4 ms·

Oh how I miss the days of simple self-publishing from your WYSIWYG html editor direct to a cheap VPS. Why's everything gotta be so complicated?

frenchie4111 8y ago
In order to make things look simpler, we have to make them more complicated
detaro 8y ago
You can still do that if that's what you want? Putting a website online isn't any harder today than in the past.
- whalesalad 8y ago
  I think the OP is referring to the social conditioning we've had to prefer content platforms like Medium. Plus, most people starting out don't want to deal with the stateful hell that is configuring a DO/Linode box for WP. Regardless, Hackernoon should have left Medium as soon as they found traction.
  - detaro 8y ago
    Re configuring servers: Shared hosting is still a thing, as are dozens of companies that will run your wordpress/... for you. There's degrees of complexity vs flexibility you can choose from. But I think you are right, Hackernoon immensely benefited from being on Medium and how easy they could "take over" articles - I remember quite often seeing an article making the rounds under the author's account, and then a few hours later being blasted out everywhere under hackernoon.com. That wouldn't have happened without the integrated nature of medium (but as a consumer also didn't add anything for me). And medium provided all that for free.
  - rchaud 8y ago
    There's a lot of legwork to do (relatively speaking) to get a simple FTP server up and running. The UI/UX of domain registrar sites are horrible and filled with dark patterns to upsell you to email hosting, Whois protection, cloud storage, etc. A non-technical person without any webmaster experience might give up here, understandably. Even if they soldier on, they'll find themselves needing to maintain separate logins for your registrar account, your Wordpress account, your MySQL account (if you decided to install Wordpress) and at no point does the registar site make any of this clear. At least it's not too much work to point the domain towards your server's IP address. On DigitalOcean, I had to do all of the above, plus rewrite my .htaccess files for prettified URLs since whatever worked on localhost did not work when the files were sitting on a droplet. Finally, at the end of the day, people are loath to pay $10/mo for web hosting because that's as much as a Netflix subscription, and they had to do all the heavy lifting themselves.
    - detaro 8y ago
      Or they go to someone like Dreamhost where you can get a hosting package with domain and Wordpress already installed from one company. As much as I enjoy fuzzing about with my server, if you need "a website", a VPS should not be your first target.
KerrickStaley 8y ago
I use GitHub Pages + Jekyll to host my blog, and it works pretty well. It's free and I don't have to do any administration work or worry about load. It's also trivial to port to another platform (e.g. VPS). https://github.com/kerrickstaley/kerrickstaley.github.io https://github.com/kerrickstaley/kerrickstaley.github.io https://www.kerrickstaley.com/ https://www.kerrickstaley.com/

frenchie4111 8y ago

In order to make things look simpler, we have to make them more complicated

detaro 8y ago

You can still do that if that's what you want? Putting a website online isn't any harder today than in the past.

whalesalad 8y ago
I think the OP is referring to the social conditioning we've had to prefer content platforms like Medium. Plus, most people starting out don't want to deal with the stateful hell that is configuring a DO/Linode box for WP. Regardless, Hackernoon should have left Medium as soon as they found traction.
- detaro 8y ago
  Re configuring servers: Shared hosting is still a thing, as are dozens of companies that will run your wordpress/... for you. There's degrees of complexity vs flexibility you can choose from. But I think you are right, Hackernoon immensely benefited from being on Medium and how easy they could "take over" articles - I remember quite often seeing an article making the rounds under the author's account, and then a few hours later being blasted out everywhere under hackernoon.com. That wouldn't have happened without the integrated nature of medium (but as a consumer also didn't add anything for me). And medium provided all that for free.
- rchaud 8y ago
  There's a lot of legwork to do (relatively speaking) to get a simple FTP server up and running. The UI/UX of domain registrar sites are horrible and filled with dark patterns to upsell you to email hosting, Whois protection, cloud storage, etc. A non-technical person without any webmaster experience might give up here, understandably. Even if they soldier on, they'll find themselves needing to maintain separate logins for your registrar account, your Wordpress account, your MySQL account (if you decided to install Wordpress) and at no point does the registar site make any of this clear. At least it's not too much work to point the domain towards your server's IP address. On DigitalOcean, I had to do all of the above, plus rewrite my .htaccess files for prettified URLs since whatever worked on localhost did not work when the files were sitting on a droplet. Finally, at the end of the day, people are loath to pay $10/mo for web hosting because that's as much as a Netflix subscription, and they had to do all the heavy lifting themselves.
  - detaro 8y ago
    Or they go to someone like Dreamhost where you can get a hosting package with domain and Wordpress already installed from one company. As much as I enjoy fuzzing about with my server, if you need "a website", a VPS should not be your first target.

KerrickStaley 8y ago

I use GitHub Pages + Jekyll to host my blog, and it works pretty well. It's free and I don't have to do any administration work or worry about load. It's also trivial to port to another platform (e.g. VPS). https://github.com/kerrickstaley/kerrickstaley.github.io https://github.com/kerrickstaley/kerrickstaley.github.io https://www.kerrickstaley.com/ https://www.kerrickstaley.com/