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Stratechery recommends using either Wordpress.com SaaS or the LAMP Stack based Wordpress.org platform. He does not mention Static Site Generators like Jekyll wh

Stratechery recommends using either Wordpress.com SaaS or the LAMP Stack based Wordpress.org platform. He does not mention Static Site Generators like Jekyll which is OSS and the default option for Github Pages freely hosted on github.io. A modern blog should be written in Markdown and stored in a git repository. For non-devs, wordpress.com offers a slicker first time experience but companies like Netlify are trying to provide slick WebUIs to bridge the gap.

mintone 6y ago
> A modern blog should be written in Markdown and stored in a git repository Why?
- webwielder2 6y ago
  I think they mean, "Some modern blogs are written in Markdown and stored in a git repository."
  - sradman 6y ago
    No I don’t mean that. Git and Markdown are the de facto standard for general purpose content and content creation workflows. These tools are as future proof as anything in existence; the acid free paper of the digital age.
    - Tomte 6y ago
      That's absolutely laughable. I'd give XML much better chances to be a future-proof markup, and I'm not even a fan of XML. Especially considering the dozens of MD variations (Vanilla? Extra? GitHub? CommonMark? pandoc?) preclude any future-proof-ness. And all the ad-hoc extensions you do in your application when you want to support (for example) figure tags with alt text, title and caption (not even really possible in pandoc) make things even worse.
      - sradman 6y ago
        Markdown is an imperfect trade-off. It is the best readable/writable format that transpiles to HTML5, IMHO.
        Tomte 6y ago
        MD is good. That's different from future-proof.
    - Veen 6y ago
      This might be what you wish was the standard, but it really isn't. If anything is “the de facto standard” it’s WordPress, which runs about 30 percent of the web. A tiny proportion of primarily tech-related businesses and a lot of developers use markdown and git. Most people who write and publish on the web, including professional writers, do not know Markdown and have never heard of git. As someone who works in marketing and publishing, I can tell you that it is enough of a struggle to stop writers using Word—plain text and git are unthinkable for most of them.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
httpsterio 6y ago
Netlify also offers drag and drop deployment and single button clone&deploy, can't be much simpler tbh
- markx2 6y ago
  Blogging is more than just text (whichever markup is used) or links to youtube etc. How does "someone wanting to blog" add a picture of their cat to their post? I'm aware that Grav has tackled this but not others. Comments can be a swamp but with WordPress there is Akismet. Which SSG's provide that? I suppose it comes down to what you mean by 'blogging'?
julianeon 6y ago
I'm skeptical of Markdown as the only, best practice, option. I've been searching for this online - can I make an API call from Markdown? - and this is one of those cases where common search terms make it hard to narrow down the result. However, a cursory search makes it seem like the answer is, no; or, not easily. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60177551/calling-rest-api-from-a-markdown-template https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60177551/calling-rest-ap... Want examples of blogs where you'd want to make API calls from your page and not being able to in Markdown would be ruinous? Here's two from my blog. A pretty much straight-from-Twitter page, nothing but Twitter API calls. http://www.mediazed.com/bristol-colston-statue.html http://www.mediazed.com/bristol-colston-statue.html Now you could say, that's a pretty artificial blog post structure, most bloggers wouldn't do that. So here's a more harmonious blend - a pretty regular blog post text blended with Twitter API calls. http://www.mediazed.com/thiel-fellows.html http://www.mediazed.com/thiel-fellows.html And lately I've been thinking of mixing in other embeded platform code (Insta, YouTube) - easily done like this, potentially a hassle with Markdown. Now, maybe you can fight with Markdown and find some way to sprinkle in the embedded code, but if you ask me, it seems like: if I'm dealing with a lot of raw HTML at that point, why not just go all the way and, as a dev, do it all in HTML? I don't see much value add in Markdown, at that point. And this is a perfectly valid, 'real-world' blog use case.
- dchest 6y ago
  Maybe you're thinking about sanitized Markdown, but proper Markdown allows HTML: For any markup that is not covered by Markdown’s syntax, you simply use HTML itself. There’s no need to preface it or delimit it to indicate that you’re switching from Markdown to HTML; you just use the tags. https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax * * * Unrelated to Markdown: CMS like WordPress have quick tags for embeds, e.g. your post with tweets could have been something like [tweet id="123..."] [tweet id="456..."] instead of the massive amount of code that you have to copy and paste, which will break if Twitter stops supporting that API, while this embed style would be easy to update.
  - julianeon 6y ago

mintone 6y ago

> A modern blog should be written in Markdown and stored in a git repository Why?

webwielder2 6y ago
I think they mean, "Some modern blogs are written in Markdown and stored in a git repository."
- sradman 6y ago
  No I don’t mean that. Git and Markdown are the de facto standard for general purpose content and content creation workflows. These tools are as future proof as anything in existence; the acid free paper of the digital age.
  - Tomte 6y ago
    That's absolutely laughable. I'd give XML much better chances to be a future-proof markup, and I'm not even a fan of XML. Especially considering the dozens of MD variations (Vanilla? Extra? GitHub? CommonMark? pandoc?) preclude any future-proof-ness. And all the ad-hoc extensions you do in your application when you want to support (for example) figure tags with alt text, title and caption (not even really possible in pandoc) make things even worse.
    - sradman 6y ago
      Markdown is an imperfect trade-off. It is the best readable/writable format that transpiles to HTML5, IMHO.
      - Tomte 6y ago
        MD is good. That's different from future-proof.
  - Veen 6y ago
    This might be what you wish was the standard, but it really isn't. If anything is “the de facto standard” it’s WordPress, which runs about 30 percent of the web. A tiny proportion of primarily tech-related businesses and a lot of developers use markdown and git. Most people who write and publish on the web, including professional writers, do not know Markdown and have never heard of git. As someone who works in marketing and publishing, I can tell you that it is enough of a struggle to stop writers using Word—plain text and git are unthinkable for most of them.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

httpsterio 6y ago

Netlify also offers drag and drop deployment and single button clone&deploy, can't be much simpler tbh

markx2 6y ago
Blogging is more than just text (whichever markup is used) or links to youtube etc. How does "someone wanting to blog" add a picture of their cat to their post? I'm aware that Grav has tackled this but not others. Comments can be a swamp but with WordPress there is Akismet. Which SSG's provide that? I suppose it comes down to what you mean by 'blogging'?

julianeon 6y ago

I'm skeptical of Markdown as the only, best practice, option. I've been searching for this online - can I make an API call from Markdown? - and this is one of those cases where common search terms make it hard to narrow down the result. However, a cursory search makes it seem like the answer is, no; or, not easily. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60177551/calling-rest-api-from-a-markdown-template https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60177551/calling-rest-ap... Want examples of blogs where you'd want to make API calls from your page and not being able to in Markdown would be ruinous? Here's two from my blog. A pretty much straight-from-Twitter page, nothing but Twitter API calls. http://www.mediazed.com/bristol-colston-statue.html http://www.mediazed.com/bristol-colston-statue.html Now you could say, that's a pretty artificial blog post structure, most bloggers wouldn't do that. So here's a more harmonious blend - a pretty regular blog post text blended with Twitter API calls. http://www.mediazed.com/thiel-fellows.html http://www.mediazed.com/thiel-fellows.html And lately I've been thinking of mixing in other embeded platform code (Insta, YouTube) - easily done like this, potentially a hassle with Markdown. Now, maybe you can fight with Markdown and find some way to sprinkle in the embedded code, but if you ask me, it seems like: if I'm dealing with a lot of raw HTML at that point, why not just go all the way and, as a dev, do it all in HTML? I don't see much value add in Markdown, at that point. And this is a perfectly valid, 'real-world' blog use case.

dchest 6y ago
Maybe you're thinking about sanitized Markdown, but proper Markdown allows HTML: For any markup that is not covered by Markdown’s syntax, you simply use HTML itself. There’s no need to preface it or delimit it to indicate that you’re switching from Markdown to HTML; you just use the tags. https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax * * * Unrelated to Markdown: CMS like WordPress have quick tags for embeds, e.g. your post with tweets could have been something like [tweet id="123..."] [tweet id="456..."] instead of the massive amount of code that you have to copy and paste, which will break if Twitter stops supporting that API, while this embed style would be easy to update.
- julianeon 6y ago