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to expand on this, not much of what's done in managing software applications is "easy". people so often talk about spinning up VMs and services at scale and for

to expand on this, not much of what's done in managing software applications is "easy". people so often talk about spinning up VMs and services at scale and forget that even running your own well maintained blog is a big effort

goostavos 7y ago
Eh, let's not get carried away. A blog requires almost zero maintenance (assuming it's "just" a blog). I've been running mine on a $5 Digital Ocean droplet for several years without any fuss. Maintenance boils down to logging in once a year or so and installing whatever updates are required (which I'm a few years behind on...). It's survived a few HN front page posts even with this unoptimized, non-scalable, sqlite backed ramshackle setup all without breaking a sweat.
- bryguy32403 7y ago
  It is quite likely your blog is serving spam in the best case and warez in worst
ericd 7y ago
Static site generators make it pretty darn easy, though, especially if you serve it off S3. You don’t have to think about that site every year if you don’t want to, and it’s generally fine for blogs.
- dcuthbertson 7y ago
  I get a feeling about this as the one described in the article about git servers. Yes, static site generators make it easy to post new content written in plain text, markdown, and other markup languages. However, it's the initial configuration that can be tough. I spent a year playing around with Hugo. Along the way, I learned a little bit about HTML, CSS, SCSS, go-template language, shortcodes, configuration through toml, toml/yaml front matter, reStructuredText, markdown, and git submodules. When my blog was Jekyll-based, I had to maintain gems that were compatible with the version of Ruby & Jekyll used by GitHub. None of this stuff is easy when you're starting out. Even when you've become used to whatever environment you've created, there are a lot of moving parts to monitor and manage.
  - ericd 7y ago
    Yeah, I’ve found the purpose built blog generators I’ve played with to be a bit overly complicated for what they do. I’ve found Frozen-Flask to be more straightforward, and it has the advantage of being switchable back to a dynamic site fairly easily. An alternative would be wgetting Wordpress or similar.

goostavos 7y ago

Eh, let's not get carried away. A blog requires almost zero maintenance (assuming it's "just" a blog). I've been running mine on a $5 Digital Ocean droplet for several years without any fuss. Maintenance boils down to logging in once a year or so and installing whatever updates are required (which I'm a few years behind on...). It's survived a few HN front page posts even with this unoptimized, non-scalable, sqlite backed ramshackle setup all without breaking a sweat.

bryguy32403 7y ago
It is quite likely your blog is serving spam in the best case and warez in worst

ericd 7y ago

Static site generators make it pretty darn easy, though, especially if you serve it off S3. You don’t have to think about that site every year if you don’t want to, and it’s generally fine for blogs.

dcuthbertson 7y ago
I get a feeling about this as the one described in the article about git servers. Yes, static site generators make it easy to post new content written in plain text, markdown, and other markup languages. However, it's the initial configuration that can be tough. I spent a year playing around with Hugo. Along the way, I learned a little bit about HTML, CSS, SCSS, go-template language, shortcodes, configuration through toml, toml/yaml front matter, reStructuredText, markdown, and git submodules. When my blog was Jekyll-based, I had to maintain gems that were compatible with the version of Ruby & Jekyll used by GitHub. None of this stuff is easy when you're starting out. Even when you've become used to whatever environment you've created, there are a lot of moving parts to monitor and manage.
- ericd 7y ago
  Yeah, I’ve found the purpose built blog generators I’ve played with to be a bit overly complicated for what they do. I’ve found Frozen-Flask to be more straightforward, and it has the advantage of being switchable back to a dynamic site fairly easily. An alternative would be wgetting Wordpress or similar.