4 ms·

"My personal website with 4 pages doesn't need a CMS!"

cxr 6y ago
This comment presents a caricatured perspective of those it opposes by using a made-up quote (it doesn't seem to have actually been said by anyone anywhere), and it doesn't really do anything for the discussion that wasn't already covered by the parent comment it's attached to. Please, folks, don't encourage people to post low-effort noise by upvoting comments like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13602947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13602947
- chubot 6y ago
  I agree it could have been phrased more nicely, but it actually pointed out something valid, which I didn't catch at first. The author hasn't written any posts in 5 years, and has ~15 total since 2010: https://blog.steren.fr/ https://blog.steren.fr/ As someone who blogs regularly, I'm more interested in the toolchain of people who HAVE done significant writing. I read blogs for at least a decade before I wrote one, and it's harder than it seems, and coercing a good result out of tools isn't easy. In fact I just wrote a few of my own tools to fix the image problem, e.g. http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/01/blog-roadmap.html#unix-y-web-services-i-wrote http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/01/blog-roadmap.html#unix-... Basically, the author's strategy is not likely to last (though it's not impossible). My blog started out very minimal, but as you write, you bump into the need for more automation and tools. My site looks very simple and minimal, but there is a surprising amount underneath. Funny comic: https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/ https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/ When I was writing those tools I often wondered if we should just go back to Spolsky's CityDesk. It was a Windows GUI that would FTP HTML and images to a static server! I remember trying it briefly in the early 2000's. Although his blog also rotted due to CityDesk rotting! It's a hard problem. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/rip-citydesk/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/rip-citydesk/
  - cxr 6y ago
    > it could have been phrased more nicely That's an understatement. It's the kind of comment that should be in the grey. Comments that amount to pile-ons and smug dismissals—like the one above—are far more welcome here than they used to be. > Spolsky's CityDesk. It was a Windows GUI that would FTP HTML and images to a static server! Among the things that Microsoft first started pushing to GitHub around the time that they formed the .NET Foundation was Live Writer. <http://openlivewriter.com http://openlivewriter.com> Dave Winer's Frontier is open source, too, but has also rotted. Brent Simmons, the creator of NetNewsWire, set out within the last couple of years to recreate it as a modern Mac app, but dropped the project last summer. > Although his blog also rotted due to CityDesk rotting! It's a hard problem. I'm convinced that we've missed the obvious and have been doing it all wrong, due to predilection for certain systems and ways of working. If you have a personal homepage, you should have among the stuff hosted there a document that describes how your site is updated. This document should be less of a blog post than an SOP. But now make sure it's specified with enough rigor that you can feed the same document into a machine that can perform those steps automatically. The reason the "WordPress setup from 2004" works and "old-ass blogger.com site" work is because they're closer to this ideal than Jekyll or Hugo or the others are. The caveat is that the hosted services make it really hard to actually look over the procedures that the machine will run, and if they let you, then you'd find that they were spread out over multiple "documents". Whatever the case, the thing not to do is to have this sort of thing live out-of-band elsewhere as a tool that requires its own configuration and setup (with both the tool and the configuration being subject to rot) accompanied (if at all) by a terse README. (Otherwise, if you're keeping that sort of thing elsewhere, then your homepage is not really a true digital home, is it? It's a Potemkin palace, and the place where those other things live is your real home.)
    - chubot 6y ago
      Yeah it's definitely a problem that you have this "elsewhere" thing that rots. Having some kind of online editor is one way to solve it, although it also tends to rot (who hosts that? Are you limited to PHP? Are you upgrading PHP? Did that company get sold?) [1] I think a simpler way to solve it is with the now standard "infrastructure as code" pattern. For example, use Github Actions and similar platforms to build your blog. Basically check in a spec for a container (Dockerfile) into VCS. It's done off of your machine, and it will "never" rot. You still have the cloud portability problem, and the "shell scripts and YAML are gross" problem. But those are solvable, especially for the relatively simple case of building a blog. I'm working on that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25343716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25343716 [1] I think it's funny that VC's use non-startup platforms for their own blogs, because they know that blog platforms do not last. https://blog.samaltman.com/ https://blog.samaltman.com/ https://posthaven.com/ https://posthaven.com/

cxr 6y ago

This comment presents a caricatured perspective of those it opposes by using a made-up quote (it doesn't seem to have actually been said by anyone anywhere), and it doesn't really do anything for the discussion that wasn't already covered by the parent comment it's attached to. Please, folks, don't encourage people to post low-effort noise by upvoting comments like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13602947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13602947

chubot 6y ago
I agree it could have been phrased more nicely, but it actually pointed out something valid, which I didn't catch at first. The author hasn't written any posts in 5 years, and has ~15 total since 2010: https://blog.steren.fr/ https://blog.steren.fr/ As someone who blogs regularly, I'm more interested in the toolchain of people who HAVE done significant writing. I read blogs for at least a decade before I wrote one, and it's harder than it seems, and coercing a good result out of tools isn't easy. In fact I just wrote a few of my own tools to fix the image problem, e.g. http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/01/blog-roadmap.html#unix-y-web-services-i-wrote http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/01/blog-roadmap.html#unix-... Basically, the author's strategy is not likely to last (though it's not impossible). My blog started out very minimal, but as you write, you bump into the need for more automation and tools. My site looks very simple and minimal, but there is a surprising amount underneath. Funny comic: https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/ https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/ When I was writing those tools I often wondered if we should just go back to Spolsky's CityDesk. It was a Windows GUI that would FTP HTML and images to a static server! I remember trying it briefly in the early 2000's. Although his blog also rotted due to CityDesk rotting! It's a hard problem. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/rip-citydesk/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/rip-citydesk/
- cxr 6y ago
  > it could have been phrased more nicely That's an understatement. It's the kind of comment that should be in the grey. Comments that amount to pile-ons and smug dismissals—like the one above—are far more welcome here than they used to be. > Spolsky's CityDesk. It was a Windows GUI that would FTP HTML and images to a static server! Among the things that Microsoft first started pushing to GitHub around the time that they formed the .NET Foundation was Live Writer. <http://openlivewriter.com http://openlivewriter.com> Dave Winer's Frontier is open source, too, but has also rotted. Brent Simmons, the creator of NetNewsWire, set out within the last couple of years to recreate it as a modern Mac app, but dropped the project last summer. > Although his blog also rotted due to CityDesk rotting! It's a hard problem. I'm convinced that we've missed the obvious and have been doing it all wrong, due to predilection for certain systems and ways of working. If you have a personal homepage, you should have among the stuff hosted there a document that describes how your site is updated. This document should be less of a blog post than an SOP. But now make sure it's specified with enough rigor that you can feed the same document into a machine that can perform those steps automatically. The reason the "WordPress setup from 2004" works and "old-ass blogger.com site" work is because they're closer to this ideal than Jekyll or Hugo or the others are. The caveat is that the hosted services make it really hard to actually look over the procedures that the machine will run, and if they let you, then you'd find that they were spread out over multiple "documents". Whatever the case, the thing not to do is to have this sort of thing live out-of-band elsewhere as a tool that requires its own configuration and setup (with both the tool and the configuration being subject to rot) accompanied (if at all) by a terse README. (Otherwise, if you're keeping that sort of thing elsewhere, then your homepage is not really a true digital home, is it? It's a Potemkin palace, and the place where those other things live is your real home.)
  - chubot 6y ago
    Yeah it's definitely a problem that you have this "elsewhere" thing that rots. Having some kind of online editor is one way to solve it, although it also tends to rot (who hosts that? Are you limited to PHP? Are you upgrading PHP? Did that company get sold?) [1] I think a simpler way to solve it is with the now standard "infrastructure as code" pattern. For example, use Github Actions and similar platforms to build your blog. Basically check in a spec for a container (Dockerfile) into VCS. It's done off of your machine, and it will "never" rot. You still have the cloud portability problem, and the "shell scripts and YAML are gross" problem. But those are solvable, especially for the relatively simple case of building a blog. I'm working on that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25343716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25343716 [1] I think it's funny that VC's use non-startup platforms for their own blogs, because they know that blog platforms do not last. https://blog.samaltman.com/ https://blog.samaltman.com/ https://posthaven.com/ https://posthaven.com/