6 ms·

Blogging Like a Hacker (2008)

94 points by gk1 7y ago

bhaak 7y ago
I often remark that IT in general is a history-less space. I wonder if Tom would have developed Jekyll if he knew about Blosxom? Blosxom had its last release in the same month when Jekyll had its first. The blog post seems to imply that he came up with the idea and code for Jekyll all by himself. But also as he's a Ruby guy, it's likely he would have ported over the code and concepts to his own project.
- mettamage 7y ago
  Your comment gave me an idea. I'm not going to do it alone (I think), but someone should do it. Start a podcast/educational website on the history of tech. For anyone who wants to do it together and see if it's a fun project to pursue, email me :) (in my profile) Or are there already podcasts on it? If so, I haven't seen it appear on HN.
  - anarchyrucks 7y ago
    Two bit history does something similar. https://twobithistory.org https://twobithistory.org
  - adventured 7y ago
    There are some, for example the Internet History Podcast is overall tremendous: http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/ http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/ I'm not aware of anyone successfully doing a more expansive history of tech podcast (and actually filling it out).
- Apaec 7y ago
  I've seen this a lot in OSS. Virtuous developers will at least give credit. Others will claim it was their own work, spice up the wording and build their own personal brand. Could we refer to these cases as "plagiarism"? It's the proper definition after all. Forking is different as it relates to code, not ideas.
  - bhaak 7y ago
    I mean that they actually don't know about the history. You can see this in almost every discussion about computer science topics. Look for example how many programmers are shit-talking about Java and they have no clue about certain design decisions back in the day. Java was the language that made byte compilation and VMs mainstream. Together with XML (another heated topic) it liberated us from unnecessary binary data formats. And even the language itself was a gift from the programming gods at a time when the most viable programming languages were C, C++, or Perl. I will forever be thankful to Java for saving me from C++.
Eiriksmal 7y ago
Fascinating. For those who click to read the comments before the actual article, this is Mr. Preston-Werner's introduction of Jekyll, the Ruby static site generator, to the world. He lays out his reasons for creating the tech: >>>First, all my writing would be stored in a Git repository. This would ensure that I could try out different ideas and explore a variety of posts all from the comfort of my preferred editor and the command line. I’d be able to publish a post via a simple deploy script or post-commit hook. Complexity would be kept to an absolute minimum, so a static site would be preferable to a dynamic site that required ongoing maintenance. My blog would need to be easily customizable; coming from a graphic design background means I’ll always be tweaking the site’s appearance and layout. Which are the exact same wishes I had with my own blog, and I assume many other "hacker" types have for theirs, as well. I don't remember why I settled on Pelican (Python) over Jekyll (Ruby), but either tool is a fantastic choice for blogs... and I now understand that's because Jekyll was literally created to support those goals!
- h2odragon 7y ago
  I have been playing with both over the past two days and am using Pelican because I couldn't get a functioning enough ruby install put together for Jekyll. Either tool looks about equivalent in actual usage... Which is an incredible improvement on the state of the world 12 years ago when i last cared at all about generating web content.
- xtagon 7y ago
  And there are many more options now, in various languages. StaticGen.com has a pretty big list.
- greggman2 7y ago
  I switched to a static site gen and a git repo. I lost the ability to preview. Sure, if I'm at home I can run the build script, launch a simple server, navigate to the page on localhost but it's a long way from say wordpress (previous solution) where it was a much nicer experience to preview. Adding images into a post was also nicer. Just drag and drop instead of copy into folder, check into git, manaully type urls like it is now. I use a private repo on github so at least I can add something without having to be at my computer but still no preview or nice UI. Any static generators have well designed solutions for this?
stakhanov 7y ago
You call that blogging like a hacker? This is blogging like a hacker: https://www.stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html https://www.stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html This is blogging like a hacker: https://blog.fefe.de/ https://blog.fefe.de/
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- saagarjha 7y ago
  What, serif fonts?
  - stakhanov 7y ago
    I don't believe the sites themselves make any stipulations about preferences regarding fonts. It's up to your browser. In any case: Regarding the downvoting: Bring it, bitches. ...just trying to set something straight about established cultural norms around the word "hacker".
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      I’m still not seeing what you’ve “set straight”.
      - stakhanov 7y ago
        Jekyll is about taking a few bytes of text and turning them into the multi-megabyte-monstrosity that a website is nowadays expected to be. A real hacker responds to that trend Nancy Reagan style. "Just say no".
        saagarjha 7y ago
        No, that only happens if you choose to make it a multi-megabyte monstrosity. My website, which uses Jekyll, has a home page that is under 10 KB uncompressed. It's just a HTML page and two CSS files: https://saagarjha.com https://saagarjha.com
gr8pes 7y ago
What about Ghost blog? I have been wanting to dive into some of my own blogging and have been trying out Ghost (https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/). It has been really fun trying to find a theme that I like and the native apps make it very pleasing to work on.
- outworlder 7y ago
  Ghost is like the antithesis of this post.
  - mettamage 7y ago
    Lol, I literally used Ghost for a while and used Jekyll to convert it into a static blog. It allowed me to use Markdown to quickly write blog posts. Jekyll would create a static version of my public localhost, and I'd push it to Github.
GEBBL 7y ago
The nice thing about Jekyll is that you can just find a nice looking theme and then fork it, edit the config.yml file with your specifics, such as name/address/etc and then publish. Posts go under the posts folder, uploaded as md files. It's very nice and clean. You can host a site on github pages and point your .com to their DNS servers. It frees you up to focus on writing, and you have the benefit of markdown there if you need it. Makes you wonder why a simple blog site needs to be interacting with a DB and making mad calls all over the place, with loads of insecure plugins and all the rest of it. Just give me simplicity :)
unpwn 7y ago
Recently set up a static gen blog. I went with Hugo over Jekyll. I think its a bit personal preference tbh, but I really liked Hugo's layout, speed, and kinda prefer hacking with Go over Ruby if it comes to that.
- outworlder 7y ago
  I like Hugo too – but it came much later as is probably influenced by Jekyll.
nickjj 7y ago
Jekyll is great. It's what I use to run my site for the last ~4 years with about 250 posts (it's still very fast -- reloads happen in less than 3 seconds). It really doesn't take too much effort to use existing Jekyll features to add in custom "user features" into your site. You can go so far without needing to write your own plugins. For example, I just put out a video a few days ago that goes over using "includes" to add 3 unrelated site features (site wide affiliate link notices, a table of contents for blog posts and embedding media): https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/implementing-3-different-website-features-with-jekyll-using-includes https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/implementing-3-different-webs...
hashberry 7y ago
Also, blogging like a hacker includes not being afraid of your blog being hacked. Static HTML has the advantage of high security + high performance.
strogonoff 7y ago
Jekyll can be used for much more than blogging, too. Ribose, for example, has a network of sites for its open-source initiatives[0] built on top of Jekyll. Sites are integrated with each other and also with Git repos of relevant software packages, pulling e.g. latest commit times & documentation in AsciiDoc at build time. Each site does have a blog/newsroll, but in the end is much more than that. The implementation involves a gem-based theme with accompanying helper plugin, which are open source[1]. Going the static site route, on one hand, introduces new constraints—for example, build times become important—but on the other hand allows to build blazing-fast websites without having to worry as much about ongoing server maintenance. (Currently each site gets built on Travis CI and delivered via AWS S3/CF.) Disclaimer: I work with Ribose currently and participated in Ribose Open development. [0] See for example https://www.metanorma.com/ https://www.metanorma.com/, https://www.rnpgp.com/ https://www.rnpgp.com/ or https://www.cryptode.com/ https://www.cryptode.com/ [1] https://github.com/riboseinc/jekyll-theme-open-project/ https://github.com/riboseinc/jekyll-theme-open-project/
- arkokoley 7y ago
  True. Zense Dev (we are a student software development group based out of Bangalore, India) uses Jekyll to render its main website[0] which includes a blog, a list of projects, lists of events happening and a list of the members of the group. We even have member pages and the blog posts written by that member show up there. [0] https://zense.co.in https://zense.co.in [1] http://zense.co.in/people/arkokoley http://zense.co.in/people/arkokoley
andreyk 7y ago
I really like this quote from this article: “I love writing. I get a kick out of sharing my thoughts with others. The act of transforming ideas into words is an amazingly efficient way to solidify and refine your thoughts about a given topic. “ So much so that it is quoted on my own Jekyll-based personal website (http://www.andreykurenkov.com/ http://www.andreykurenkov.com/). I have set up 3 additional site since with Jekyll, all hosted on GitHub, and it's super easy every time.

94 points by gk1 7y ago

I often remark that IT in general is a history-less space. I wonder if Tom would have developed Jekyll if he knew about Blosxom? Blosxom had its last release in the same month when Jekyll had its first. The blog post seems to imply that he came up with the idea and code for Jekyll all by himself. But also as he's a Ruby guy, it's likely he would have ported over the code and concepts to his own project.

mettamage 7y ago
Your comment gave me an idea. I'm not going to do it alone (I think), but someone should do it. Start a podcast/educational website on the history of tech. For anyone who wants to do it together and see if it's a fun project to pursue, email me :) (in my profile) Or are there already podcasts on it? If so, I haven't seen it appear on HN.
- anarchyrucks 7y ago
  Two bit history does something similar. https://twobithistory.org https://twobithistory.org
- adventured 7y ago
  There are some, for example the Internet History Podcast is overall tremendous: http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/ http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/ I'm not aware of anyone successfully doing a more expansive history of tech podcast (and actually filling it out).
Apaec 7y ago
I've seen this a lot in OSS. Virtuous developers will at least give credit. Others will claim it was their own work, spice up the wording and build their own personal brand. Could we refer to these cases as "plagiarism"? It's the proper definition after all. Forking is different as it relates to code, not ideas.
- bhaak 7y ago
  I mean that they actually don't know about the history. You can see this in almost every discussion about computer science topics. Look for example how many programmers are shit-talking about Java and they have no clue about certain design decisions back in the day. Java was the language that made byte compilation and VMs mainstream. Together with XML (another heated topic) it liberated us from unnecessary binary data formats. And even the language itself was a gift from the programming gods at a time when the most viable programming languages were C, C++, or Perl. I will forever be thankful to Java for saving me from C++.

Eiriksmal 7y ago

Fascinating. For those who click to read the comments before the actual article, this is Mr. Preston-Werner's introduction of Jekyll, the Ruby static site generator, to the world. He lays out his reasons for creating the tech: >>>First, all my writing would be stored in a Git repository. This would ensure that I could try out different ideas and explore a variety of posts all from the comfort of my preferred editor and the command line. I’d be able to publish a post via a simple deploy script or post-commit hook. Complexity would be kept to an absolute minimum, so a static site would be preferable to a dynamic site that required ongoing maintenance. My blog would need to be easily customizable; coming from a graphic design background means I’ll always be tweaking the site’s appearance and layout. Which are the exact same wishes I had with my own blog, and I assume many other "hacker" types have for theirs, as well. I don't remember why I settled on Pelican (Python) over Jekyll (Ruby), but either tool is a fantastic choice for blogs... and I now understand that's because Jekyll was literally created to support those goals!

h2odragon 7y ago
I have been playing with both over the past two days and am using Pelican because I couldn't get a functioning enough ruby install put together for Jekyll. Either tool looks about equivalent in actual usage... Which is an incredible improvement on the state of the world 12 years ago when i last cared at all about generating web content.
xtagon 7y ago
And there are many more options now, in various languages. StaticGen.com has a pretty big list.
greggman2 7y ago
I switched to a static site gen and a git repo. I lost the ability to preview. Sure, if I'm at home I can run the build script, launch a simple server, navigate to the page on localhost but it's a long way from say wordpress (previous solution) where it was a much nicer experience to preview. Adding images into a post was also nicer. Just drag and drop instead of copy into folder, check into git, manaully type urls like it is now. I use a private repo on github so at least I can add something without having to be at my computer but still no preview or nice UI. Any static generators have well designed solutions for this?

stakhanov 7y ago

You call that blogging like a hacker? This is blogging like a hacker: https://www.stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html https://www.stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html This is blogging like a hacker: https://blog.fefe.de/ https://blog.fefe.de/

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
saagarjha 7y ago
What, serif fonts?
- stakhanov 7y ago
  I don't believe the sites themselves make any stipulations about preferences regarding fonts. It's up to your browser. In any case: Regarding the downvoting: Bring it, bitches. ...just trying to set something straight about established cultural norms around the word "hacker".
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    I’m still not seeing what you’ve “set straight”.
    - stakhanov 7y ago
      Jekyll is about taking a few bytes of text and turning them into the multi-megabyte-monstrosity that a website is nowadays expected to be. A real hacker responds to that trend Nancy Reagan style. "Just say no".
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        No, that only happens if you choose to make it a multi-megabyte monstrosity. My website, which uses Jekyll, has a home page that is under 10 KB uncompressed. It's just a HTML page and two CSS files: https://saagarjha.com https://saagarjha.com

gr8pes 7y ago

What about Ghost blog? I have been wanting to dive into some of my own blogging and have been trying out Ghost (https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/). It has been really fun trying to find a theme that I like and the native apps make it very pleasing to work on.

outworlder 7y ago
Ghost is like the antithesis of this post.
- mettamage 7y ago
  Lol, I literally used Ghost for a while and used Jekyll to convert it into a static blog. It allowed me to use Markdown to quickly write blog posts. Jekyll would create a static version of my public localhost, and I'd push it to Github.

GEBBL 7y ago

The nice thing about Jekyll is that you can just find a nice looking theme and then fork it, edit the config.yml file with your specifics, such as name/address/etc and then publish. Posts go under the posts folder, uploaded as md files. It's very nice and clean. You can host a site on github pages and point your .com to their DNS servers. It frees you up to focus on writing, and you have the benefit of markdown there if you need it. Makes you wonder why a simple blog site needs to be interacting with a DB and making mad calls all over the place, with loads of insecure plugins and all the rest of it. Just give me simplicity :)

unpwn 7y ago

Recently set up a static gen blog. I went with Hugo over Jekyll. I think its a bit personal preference tbh, but I really liked Hugo's layout, speed, and kinda prefer hacking with Go over Ruby if it comes to that.

outworlder 7y ago
I like Hugo too – but it came much later as is probably influenced by Jekyll.

nickjj 7y ago

Jekyll is great. It's what I use to run my site for the last ~4 years with about 250 posts (it's still very fast -- reloads happen in less than 3 seconds). It really doesn't take too much effort to use existing Jekyll features to add in custom "user features" into your site. You can go so far without needing to write your own plugins. For example, I just put out a video a few days ago that goes over using "includes" to add 3 unrelated site features (site wide affiliate link notices, a table of contents for blog posts and embedding media): https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/implementing-3-different-website-features-with-jekyll-using-includes https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/implementing-3-different-webs...

hashberry 7y ago

Also, blogging like a hacker includes not being afraid of your blog being hacked. Static HTML has the advantage of high security + high performance.

strogonoff 7y ago

Jekyll can be used for much more than blogging, too. Ribose, for example, has a network of sites for its open-source initiatives[0] built on top of Jekyll. Sites are integrated with each other and also with Git repos of relevant software packages, pulling e.g. latest commit times & documentation in AsciiDoc at build time. Each site does have a blog/newsroll, but in the end is much more than that. The implementation involves a gem-based theme with accompanying helper plugin, which are open source[1]. Going the static site route, on one hand, introduces new constraints—for example, build times become important—but on the other hand allows to build blazing-fast websites without having to worry as much about ongoing server maintenance. (Currently each site gets built on Travis CI and delivered via AWS S3/CF.) Disclaimer: I work with Ribose currently and participated in Ribose Open development. [0] See for example https://www.metanorma.com/ https://www.metanorma.com/, https://www.rnpgp.com/ https://www.rnpgp.com/ or https://www.cryptode.com/ https://www.cryptode.com/ [1] https://github.com/riboseinc/jekyll-theme-open-project/ https://github.com/riboseinc/jekyll-theme-open-project/

arkokoley 7y ago
True. Zense Dev (we are a student software development group based out of Bangalore, India) uses Jekyll to render its main website[0] which includes a blog, a list of projects, lists of events happening and a list of the members of the group. We even have member pages and the blog posts written by that member show up there. [0] https://zense.co.in https://zense.co.in [1] http://zense.co.in/people/arkokoley http://zense.co.in/people/arkokoley

andreyk 7y ago

I really like this quote from this article: “I love writing. I get a kick out of sharing my thoughts with others. The act of transforming ideas into words is an amazingly efficient way to solidify and refine your thoughts about a given topic. “ So much so that it is quoted on my own Jekyll-based personal website (http://www.andreykurenkov.com/ http://www.andreykurenkov.com/). I have set up 3 additional site since with Jekyll, all hosted on GitHub, and it's super easy every time.