12 ms·

Using the same blogging software for 20 years

94 points by cosmojg 7y ago

bradley_taunt 7y ago
Really interesting read. With the current trend of revitalizing personal sites/blogs, I hope to see more of them stick around for even 10+ years. Everyone should have their own personal piece of the web.
Fizzadar 7y ago
20 years! That's awesome. Makes me wish I didn't replace 7 years of history on my blog in 2013.
- kick 7y ago
  The front page of your blog has been archived a few hundred times since 2006. I'm pretty confident you can recover most of your posts, if you want: https://web.archive.org/web/20060801000000*/pointlessramblings.com https://web.archive.org/web/20060801000000*/pointlessramblin...
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    At one point I downloaded my site's Wayback Machine Archive curious what I could recover. It didn't feel like enough because particularly in the regions of time where I lost the most blog posts my front page mostly only had synopses or excerpts of posts and the full posts themselves were on a follow-up page that the Wayback Machine didn't archive.
gwern 7y ago
> I gave up on dealing with link rot years ago. If I come across an old post with non-functioning links, I may just find a new resource, link to The Wayback Machine or (if I'm getting some spammer trying to get me to fix a broken link by linking to their black-hat-SEO laiden spamfarm) removing the link outright. I don't think it's worth the time to fix old links, given the average lifespan of a website is 2½ years and trying to automate the detection of link rot is a fools errand (a page that goes 404 or does not respond is easy—now handle the case where it's a new company running the site and all old links still go a page, but not the page that you linked to). I'm also beginning to think it's not worth linking at all, but old habits die hard. After about nine years of writing, I've concluded something similar: my existing reactive approach (https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs) is not going to scale either with expanding content or over time. Fixing individual links is OK if you have only a few or aren't going to be around too long, but as you approach tens of thousands of links over decades, the dead links build up. So the solution I am going to implement soon is taking a tool like ArchiveBox or SinglePage and hosting my own copies of (most) external links, so they will be cached shortly after linking and can't break. The bandwidth and space will be somewhat expensive, but it'll save me and my readers a ton in the long run.
- kick 7y ago
  So the solution I am going to implement soon is taking a tool like ArchiveBox or SinglePage and hosting my own copies of (most) external links, so they will be cached shortly after linking and can't break. The bandwidth and space will be somewhat expensive, but it'll save me and my readers a ton in the long run. Wouldn't a more ideal solution be archiving via a variety of external (or internal, I guess) sources the first time a link appears on your site, and then after a year automatically switching all links to archived versions? This would kill link rot in its tracks while preserving a lot of the value of links for the people you're linking to, and would cost less in bandwidth costs given the curve of access on old content.
  - gwern 7y ago
    > Wouldn't a more ideal solution be archiving via a variety of external (or internal, I guess) sources the first time a link appears on your site, and then after a year automatically switching all links to archived versions? Yes, by 'shortly' I meant something like 90 days. In my experience, most pages won't change too much 90 days after I add them (I'm thinking particularly of social media-like things), but it's also rare for something to die that quickly. 365+ days, however, would be perilously long. My main concern there is balancing between delaying so long to snapshot that the link dies (thus generating the manual linkrot-repair problem I'm trying to avoid) and being too eager to snapshot and archiving a version which is not done and would mislead a reader. (I also went through all my domains and created a whitelist of domains that my experience suggests are trustworthy or where local mirrors wouldn't be relevant. For example, obviously you don't really need to worry about Arxiv links breaking, or about English Wikipedia pages disappearing - barring the occasional deletionist rampage.) > This would kill link rot in its tracks while preserving a lot of the value of links for the people you're linking to, and would cost less in bandwidth costs given the curve of access on old content. My traffic patterns are different from a blog, so it wouldn't.
- PowerfulWizard 7y ago
  I've been meaning to set up some kind of basic crawl & archive system forever. Ideally I'd like to output something replayable and analyzable like a WARC or HAR, but also spit out a PDF, which I think chrome headless should be able to do. Right now I just print to file if I want to "save" something. But your write-up is very thorough, that is basically the situation. So much good unique content on youtube too which is almost impossible to properly archive due to size, my subscriptions alone would probably be over 1TB. I'd like to write a basic tool that would take a PDF, i.e. of a book, and output a directory of PDFs of snapshots of all web links in the book, to create basically a full reference snapshot for a given book that could be stored alongside the book. Not sure if it work well and result in a reasonable size.
dddddaviddddd 7y ago
Currently have been running essentially the same PHP + plain text files stack on my website for about 10 years. No more complex than it needs to be.
egypturnash 7y ago
I’ve been using the same WordPress installation for seven years now. I thought it was longer but I guess I was mentally counting the years before that when I just had a modified version of a gallery script (Singapore) shoeing my art and no actual text blog. I’ll probably be using it for years to come. Does what I need it to, works for the amount of traffic I get, no need to change.
chipotle_coyote 7y ago
I admit I'm mostly amused/fascinated by the list at the end of the feed types the blog supports, ranked by popularity. Gopher being more popular than Atom is a quirk specific to this blog -- it's not like many other sites these days support it, right? -- but it's the quite new JSONFeed being at top that was most surprising. Possibly also a quirk specific to this blog, but I'm not as sure of that as I am about Gopher.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  My impression is that because it is the same RSS discovery process that finds both traditional RSS, Atom, and JSONFeed, knowing which one your Reader application favors and/or is using is sometimes difficult. I'd off-hand heard that many of the big, strongest web-based Readers had started favoring JSONFeed, but this is the first evidence I've seen of it. It's also why I assume Atom is so low on the list, in that those same readers likely would prefer Atom to RSS, but have switched to JSONFeed today, and RSS has the long tail of longevity and legacy reading software. It could also just be that since it is apparently request count (rather than unique origin or such) that possibly JSONFeed tools simply request it more often than the others.
criddell 7y ago
> My PageRank is still high enough to get requests from people trying to leach off from it. One of his guesses for this is because he doesn't try to game the PageRank system. I hope he's right. I've argued with other people that the best way to score well on Google is to create the best website you can and forget about SEO games. The specific example we were talking about is recipe websites. They all seem to have pointless essays about the first time the author tried ossobuco when they were an exchange student or something else irrelevant. The theory is that the essay is for Google and not for the poor schmuck trying to make dinner.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  The essays at the top of recipes are about creating "romance", and often are intended for people as much as (or more than) SEO. They are intended to create empathy from the recipe reader toward the writer and establish certain bonafides, most of which are inconsequential to the recipe itself but help separate one recipe website and/or one recipe author/collector/distributor from another. It's actually something that goes way back in recipe books, where a lot of classic, well respected recipe books for centuries have always put the work into an introduction chapter describing the author, what their passions are, how they approach recipes. It helps sell recipe books and helps aspiring and/or home chefs see things like "oh, this author is just like me" or "if this person can make this recipe, so can I". It's just that on the internet when you are looking for one specific recipe that "introduction chapter" starts to have to move into every single recipe because people aren't going to pick up your website or blog like a book, they are going to go straight to a single page. Though even that isn't entirely unique in the world of cookbooks: there are also old traditions of narrative recipe books that treat the cookbook as a diary of sorts laying out the author's discovery and interest in every single recipe. Sometimes people want a story to go with your dry lists of ingredients and otherwise boring step-by-step directions. It emphasizes the art in cooking, that it isn't just boring "food chemistry", but that it is a way for people to connect to each other. Even if it didn't help with SEO, there are probably lots of recipe bloggers that would do it anyway because it shows passion, love for the art, narrative hooks for the reader to explore who they are, their creativity, and/or their other interests outside of just their kitchen.
mmsimanga 7y ago
I must confess I have probably spent more time trying out blogging software than actually blogging. Reading that OP has his entries as HTML has given me food for thought. I am using Hugo but not being a front end developer I battled (most probably due to my lack of knowledge, time and application) so much to get my theme simple that I find myself hesitant to blog again. Moral of the story use what you understand.
mooreds 7y ago
Love it. I've been blogging for 16 years myself. Find it a wonderful way to share knowledge and see myself changing over time. I've tried keeping a diary but it never works for me.
ncmncm 7y ago
Reading the article, it says he hasn't been using the same software, because he's rewritten all of it, since, much of it multiple times. The only thing that's the same is the content and the file format. "You have an ax. You replace the handle. Later, you replace the head. When did it stop being the same ax?" "When I replaced the handle."
- theandrewbailey 7y ago
  See also Ship of Theseus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
- gwern 7y ago
  You know, in DC (http://dresdencodak.com/2015/05/18/dark-science-46/ http://dresdencodak.com/2015/05/18/dark-science-46/), the character who gives that answer is turning into a villain.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    Good catch! But her brain is her superpower. RADNAR By the stone of Daggoth!
jefftk 7y ago
I've been using the same blogging infrastructure for fifteen years. I write HTML, then run an offline script to create a static website (rss feed, tag indexes, extracts for home page). I rewrote most of it once, switching from parsing the html with regexps to using an actual html parser, and taking the time to clean up some especially ugly parts.

94 points by cosmojg 7y ago

Really interesting read. With the current trend of revitalizing personal sites/blogs, I hope to see more of them stick around for even 10+ years. Everyone should have their own personal piece of the web.

Fizzadar 7y ago

20 years! That's awesome. Makes me wish I didn't replace 7 years of history on my blog in 2013.

kick 7y ago
The front page of your blog has been archived a few hundred times since 2006. I'm pretty confident you can recover most of your posts, if you want: https://web.archive.org/web/20060801000000*/pointlessramblings.com https://web.archive.org/web/20060801000000*/pointlessramblin...
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  At one point I downloaded my site's Wayback Machine Archive curious what I could recover. It didn't feel like enough because particularly in the regions of time where I lost the most blog posts my front page mostly only had synopses or excerpts of posts and the full posts themselves were on a follow-up page that the Wayback Machine didn't archive.

gwern 7y ago

> I gave up on dealing with link rot years ago. If I come across an old post with non-functioning links, I may just find a new resource, link to The Wayback Machine or (if I'm getting some spammer trying to get me to fix a broken link by linking to their black-hat-SEO laiden spamfarm) removing the link outright. I don't think it's worth the time to fix old links, given the average lifespan of a website is 2½ years and trying to automate the detection of link rot is a fools errand (a page that goes 404 or does not respond is easy—now handle the case where it's a new company running the site and all old links still go a page, but not the page that you linked to). I'm also beginning to think it's not worth linking at all, but old habits die hard. After about nine years of writing, I've concluded something similar: my existing reactive approach (https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs) is not going to scale either with expanding content or over time. Fixing individual links is OK if you have only a few or aren't going to be around too long, but as you approach tens of thousands of links over decades, the dead links build up. So the solution I am going to implement soon is taking a tool like ArchiveBox or SinglePage and hosting my own copies of (most) external links, so they will be cached shortly after linking and can't break. The bandwidth and space will be somewhat expensive, but it'll save me and my readers a ton in the long run.

kick 7y ago
So the solution I am going to implement soon is taking a tool like ArchiveBox or SinglePage and hosting my own copies of (most) external links, so they will be cached shortly after linking and can't break. The bandwidth and space will be somewhat expensive, but it'll save me and my readers a ton in the long run. Wouldn't a more ideal solution be archiving via a variety of external (or internal, I guess) sources the first time a link appears on your site, and then after a year automatically switching all links to archived versions? This would kill link rot in its tracks while preserving a lot of the value of links for the people you're linking to, and would cost less in bandwidth costs given the curve of access on old content.
- gwern 7y ago
  > Wouldn't a more ideal solution be archiving via a variety of external (or internal, I guess) sources the first time a link appears on your site, and then after a year automatically switching all links to archived versions? Yes, by 'shortly' I meant something like 90 days. In my experience, most pages won't change too much 90 days after I add them (I'm thinking particularly of social media-like things), but it's also rare for something to die that quickly. 365+ days, however, would be perilously long. My main concern there is balancing between delaying so long to snapshot that the link dies (thus generating the manual linkrot-repair problem I'm trying to avoid) and being too eager to snapshot and archiving a version which is not done and would mislead a reader. (I also went through all my domains and created a whitelist of domains that my experience suggests are trustworthy or where local mirrors wouldn't be relevant. For example, obviously you don't really need to worry about Arxiv links breaking, or about English Wikipedia pages disappearing - barring the occasional deletionist rampage.) > This would kill link rot in its tracks while preserving a lot of the value of links for the people you're linking to, and would cost less in bandwidth costs given the curve of access on old content. My traffic patterns are different from a blog, so it wouldn't.
PowerfulWizard 7y ago
I've been meaning to set up some kind of basic crawl & archive system forever. Ideally I'd like to output something replayable and analyzable like a WARC or HAR, but also spit out a PDF, which I think chrome headless should be able to do. Right now I just print to file if I want to "save" something. But your write-up is very thorough, that is basically the situation. So much good unique content on youtube too which is almost impossible to properly archive due to size, my subscriptions alone would probably be over 1TB. I'd like to write a basic tool that would take a PDF, i.e. of a book, and output a directory of PDFs of snapshots of all web links in the book, to create basically a full reference snapshot for a given book that could be stored alongside the book. Not sure if it work well and result in a reasonable size.

dddddaviddddd 7y ago

Currently have been running essentially the same PHP + plain text files stack on my website for about 10 years. No more complex than it needs to be.

egypturnash 7y ago

I’ve been using the same WordPress installation for seven years now. I thought it was longer but I guess I was mentally counting the years before that when I just had a modified version of a gallery script (Singapore) shoeing my art and no actual text blog. I’ll probably be using it for years to come. Does what I need it to, works for the amount of traffic I get, no need to change.

chipotle_coyote 7y ago

I admit I'm mostly amused/fascinated by the list at the end of the feed types the blog supports, ranked by popularity. Gopher being more popular than Atom is a quirk specific to this blog -- it's not like many other sites these days support it, right? -- but it's the quite new JSONFeed being at top that was most surprising. Possibly also a quirk specific to this blog, but I'm not as sure of that as I am about Gopher.

WorldMaker 7y ago
My impression is that because it is the same RSS discovery process that finds both traditional RSS, Atom, and JSONFeed, knowing which one your Reader application favors and/or is using is sometimes difficult. I'd off-hand heard that many of the big, strongest web-based Readers had started favoring JSONFeed, but this is the first evidence I've seen of it. It's also why I assume Atom is so low on the list, in that those same readers likely would prefer Atom to RSS, but have switched to JSONFeed today, and RSS has the long tail of longevity and legacy reading software. It could also just be that since it is apparently request count (rather than unique origin or such) that possibly JSONFeed tools simply request it more often than the others.

criddell 7y ago

> My PageRank is still high enough to get requests from people trying to leach off from it. One of his guesses for this is because he doesn't try to game the PageRank system. I hope he's right. I've argued with other people that the best way to score well on Google is to create the best website you can and forget about SEO games. The specific example we were talking about is recipe websites. They all seem to have pointless essays about the first time the author tried ossobuco when they were an exchange student or something else irrelevant. The theory is that the essay is for Google and not for the poor schmuck trying to make dinner.

WorldMaker 7y ago
The essays at the top of recipes are about creating "romance", and often are intended for people as much as (or more than) SEO. They are intended to create empathy from the recipe reader toward the writer and establish certain bonafides, most of which are inconsequential to the recipe itself but help separate one recipe website and/or one recipe author/collector/distributor from another. It's actually something that goes way back in recipe books, where a lot of classic, well respected recipe books for centuries have always put the work into an introduction chapter describing the author, what their passions are, how they approach recipes. It helps sell recipe books and helps aspiring and/or home chefs see things like "oh, this author is just like me" or "if this person can make this recipe, so can I". It's just that on the internet when you are looking for one specific recipe that "introduction chapter" starts to have to move into every single recipe because people aren't going to pick up your website or blog like a book, they are going to go straight to a single page. Though even that isn't entirely unique in the world of cookbooks: there are also old traditions of narrative recipe books that treat the cookbook as a diary of sorts laying out the author's discovery and interest in every single recipe. Sometimes people want a story to go with your dry lists of ingredients and otherwise boring step-by-step directions. It emphasizes the art in cooking, that it isn't just boring "food chemistry", but that it is a way for people to connect to each other. Even if it didn't help with SEO, there are probably lots of recipe bloggers that would do it anyway because it shows passion, love for the art, narrative hooks for the reader to explore who they are, their creativity, and/or their other interests outside of just their kitchen.

mmsimanga 7y ago

I must confess I have probably spent more time trying out blogging software than actually blogging. Reading that OP has his entries as HTML has given me food for thought. I am using Hugo but not being a front end developer I battled (most probably due to my lack of knowledge, time and application) so much to get my theme simple that I find myself hesitant to blog again. Moral of the story use what you understand.

mooreds 7y ago

Love it. I've been blogging for 16 years myself. Find it a wonderful way to share knowledge and see myself changing over time. I've tried keeping a diary but it never works for me.

ncmncm 7y ago

Reading the article, it says he hasn't been using the same software, because he's rewritten all of it, since, much of it multiple times. The only thing that's the same is the content and the file format. "You have an ax. You replace the handle. Later, you replace the head. When did it stop being the same ax?" "When I replaced the handle."

theandrewbailey 7y ago
See also Ship of Theseus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
gwern 7y ago
You know, in DC (http://dresdencodak.com/2015/05/18/dark-science-46/ http://dresdencodak.com/2015/05/18/dark-science-46/), the character who gives that answer is turning into a villain.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  Good catch! But her brain is her superpower. RADNAR By the stone of Daggoth!

jefftk 7y ago

I've been using the same blogging infrastructure for fifteen years. I write HTML, then run an offline script to create a static website (rss feed, tag indexes, extracts for home page). I rewrote most of it once, switching from parsing the html with regexps to using an actual html parser, and taking the time to clean up some especially ugly parts.