opens up a world of opportunities for network related things. I've used that site to host Ludum Dare entries, ClickOnce .NET apps, and a Wiki Profile image that I used to see if anyone was looking at my page on a company wiki. An SSH tunnel has allowed me to bypass some firewalls that block the majority of ports.... I've learned a lot on that server. Some of the best $50/year that I spend in terms of hosting stuff.
facepalm 11y ago
Self hosted blogs miss the social graph, which drives traffic. That's why Tumblr took off, and I suspect it is also what is driving Medium.
K0nserv 11y ago
I don't think that it's dead and self publishing I'd argue is easier and cheaper than ever. My blog has all the power of s3 for scaling with free SSL from Cloudflare and I pay peanuts for it. Current bill is $0.03 some months it gets closer to $1. I've written about it here https://hugotunius.se/aws/cloudflare/web/2016/01/10/the-one-cent-blog.html https://hugotunius.se/aws/cloudflare/web/2016/01/10/the-one-...
- pjc50 11y ago
  This is going to sound like a stupid question, but how does one use Jekyll on Windows? I've also never been quite clear whether the github Jekyll is supposed to be run locally before push or is run automatically on their side. (also, what is S3 adding in your case? As far as I'm aware github.io sites are free, while AWS billing is not a hard limit and you're still liable for potentially huge charges if someone decides to DDOS you while you're away from a computer)
  - K0nserv 11y ago
    Jekyll should work on Windows because Ruby works on Windows. The reality of it is that many library developers are very bad at making sure their stuff work on Windows. http://rubyinstaller.org/ http://rubyinstaller.org/ might be something to look into. Another option is to use some other static site generator instead of Jekyll. > I've also never been quite clear whether the github Jekyll is supposed to be run locally before push or is run automatically on their side. Depends on the setup. In all setups you are going to want to be able to run the page locally in a watch mode. `jekyll serve --watch --drafts`. When it comes to deployment it differs a bit, if you use the approach outlined in my post the actual building of the page happens on Travis which pushes the generated site to s3. With Github pages it's all taken care of by Github when you push. > also, what is S3 adding in your case? As far as I'm aware github.io sites are free, while AWS billing is not a hard limit and you're still liable for potentially huge charges if someone decides to DDOS you while you're away from a computer When running Jekyll with Github pages there are limitations to what kind of plugins and gems you can use. However it's a perfectly valid approach. I have a billing alert set up at $5 on AWS and to a degree Cloudflare protects me from DDOS. Honestly though most of my pages are extremely lightweight and s3 is cheap enough that even millions of requests is not going to incur huge costs. All my static assets are cached by cloudflare as well.
xylon 11y ago
I just write my blog direct in HTML and host it on a Raspberry pi running FreeBSD and darkhttpd: http://www.naughtycomputer.uk/ http://www.naughtycomputer.uk/
mark_l_watson 11y ago
I went from years of using blogger.com to trying Wordpress for a few months. Then I switched to Jekyll and statically generated blog articles. In the end I went back to blogger.com because I figured that if I needed a 3rd party like discus for comments, then I might as well use blogger.com
therealidiot 11y ago
For those who aren't scared of using Git with their blog, there's fugitive. It's a few {pre,post}-{commit,receive} hooks which generate a static html blog from html articles (though you can configure it with an external parser iirc, so it shouldn't be hard to get Markdown support.) It probably wouldn't suffice for many use cases, but for simple blogs it might be enough. https://gitorious.org/fugitive/fugitive https://gitorious.org/fugitive/fugitive
EvanPlaice 11y ago
Lots of comments are covering how Wordpress is a maintenance hassle, static sites require a programmer to update. What about a 3rd option? Use a web application that can asynchronously fetch markdown files and render them client-side. That's basically how my site I've been working functions. http://evanplaice.com http://evanplaice.com Here's the code Http://gihub.com/evanplaice/evanplaice.com I haven't fleshed out the journal section yet but the majority of the rest of the site is all markdown driven with a clean separation between application. It's also hosted on S3. In theory, I could change the content directly to be loaded on Dropbox, although it would be preferable to provide inline caching of requests. For example use AWS lambda to frequently check for updates. Eventually, when it's ready, I plan to extract the journaling portion and release it as a server-less journaling platform.

193 points by robertnealan 11y ago

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.

minimaxir 11y ago
> 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.)
- onion2k 11y ago
  Not at all. Just that more web developers know JavaScript than Ruby considering front end devs use it too.
PuffinBlue 11y ago
What's the generation speed like with Hexo? I'm using Hugo but I'm not really enjoying Go templates so I'm curious as to how Hexo performs.
- onion2k 11y ago
  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.
  - PuffinBlue 11y ago
    Thanks, I will probably give it a try.
- primaryobjects 11y ago
  I run hexo on a blog of almost 100 articles. Great platform btw. It takes about 20s to generate. Here's my review of migrating to hexo http://www.primaryobjects.com/2015/12/15/a-tale-of-migrating-to-a-static-web-site/ http://www.primaryobjects.com/2015/12/15/a-tale-of-migrating...
  - tuananh 11y ago
    20s for 100 articles is pretty slow.
- fenomas 11y ago
  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: http://aphall.com/2016/01/migrating-wordpress-to-static/ http://aphall.com/2016/01/migrating-wordpress-to-static/
  - PuffinBlue 11y ago
    I like the full width code blocks you have in your design. Your site looks great, and all the better to know it's static!
    - fenomas 11y ago
      Thanks very much! Yeah, there's a kind of peace of mind that comes from knowing there are no updates pending, SQL server to configure, etc. The other nice thing about SSGs is emitting modern output (minified, etc). What comes out of wordpress is a horror show...
- pkd 11y ago
  I wanted the same, ie speed with ease of templating, so I made Griffin[1] which uses handlebars templates and can parse 5000 markdown pages in ~8 seconds on my machine. [1] https://github.com/pawandubey/griffin https://github.com/pawandubey/griffin
mfukar 11y ago
One doesn't really have to know Ruby to publish with Jekyll. Case in point, I haven't written half a line of Ruby code for my Jekyll blog yet.

mig39 11y ago

No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

minimaxir 11y ago
This article is correctly using a rhetorical question for discussion. (The answer to the headline is "maybe")
- thescriptkiddie 11y ago
  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.
anonbanker 11y ago
In support of betteridge, I still keep a personal blog on a vanity domain, and you can pry it out of my cold dead hands.
- stonogo 11y ago
  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!
  - anonbanker 11y ago
    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.

27182818284 11y ago

I self-host using a static site generator. I've found it to be very nice in the sense that it just takes pennies for the site to run. I think a lot of folks are still running WordPress of some kind on their own Dreamhost, etc, accounts which feels like self-hosting to me.

minimaxir 11y ago
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.
- PuffinBlue 11y ago
  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?
  - minimaxir 11y ago
    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. A few emails were sent out that day.
    - PuffinBlue 11y ago
      Geez, that sounds like a complete PITA. At least you'll now have a nice version controlled setup, small mercy.
- sleepyhead 11y ago
  "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).

scandox 11y ago

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... Or maybe it's just me?

fweespeech 11y ago
I think it might be you. I treat it like I would Wordpress.com
- scandox 11y ago
  This calls for an experiment
  - Skunkleton 11y ago
    You do the experiment, and blog about it on Medium. I will probably believe anything you put up there.
- Nadya 11y ago
  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.
peterwwillis 11y ago
Not just you. Before I found out what Medium was, I thought it was some new journalism franchise with a lot of amateur contributors. (I guess in a weird way that's what blogging is?)
- dogma1138 11y ago

ThomPete 11y ago

No of course it's not dead. Just like the desktop isn't dead just because mobile is exploding.

forrestthewoods 11y ago

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. http://blog.forrestthewoods.com/ http://blog.forrestthewoods.com/ https://gamedevdaily.io/ https://gamedevdaily.io/

Andrex 11y ago
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.

lkrubner 11y ago

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.

robertnealan 11y ago
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.
- dasil003 11y ago
  I seem to recall that Medium was initially invite only as well?

peterwwillis 11y ago

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.

PuffinBlue 11y ago
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.
- peterwwillis 11y ago
  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?
  - mynewtb 11y ago
    Wordpress auto-updates. Most exploits are in plugins.
  - mmaunder 11y ago
    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. https://www.wordfence.com/learn/2015-wordpress-security-survey/ https://www.wordfence.com/learn/2015-wordpress-security-surv...
    - mynewtb 11y ago
      Heavy selection bias.

misiti3780 11y ago

yes - why self host when I can host my blog at github using jekyll in < 10 minutes ?

volaski 11y ago
You'd be lying if you say it took you less than 10 minutes the very first time you attempted it.
robertnealan 11y ago
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.

davnicwil 11y ago

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.

j45 11y ago
What would you have in place in case Medium went away or lost the data compared to what you already have?
- davnicwil 11y ago
  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.
  - j45 11y ago
    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.
- HappyTypist 11y ago
  Archive.org

j45 11y ago

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.

burningion 11y ago

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.

johnchristopher 11y ago
> 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.
- fenomas 11y ago
  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.)

erikb 11y ago

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.

blakesterz 11y ago

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.

dlsx 11y ago

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.

joelgrus 11y ago

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.

dexterdog 11y ago
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.
ShinyCyril 11y ago
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.

skybrian 11y ago

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.

dredmorbius 11y ago
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.
- carussell 11y ago
  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. 1. http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    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).

cookiecaper 11y ago

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.

praveenster 11y ago

I am surprised nobody seems to mention indiewebcamp.com and withknown.com as alternatives to Wordpress or Ghost.

welly 11y ago
I'm not. Who are either of those?

evancordell 11y ago

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 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.

terminalcommand 11y ago
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 http://unixheaven.com if anyone's interested.
tdkl 11y ago
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.

elcct 11y ago

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 https://github.com/parkomat/parkomat

Zyst 11y ago

In this particular ecosystem (HN)? Probably not. Half the time I see Medium posts, the other half I'll see something hosted with Jekyll + github pages. Which technically isn't Self Hosted, but still quite different from just writing in Medium or something of the sort. However I suspect HackerNews readers are not the average, and I do think there's a down trend on self hosting blogs, versus using Medium/Wordpress/Tumblr or even Blogspot.

stolk 11y ago

What's wrong with blogger.com ?

cyphar 11y ago

Nope. I run my own blog, which I implemented myself (using some nice Flask markdown thing as a base). https://www.cyphar.com/blog https://www.cyphar.com/blog

cyphar 11y ago
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.

dredmorbius 11y ago

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). 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/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/ 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 http://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB) and static site generators.

FiatLuxDave 11y ago
Very interesting post. I've also been looking for interesting content online since Usenet days, although my interests are a bit more .sci than .soc. If you ever do a similar analysis using say, science Nobel Prize Winners or some other similar list, I'd love to see it.

tuananh 11y ago

I still self-hosted my site (jekyll) on a tiny instance (128mb ram) from RamNode. free ssl by cloudflare. it costs a bit more than $1 a month to run it.

dberg 11y ago

honest question, how did Medium become so dominant for all blog posting so quickly ? The design is no doubt beautiful but there is nothing special. Curious why so many bloggers magically decided to publish there all of a sudden. I see tons of tech posts there now.

rglover 11y ago
I've been wondering this, too, and design/ease-of-use aside, the biggest argument I've heard (and observed) is the network effect. Even trivial Medium posts get at least a handful of favorites and 1-2 comments. A built-in audience is likely an easy sell for the majority of folks.
- dberg 11y ago
  I guess that makes sense, but there are certainly other platforms with an "audience", like Tumblr, etc?
  - volaski 11y ago
    Medium started out with Twitter sign in, which means their early users were all Twitter "influencers". The way I look at it, it's a blogging wrapper layer built around Twitter social graph. When you sign in with your Twitter account you automatically follow everyone you follow on Twitter on Medium.
hboon 11y ago
Read what 37Signals/Basecamp who has spent 15 years building their (huge) audience on their own site says: https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-moves-to-medium-c8083ce19686#.lka3ttxc8 https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-moves-to-medium-c8... I think the number 1 reason is reach.
- adajos 11y ago
  Reach is exactly right. Also good for audience building. That said, I agree with most of the complaints about Medium as well.

verusfossa 11y ago

The intimidating thing for me was always how heavy blogging software was. Never really liked the idea of centralized hosting, but hosting some huge PHP blob with a database never felt like it was worth it. I'm hosting my own site now running Hugo and I love it. I agree that most people have moved to centralized hosting, but I'm seeing a resurgence of self-hosting with static site generators like jekyll, middleman or hugo. Things like static search[1] and static comments[2] are possible with some thought. Really neat and lightweight and with gitolite, I can keep my git repo containing the blog code on the server too, setup commit hook to rebuild the site and I'm maintenence free. I have some npm postcss scripts that build my scss, autoprefix it, etc and dump it into the assets for hugo to build from all in one go. A lot of this is unncessary, I could just be using css. I like that there's not all this asset-flow magic built out, just simple npm with bash cli. Unix philosophy and very little heavy lifting. I think there's still hope. Now if we can just teach casual users git... [0]https://gohugo.io/ https://gohugo.io/ [1]http://www.blevesearch.com/news/Site-Search/ http://www.blevesearch.com/news/Site-Search/ [2]https://tlvince.com/static-commenting https://tlvince.com/static-commenting

macawfish 11y ago
I'm working on a little static site generator now for my own site. The PHP/SQL wordpress kind of option just annoys me and have held me back from publishing altogether (don't even get me started on publishing services and social media sites. Well, stuff like hugo, nanoc, ikiwiki... inspirational! My static site generator is using rake for file rules to do stuff with git hooks. It's going to depend on Ruby, but won't be a "Ruby framework". Rake might as well run php, perl, a bash script or a binary. Rake is just a wonderful tool for the job, and Ruby is about as ubiquitous as Perl these days. Here's some inspiration: http://patshaughnessy.net/2015/1/8/using-rake-to-generate-a-blog http://patshaughnessy.net/2015/1/8/using-rake-to-generate-a-... Be sure to check out the "power rake" talk he mentions if you haven't already. Edit: one more thought. On the idea of teaching casual users "git", I think that's an amazing idea. It touches on tip of an iceberg: computer/scientific/technological literacy gaps. If our technologies continue down the path of "black magic," with the ever extreme dichotomy of priests who know the secrets vs. ordinary/"dumb" people who are locked out of the inner knowledge, it's just not going to be conducive to a bright future. Remember, regular people are dependent on technology, but have begun to develop superstitions about how it works. It's magic to people! This is such a deep issue.

fenomas 11y ago

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

mbreese 11y ago
We're talking about the authors here, not just readers, so yes, having an click-though for a change in Terms of Service seems appropriate.. Sending an email to users when they change is also appropriate. Terms of Service shouldn't change often enough that this should ever be an issue.

pcurve 11y ago

Remember Movable Type?

torbit 11y ago

nah. people (content marketers) post on medium in hope they click on their personal link in the author bio, which has their blog and content they wouldn't put on medium.

tronathan 11y ago

https://s3.amazonaws.com/f.cl.ly/items/072W0F1l3Q1C2b3u3T2r/xs2nv.jpg https://s3.amazonaws.com/f.cl.ly/items/072W0F1l3Q1C2b3u3T2r/...

ne01 11y ago

At sunsed.com we are 100% dedicated to create the best blogging (and in the near future, a full CMS) platform. We hope to re-energize the world of self-publishing with a managed solution that lets you import/export to any other CMS/Blogging platform! Right now we are working on an IDE inside SunSed so anyone can create their own template with HTML++ (our own templating/programming language). Here is a screenshot of of our IDE (I'm working on it right now): https://cdn.sunsed.com/0/images/shared-on-web/htmlpp-ide-preview.png https://cdn.sunsed.com/0/images/shared-on-web/htmlpp-ide-pre... We are going to announce HTML++ and SunSed 2.0 on HN in the next few months. Happy hacking & blogging!

lips 11y ago

As a blog consumer, rather than producer, I also have reservations about Medium-esque sites, but from the opposite perspective. There's already an infinite quantity of interesting content to read, and it seems reasonable to expect rising quantities of worthwhile, as I find writing and creations that I was unaware of when they were being made. With all this stuff, I want to be able to control where and when I read, and how I filter, manage, follow, and store all this stuff. At some point, platform operations reflect a business plan, and that plan may or may not allow for one or more of my preferences, for reasons of $. I guess I just prefer a relationship where a standard or pseudo-standard allows the user control, to select differing vendor options at the very least. Then again, as I'm barely capable of managing a basic server install, I'm fully aware of why people throw in with hosted systems. I'm hoping for great things from stuff like Sandstorm.

dredmorbius 11y ago
The failure of the Web ecosystem as a readily viable document management system is a pretty scathing indictment. As I write this, I'm desparately trying to winnow my way to "tab zero" (by analog to "inbox zero"). And, at some point, organise the pages I've turned up as interesting to be filed for later research and assimilation. I'm using a tablet as my primary browsing device lately (battery life, weight, portrait aspect for long-form reading, plus keyboard), but this means hugely stripped down browser capabilities. While I've got bookmarks, there's no tagging or other organisation possible. Even Readability's app (abandonware for the past 3 years) lacks tags. Calibre and Zotero don't have a full-fledged Android apps, Mendeley is owned by Elseveir (no fucking way I'm getting close to that). And so it goes.
- lips 11y ago
  My mind turns towards a Pinboard archival account with tag searches in browser bookmarks.
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    That seems to be the standard solution, and speaks to Maciej's results. It doesn't lessen the indictment any.

dba7dba 11y ago

My observation is that about 90% of the Wordpress sites out there don't need Wordpress. All they really need is html/css.

KhalilK 11y ago
This! They are so boated and for no reason whatsoever.
- dba7dba 11y ago
  The bloat caused by even a bare minimum WP site versus html/css is breathtaking. Let's say you need to put up a simple brochure type site. You can do alot wih just 2-3 MB text/pics. With WP, it takes about 10MB just to get it running. And let's not forget the DB backend of WP. This alone vastly increases complexity, at least for average users. Scale this up and you see how bloated WP is. You want to put up 100 brochure sites (each about 5MB). With html/css sites, that translates to what 500MB of data? With WP, that already is 1000MB. And add requirement for a DB backend for 100 websites. The bloatness jumped by at least a factor of 2 with just the requirement for more storage. With DB requirement, the bloatness jumped imo by a factor of 5 or so.
kjaer 11y ago
Wordpress is often chosen because it provides the less technically inclined with a nice management interface. If there were rock-solid web interfaces to edit content on static websites, we'd begin to have a serious contender to Wordpress. In the meantime, static websites will unfortunately be reserved to us technically inclined people.

squeakynick 11y ago

I'm embarrassed to say that I still hand write my blog directly in HTML using Notepad++ and manually FTP changes to the hosting company. Most of my blog is static HMTL, with a smidgen of script for analytics or occasional interaction. Every now and then I'll use some light PHP (typically when I need interaction with a database on the server).

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
Why be embarrassed? If it works it works. And I bet those pages load faster than most other blogs out there.
- squeakynick 11y ago
  Try it out; select an article from here ... http://datagenetics.com/blog.html http://datagenetics.com/blog.html Shameless plug :)
Tomte 11y ago
Me too! Well, not a blog, but my web site. But I'd love to see a resurgence of a Bricolage- or MovableType-like tool.
axx 11y ago
It's a good solution if it's what you need. Focus on the content, not on the tech behind it!
akerro 11y ago
I'm going to do the same. I modified a wordpress theme to fit better my needs, after an update all my changes were gone (I had a backup ofc), but it's irritating that I have to patch my theme after every update. I'm going to create a few scripts that will host my blog on gitlab and post it automatically on my server. Static pages are the future.
- moepstar 11y ago
  This is most probably because you've done it wrong ;) WordPress has a concept called "child [1] which shouldn't result in behavior like that. [1] https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes

z3t4 11y ago

I guess there are as many static site generators as there are blogging developers :P

manuw 11y ago

Medium & Co. are good for write stuff down in a simple way. I prefer self-hosting with jekyll.

zwischenzug 11y ago

I used Docker recently to host my own blog, in an attempt to put ads on it and whatever Wordpress extensions I wanted. Despite getting a healthy number of views (nothing extraordinary) the income was basically 0. It just wasn't worth the candle.

axx 11y ago
Does it always have to make you money? I feel blogging is much more about sharing content, building a community and meeting new people. In my personal experience i met a few people through various blogs and it was worth much more, than a few dollars. If you're only blogging to make money, you're doing something wrong. It's the same with startups and other things. Do it for the fun, and not for the money!

KhalilK 11y ago

I spent a couple of weeks developing a blogging system in Django last summer. Doing so allows for great customization and fits exactly my needs. It was more fun than writing actual blog content though.

yumaikas 11y ago

I host my own blog (http://junglecoder.com http://junglecoder.com) on a VPS at the moment. But I went rather overboard with it, as I built my own CMS-lite in go. I was in college, wanted to learn how the web worked at a decently low level (lower than wordpress or rails). What I've discovered is that having a VPS opens up a world of opportunities for network related things. I've used that site to host Ludum Dare entries, ClickOnce .NET apps, and a Wiki Profile image that I used to see if anyone was looking at my page on a company wiki. An SSH tunnel has allowed me to bypass some firewalls that block the majority of ports.... I've learned a lot on that server. Some of the best $50/year that I spend in terms of hosting stuff.

facepalm 11y ago

Self hosted blogs miss the social graph, which drives traffic. That's why Tumblr took off, and I suspect it is also what is driving Medium.

K0nserv 11y ago

I don't think that it's dead and self publishing I'd argue is easier and cheaper than ever. My blog has all the power of s3 for scaling with free SSL from Cloudflare and I pay peanuts for it. Current bill is $0.03 some months it gets closer to $1. I've written about it here https://hugotunius.se/aws/cloudflare/web/2016/01/10/the-one-cent-blog.html https://hugotunius.se/aws/cloudflare/web/2016/01/10/the-one-...

pjc50 11y ago
This is going to sound like a stupid question, but how does one use Jekyll on Windows? I've also never been quite clear whether the github Jekyll is supposed to be run locally before push or is run automatically on their side. (also, what is S3 adding in your case? As far as I'm aware github.io sites are free, while AWS billing is not a hard limit and you're still liable for potentially huge charges if someone decides to DDOS you while you're away from a computer)
- K0nserv 11y ago
  Jekyll should work on Windows because Ruby works on Windows. The reality of it is that many library developers are very bad at making sure their stuff work on Windows. http://rubyinstaller.org/ http://rubyinstaller.org/ might be something to look into. Another option is to use some other static site generator instead of Jekyll. > I've also never been quite clear whether the github Jekyll is supposed to be run locally before push or is run automatically on their side. Depends on the setup. In all setups you are going to want to be able to run the page locally in a watch mode. `jekyll serve --watch --drafts`. When it comes to deployment it differs a bit, if you use the approach outlined in my post the actual building of the page happens on Travis which pushes the generated site to s3. With Github pages it's all taken care of by Github when you push. > also, what is S3 adding in your case? As far as I'm aware github.io sites are free, while AWS billing is not a hard limit and you're still liable for potentially huge charges if someone decides to DDOS you while you're away from a computer When running Jekyll with Github pages there are limitations to what kind of plugins and gems you can use. However it's a perfectly valid approach. I have a billing alert set up at $5 on AWS and to a degree Cloudflare protects me from DDOS. Honestly though most of my pages are extremely lightweight and s3 is cheap enough that even millions of requests is not going to incur huge costs. All my static assets are cached by cloudflare as well.

xylon 11y ago

I just write my blog direct in HTML and host it on a Raspberry pi running FreeBSD and darkhttpd: http://www.naughtycomputer.uk/ http://www.naughtycomputer.uk/

mark_l_watson 11y ago

I went from years of using blogger.com to trying Wordpress for a few months. Then I switched to Jekyll and statically generated blog articles. In the end I went back to blogger.com because I figured that if I needed a 3rd party like discus for comments, then I might as well use blogger.com

therealidiot 11y ago

For those who aren't scared of using Git with their blog, there's fugitive. It's a few {pre,post}-{commit,receive} hooks which generate a static html blog from html articles (though you can configure it with an external parser iirc, so it shouldn't be hard to get Markdown support.) It probably wouldn't suffice for many use cases, but for simple blogs it might be enough. https://gitorious.org/fugitive/fugitive https://gitorious.org/fugitive/fugitive

EvanPlaice 11y ago

Lots of comments are covering how Wordpress is a maintenance hassle, static sites require a programmer to update. What about a 3rd option? Use a web application that can asynchronously fetch markdown files and render them client-side. That's basically how my site I've been working functions. http://evanplaice.com http://evanplaice.com Here's the code Http://gihub.com/evanplaice/evanplaice.com I haven't fleshed out the journal section yet but the majority of the rest of the site is all markdown driven with a clean separation between application. It's also hosted on S3. In theory, I could change the content directly to be loaded on Dropbox, although it would be preferable to provide inline caching of requests. For example use AWS lambda to frequently check for updates. Eventually, when it's ready, I plan to extract the journaling portion and release it as a server-less journaling platform.