6 ms·

I've been on this train for a long, long time. If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content. Register your domain, install wordpress, start your

I've been on this train for a long, long time. If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content. Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog. We actually created https://startablog.com https://startablog.com to drive this point home, teach people how to do it and even have a team that will do it for you for free if you need the help (lots of people still find the WP install process intimidating).

imglorp 6y ago
When would one choose WP over a static site generator? I just want to publish. I don't want to host something that needs patching and sysadmin and all that.
- faitswulff 6y ago
  Speaking for myself, Wordpress's theme ecosystem is unbeatable, even if you just want a static site.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  I can't speak for or against WordPress in specific but there is often a need for patching even if you somehow had mythical bug free code and keep things simple there may be compatability with say IPv6 to maintain or what was good enough for the day may now be a sick joke like relying on passwords for cryptographic security.
- jedimastert 6y ago
  > I don't want to host something that needs patching and sysadmin and all that. You mean like running your own webserver? Why would I do that instead of just getting a web host that'll take care of all of the sysadmin for you? With a lot of web hosting platforms all you'll need is to just press a button on a web site, then all you'll have to deal with is the wordpress interface
  - brendoelfrendo 6y ago
    For what it's worth, I had to make this decision recently and decided to use Publii, which is a gui-based CMS for static sites. I hook it into Netlify, and then I can edit content on my computer and push it to the web with one button. And, since the Publii client lives on my machine, there's no admin portal exposed to the internet.
  - thomaslord 6y ago
    Part of my current job is handling the technical side of managing Wordpress sites (we have people who do the design/content writing/page building, but I get pulled in for "why isn't this plugin working" or "why is the site slow" type stuff). For my personal sites I've always done something custom or a static site generator. That definitely requires some more in-depth setup on the frontend, but the long-term maintenance is drastically reduced compared to Wordpress. Sure you don't need to know the command line, but unless you log in weekly to check for plugin updates, make sure you properly vet your plugins, and either get lucky or spend a bunch of time on site optimization, your site will probably be slow and, at some point, get hacked. You can pay for more hands-on hosting that includes managing a lot of that stuff, but all of a sudden the costs get a lot higher. For a personal blog, I don't want to pay $30/month for hosting.
  - bicx 6y ago
    I use GitHub Pages and a static site generator like Hugo. It's a little more code, but this is Hacker News.
- badwolf 6y ago
  While not the easiest thing (it could be made easier though) I run a Wordpress instance in a local VM, that then publishes static to S3. Works pretty swell.
- arkitaip 6y ago
  With some minor work you can set up Wordpress to automatically update itself on a 5 USD shared hosting. Just get a no-nonsense theme and keep the plugins to an absolute minimum.
- jasonv 6y ago
  So far, getting Jekyll publishing to Github Pages has been way more complicated than I expected it to be... I know WordPress pretty well. With caching and automatic plugin updates, it's pretty low maintenance. Nothing about Jekyll + Github Pages feels "no maintenance" yet.
- joelrunyon 6y ago
  WP is accessible to the masses who just want to publish. It's not the pretties, but most people once set up can get it to do what they want it to do and start playing around with stuff. Generally speaking, the HN audience is not the typical audience we have at StartABlog.com, but WP "just works" well enough for most people.
- cxr 6y ago
  Today's static site generators are simply not fit for mass consumption. Even Jekyll—among the most polished and popular—immediately presents anyone stumbling onto its landing page with a facsimile of a terminal window with 3 inscrutable commands. And the kicker is that even if a prospective "customer" who was previously unacquainted with the command line managed to find their system's terminal emulator to open it up and enter the first command, it will almost certainly fail! What the jekyllrb.com folks gloss over is that there's an "implicit step zero"[1], and if you selected a random, college-educated writer, artist, etc, from a crowd, they are simply on average not actually in the audience for Jekyll or any other contemporary static site generator, despite how slick jekyllrb.com might look (and despite what delusions the "just learn how GitHub Pages works" crowd may hold). 1. https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/03/06/how-to-displace-javascript.html https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/03/06/how-to-displace-java...
  - netsharc 6y ago
    Despite how toxic it is, Twitter is very simple: get account, follow a few people, and you get a text field where you can write stuff, hit "Publish", and you can reach your audience. Even a senile old man who wonders if injecting disinfectant might be worthwhile can use it. Forcing people to register a domain and choose a template is "too much work" compared to that.
  - rodolphoarruda 6y ago
    This describes my experience with Hugo. I ran into not only an implicit zero step, but many other intermediate steps that were not explicit in the documentation. My decision for Hugo was influenced by the clear "getting started" type of instructions on their website. I got a bit frustrated in the end, so rolled back to WordPress.
    - cxr 6y ago
      Thanks for relating this story. It's good to be able to point to comments that serve as concrete examples. One of the things I mentioned in that post is folks' tunnel vision—in these cases, tunnel vision on the parts of the people associated with the project who are unable to see the actual number of hurdles that an outsider will encounter. The post on the Light Table blog[1] that I referenced lays this out, too. Its title "Pain We Forgot" is almost self-explanatory. 1. http://lighttable.com/2014/05/16/pain-we-forgot/ http://lighttable.com/2014/05/16/pain-we-forgot/
- sexy_seedbox 6y ago
  Because the theming and plugins ecosystem is unbeatable. For static sites, you could use something like WP2Static and have the best of both worlds.
- egypturnash 6y ago
  You can publish from any device that can load the WP web interface (or run an app built to talk to WP), instead of having to be at the one device that has the generator and the source files and everything else. You don’t have to ever touch the command line or FTP or Git or anything technical like that. You can if you want to but nowadays it’s a one-click affair in the control panel of most hosting services. Who will also probably auto-install some cache and security plugins for you because this saves them a shit-ton of support tickets. Yes, YOU are comfortable with all this technical shit but most people are not. WordPress has had auto-updates for years and years. You only have to manually intervene to upgrade it when they do a major version bump that may break things. WordPress has a lot more themes available than any static site generator ever will. WordPress has a ton of plugins to do stuff, some simple, some complex.
- greggman3 6y ago
  Don't install Wordpress. Pay for a hosted/managed blog. Wordpress.com (or one of the others). Static blogs mostly suck because they have no UI for the user. You're generally required to run your own text editor, manage all files yourself, run some build scripts, deal with the errors. Oh, and likely you need to be on a PC/Mac instead of a phone or tablet so less options. OTOH Wordpress requires constant maintenance. Like literally every month or more often you're required to install updates and if you install any plugins you're required to stay on top of those too. I got off wordpress for precisely those reasons. I run a static blog but, in part because of the friction vs WordPress I rarely post anymore.
Alex3917 6y ago
> If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content. Not entirely true. You can generate nicely formatted content using a centralized service, and then self-host the files it outputs. E.g. we support this with FWD:Everyone, folks are free to use our tool to format any email thread for publication on the web, and then self-host published threads elsewhere by just saving our API responses. IMHO this is a much better deal for folks than either hosting Wordpress, using a simple static site generator, or using a purely centralized service. You always get the latest tech that we’re investing in, but also the freedom to go nuts and do whatever.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  See https://indieweb.org/POSSE#PESOS https://indieweb.org/POSSE#PESOS
  - Alex3917 6y ago
    Thanks for this. I keep meaning to get more involved with the IndieWeb folks, just RSVP'd to one of their upcoming events.
- jamietanna 6y ago
  As shared elsewhere on the site, I am very pro IndieWeb (https://indieweb.org https://indieweb.org) and therefore try to do everything via my own site. I use https://brid.gy/ https://brid.gy/ to syndicate posts from my own website (https://www.jvt.me/mf2/2020/04/svn4c/ https://www.jvt.me/mf2/2020/04/svn4c/) to Twitter (https://twitter.com/JamieTanna/status/1254670009420431360 https://twitter.com/JamieTanna/status/1254670009420431360) so I'm still owning my content, but I can still interact with folks on other platforms.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
See also https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/
buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
> Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog. And then have 0 people read your blog because it’s on your random domain. Maybe your strategy works for well known bloggers, but tweeting content that people actually read beats owning content that nobody reads. And it is much harder to get people to visit your self-hosted blog than it is to get them to read your tweets.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
  Spread the word of your personal self-hosted blog on social media. Post about things that gets picked up by indexers like Bing or Google so that people searching the web can find your blog. Come to terms with the fact that nobody reads your blog and that's okay. Not everyone is entitled to readers or has opinions worth reading about.
  - eitland 6y ago
    > Come to terms with the fact that nobody reads your blog and that's okay. Not everyone is entitled to readers or has opinions worth reading about. This. More people should probably blog to their perfect audience either that audience exists or not. I used to write about stuff that I spent more than a couple of hours to and that couldn't be found on the internet. Back in the days at least that meant I'd get search engine traffic from other developers searching for solutions to that problem. It didn't earn me any money but it was still very useful for me to learn from. Edit: add "should probably"
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
      This is exactly my position. I won't doxx myself and post my blog here but I write to document the things that I work on and if someone else reads and learns something that's a bonus. The act of writing is fulfilling enough in and of itself.
- taurath 6y ago
  This is also why a public user registry would be a really good thing if it were figured out how to do it well and also give people privacy. That our social lives and online conversations are beholden to advertisers above all else is not the ideal end state of things. Can’t wait for something better to come along.
monksy 6y ago
I happen to agree with you a lot. Unfortunately I think what people will take away from this article is: How can we fix twitter. The answer isn't to fix it. It's the wrong use of the medium. The bigger problem is how can we network indepdent blogs in a federated fashion where it's easier to have responses, build audiences, etc. i.e. You can't exactly respond very easily and see the 10k view with a single blog article. BUT Then again this is what you get with the whole "well twitter is a better place to be"/walled garden apologists.
- aembleton 6y ago
  Maybe we need to bring back web rings
  - benibela 6y ago
    And guestbooks for comments
  - monksy 6y ago
    No we need services to aggregate and to network them. A good federation of services would be good.
- badderdash 6y ago
  Isn't this how Reddit works?
herval 6y ago
I also deeply miss the times when people had their "sites", which had more personality/memorability than a twitter/instagram feed. Maybe the time for "personal web spaces" is past and the web will remain " short form content scattered around other people's platforms", or maybe those platforms are popular just because of the network effect? I've been toying with ideas to bring "social" aspects into sites, as I think the most difficult component, these days, is discoverability (finding a twitter profile is a lot easier than finding a random wordpress blog) and recurrence (nobody uses RSS anymore, for instance, so how do you even know about new content to come back to?). Or maybe we're just nostalgic, and the future is indeed shorter and shorter bits of text and 5-second vertical video.
- eitland 6y ago
  See https://www.jvt.me https://www.jvt.me for some really interesting examples of what can be done on the indieweb now. (I found that site because he shared a link to a post I wrote.) Edit: an earlier version of this post said I found it in the referrers log. It seems I was wrong.
  - jamietanna 6y ago
    Thanks for sharing my site! As you say, I'm quite big with IndieWeb, and for readers there are quite a few other folks you'll want to see - https://snarfed.org/ https://snarfed.org/ https://tantek.com/ https://tantek.com/ https://aaronparecki.com/ https://aaronparecki.com/ and https://www.barryfrost.com/ https://www.barryfrost.com/ to name just a few. If anyone is interested learning more about the IndieWeb, https://www.jvt.me/posts/2019/10/20/indieweb-talk/ https://www.jvt.me/posts/2019/10/20/indieweb-talk/ is a transcript of a conference talk I gave on what the IndieWeb is

imglorp 6y ago

When would one choose WP over a static site generator? I just want to publish. I don't want to host something that needs patching and sysadmin and all that.

faitswulff 6y ago
Speaking for myself, Wordpress's theme ecosystem is unbeatable, even if you just want a static site.
Nasrudith 6y ago
I can't speak for or against WordPress in specific but there is often a need for patching even if you somehow had mythical bug free code and keep things simple there may be compatability with say IPv6 to maintain or what was good enough for the day may now be a sick joke like relying on passwords for cryptographic security.
jedimastert 6y ago
> I don't want to host something that needs patching and sysadmin and all that. You mean like running your own webserver? Why would I do that instead of just getting a web host that'll take care of all of the sysadmin for you? With a lot of web hosting platforms all you'll need is to just press a button on a web site, then all you'll have to deal with is the wordpress interface
- brendoelfrendo 6y ago
  For what it's worth, I had to make this decision recently and decided to use Publii, which is a gui-based CMS for static sites. I hook it into Netlify, and then I can edit content on my computer and push it to the web with one button. And, since the Publii client lives on my machine, there's no admin portal exposed to the internet.
- thomaslord 6y ago
  Part of my current job is handling the technical side of managing Wordpress sites (we have people who do the design/content writing/page building, but I get pulled in for "why isn't this plugin working" or "why is the site slow" type stuff). For my personal sites I've always done something custom or a static site generator. That definitely requires some more in-depth setup on the frontend, but the long-term maintenance is drastically reduced compared to Wordpress. Sure you don't need to know the command line, but unless you log in weekly to check for plugin updates, make sure you properly vet your plugins, and either get lucky or spend a bunch of time on site optimization, your site will probably be slow and, at some point, get hacked. You can pay for more hands-on hosting that includes managing a lot of that stuff, but all of a sudden the costs get a lot higher. For a personal blog, I don't want to pay $30/month for hosting.
- bicx 6y ago
  I use GitHub Pages and a static site generator like Hugo. It's a little more code, but this is Hacker News.
badwolf 6y ago
While not the easiest thing (it could be made easier though) I run a Wordpress instance in a local VM, that then publishes static to S3. Works pretty swell.
arkitaip 6y ago
With some minor work you can set up Wordpress to automatically update itself on a 5 USD shared hosting. Just get a no-nonsense theme and keep the plugins to an absolute minimum.
jasonv 6y ago
So far, getting Jekyll publishing to Github Pages has been way more complicated than I expected it to be... I know WordPress pretty well. With caching and automatic plugin updates, it's pretty low maintenance. Nothing about Jekyll + Github Pages feels "no maintenance" yet.
joelrunyon 6y ago
WP is accessible to the masses who just want to publish. It's not the pretties, but most people once set up can get it to do what they want it to do and start playing around with stuff. Generally speaking, the HN audience is not the typical audience we have at StartABlog.com, but WP "just works" well enough for most people.
cxr 6y ago
Today's static site generators are simply not fit for mass consumption. Even Jekyll—among the most polished and popular—immediately presents anyone stumbling onto its landing page with a facsimile of a terminal window with 3 inscrutable commands. And the kicker is that even if a prospective "customer" who was previously unacquainted with the command line managed to find their system's terminal emulator to open it up and enter the first command, it will almost certainly fail! What the jekyllrb.com folks gloss over is that there's an "implicit step zero"[1], and if you selected a random, college-educated writer, artist, etc, from a crowd, they are simply on average not actually in the audience for Jekyll or any other contemporary static site generator, despite how slick jekyllrb.com might look (and despite what delusions the "just learn how GitHub Pages works" crowd may hold). 1. https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/03/06/how-to-displace-javascript.html https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/03/06/how-to-displace-java...
- netsharc 6y ago
  Despite how toxic it is, Twitter is very simple: get account, follow a few people, and you get a text field where you can write stuff, hit "Publish", and you can reach your audience. Even a senile old man who wonders if injecting disinfectant might be worthwhile can use it. Forcing people to register a domain and choose a template is "too much work" compared to that.
- rodolphoarruda 6y ago
  This describes my experience with Hugo. I ran into not only an implicit zero step, but many other intermediate steps that were not explicit in the documentation. My decision for Hugo was influenced by the clear "getting started" type of instructions on their website. I got a bit frustrated in the end, so rolled back to WordPress.
  - cxr 6y ago
    Thanks for relating this story. It's good to be able to point to comments that serve as concrete examples. One of the things I mentioned in that post is folks' tunnel vision—in these cases, tunnel vision on the parts of the people associated with the project who are unable to see the actual number of hurdles that an outsider will encounter. The post on the Light Table blog[1] that I referenced lays this out, too. Its title "Pain We Forgot" is almost self-explanatory. 1. http://lighttable.com/2014/05/16/pain-we-forgot/ http://lighttable.com/2014/05/16/pain-we-forgot/
sexy_seedbox 6y ago
Because the theming and plugins ecosystem is unbeatable. For static sites, you could use something like WP2Static and have the best of both worlds.
egypturnash 6y ago
You can publish from any device that can load the WP web interface (or run an app built to talk to WP), instead of having to be at the one device that has the generator and the source files and everything else. You don’t have to ever touch the command line or FTP or Git or anything technical like that. You can if you want to but nowadays it’s a one-click affair in the control panel of most hosting services. Who will also probably auto-install some cache and security plugins for you because this saves them a shit-ton of support tickets. Yes, YOU are comfortable with all this technical shit but most people are not. WordPress has had auto-updates for years and years. You only have to manually intervene to upgrade it when they do a major version bump that may break things. WordPress has a lot more themes available than any static site generator ever will. WordPress has a ton of plugins to do stuff, some simple, some complex.
greggman3 6y ago
Don't install Wordpress. Pay for a hosted/managed blog. Wordpress.com (or one of the others). Static blogs mostly suck because they have no UI for the user. You're generally required to run your own text editor, manage all files yourself, run some build scripts, deal with the errors. Oh, and likely you need to be on a PC/Mac instead of a phone or tablet so less options. OTOH Wordpress requires constant maintenance. Like literally every month or more often you're required to install updates and if you install any plugins you're required to stay on top of those too. I got off wordpress for precisely those reasons. I run a static blog but, in part because of the friction vs WordPress I rarely post anymore.

Alex3917 6y ago

> If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content. Not entirely true. You can generate nicely formatted content using a centralized service, and then self-host the files it outputs. E.g. we support this with FWD:Everyone, folks are free to use our tool to format any email thread for publication on the web, and then self-host published threads elsewhere by just saving our API responses. IMHO this is a much better deal for folks than either hosting Wordpress, using a simple static site generator, or using a purely centralized service. You always get the latest tech that we’re investing in, but also the freedom to go nuts and do whatever.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
See https://indieweb.org/POSSE#PESOS https://indieweb.org/POSSE#PESOS
- Alex3917 6y ago
  Thanks for this. I keep meaning to get more involved with the IndieWeb folks, just RSVP'd to one of their upcoming events.
jamietanna 6y ago
As shared elsewhere on the site, I am very pro IndieWeb (https://indieweb.org https://indieweb.org) and therefore try to do everything via my own site. I use https://brid.gy/ https://brid.gy/ to syndicate posts from my own website (https://www.jvt.me/mf2/2020/04/svn4c/ https://www.jvt.me/mf2/2020/04/svn4c/) to Twitter (https://twitter.com/JamieTanna/status/1254670009420431360 https://twitter.com/JamieTanna/status/1254670009420431360) so I'm still owning my content, but I can still interact with folks on other platforms.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

See also https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/

buzzerbetrayed 6y ago

> Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog. And then have 0 people read your blog because it’s on your random domain. Maybe your strategy works for well known bloggers, but tweeting content that people actually read beats owning content that nobody reads. And it is much harder to get people to visit your self-hosted blog than it is to get them to read your tweets.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
Spread the word of your personal self-hosted blog on social media. Post about things that gets picked up by indexers like Bing or Google so that people searching the web can find your blog. Come to terms with the fact that nobody reads your blog and that's okay. Not everyone is entitled to readers or has opinions worth reading about.
- eitland 6y ago
  > Come to terms with the fact that nobody reads your blog and that's okay. Not everyone is entitled to readers or has opinions worth reading about. This. More people should probably blog to their perfect audience either that audience exists or not. I used to write about stuff that I spent more than a couple of hours to and that couldn't be found on the internet. Back in the days at least that meant I'd get search engine traffic from other developers searching for solutions to that problem. It didn't earn me any money but it was still very useful for me to learn from. Edit: add "should probably"
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
    This is exactly my position. I won't doxx myself and post my blog here but I write to document the things that I work on and if someone else reads and learns something that's a bonus. The act of writing is fulfilling enough in and of itself.
taurath 6y ago
This is also why a public user registry would be a really good thing if it were figured out how to do it well and also give people privacy. That our social lives and online conversations are beholden to advertisers above all else is not the ideal end state of things. Can’t wait for something better to come along.

monksy 6y ago

I happen to agree with you a lot. Unfortunately I think what people will take away from this article is: How can we fix twitter. The answer isn't to fix it. It's the wrong use of the medium. The bigger problem is how can we network indepdent blogs in a federated fashion where it's easier to have responses, build audiences, etc. i.e. You can't exactly respond very easily and see the 10k view with a single blog article. BUT Then again this is what you get with the whole "well twitter is a better place to be"/walled garden apologists.

aembleton 6y ago
Maybe we need to bring back web rings
- benibela 6y ago
  And guestbooks for comments
- monksy 6y ago
  No we need services to aggregate and to network them. A good federation of services would be good.
badderdash 6y ago
Isn't this how Reddit works?

herval 6y ago

I also deeply miss the times when people had their "sites", which had more personality/memorability than a twitter/instagram feed. Maybe the time for "personal web spaces" is past and the web will remain " short form content scattered around other people's platforms", or maybe those platforms are popular just because of the network effect? I've been toying with ideas to bring "social" aspects into sites, as I think the most difficult component, these days, is discoverability (finding a twitter profile is a lot easier than finding a random wordpress blog) and recurrence (nobody uses RSS anymore, for instance, so how do you even know about new content to come back to?). Or maybe we're just nostalgic, and the future is indeed shorter and shorter bits of text and 5-second vertical video.

eitland 6y ago
See https://www.jvt.me https://www.jvt.me for some really interesting examples of what can be done on the indieweb now. (I found that site because he shared a link to a post I wrote.) Edit: an earlier version of this post said I found it in the referrers log. It seems I was wrong.
- jamietanna 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing my site! As you say, I'm quite big with IndieWeb, and for readers there are quite a few other folks you'll want to see - https://snarfed.org/ https://snarfed.org/ https://tantek.com/ https://tantek.com/ https://aaronparecki.com/ https://aaronparecki.com/ and https://www.barryfrost.com/ https://www.barryfrost.com/ to name just a few. If anyone is interested learning more about the IndieWeb, https://www.jvt.me/posts/2019/10/20/indieweb-talk/ https://www.jvt.me/posts/2019/10/20/indieweb-talk/ is a transcript of a conference talk I gave on what the IndieWeb is