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Next Gen Static Blogging
- martinsb 6y agoHow well is this handled from the accessibility point of view? I imagine that wrapping text in consecutive “p” tags is semantically clearer, however on the other side it shouldn’t be too hard for any accessibility software to recognize this pattern described in the article. EDIT: some wording changes.
- Tomte 6y agoIt is a neat idea, but the purist in me misses those <p> tags, even though they are the main reason why I don't like writing HTML by hand.
- Izmaki 6y agoWhat about the standard <html><head>...</head><body>...</body></html> tags?
- Tomte 6y agoWhat about them? They occur exactly once, and I probably have a prepared file with them already in it. But for every paragraph I write I need to type <p> (and maybe even </p>, if I choose to). That's exactly the use case for Markdown, to get rid of that tedious stuff.
- schwartzworld 6y agoA lot of modern text editors will let you type 'p' and then tab and they will create the opening and closing tag for you.
- Tomte 6y agoSure, I can type "<p", but that's still annoying. Look, I don't hate hand-written HTML. I actually like it better than Markdown.
- JimDabell 6y agoAll of those tags are optional. It’s perfectly valid to omit them.
- iamtedd 6y agoNot according to w3.org's validator. https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Finoads.com%2Farticles%2F2020-01-09-Next-Gen-Static-Blogging https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Finoads.com%2F... Edit: Actually, seems you're right. Though doctype is not there, and there are other problems with the markup.
- JimDabell 6y agoIzmaki and I were talking about the <html>, <head>, and <body> tags, not the article. The smallest valid HTML document is: <!DOCTYPE html><title>…</title> If you put that into the validator, you will see that it is valid.
- Tomte 6y agoCorrect, documented at https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#optional-tags https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#optional-...
- timwis 6y agoWow, never heard of that CSS property — cool! Regarding medium, I think the biggest barrier is the network/promotion you get from medium. Discovery and sharing within the network brings audiences you'd otherwise have to work quite hard for on your own site.
- swsieber 6y agoIIRC there is some sort of tool for generating inter-blog links. Maybe by our stavros? My memory is fuzzy here.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoYou can always publish on both Medium and your own blog. https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE
- akkartik 6y agohttps://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/white-space#browser_compatibility https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/white-space...
- egeozcan 6y agoIf I'm understanding correctly, here, the semantic value of the <code /> element is ignored to increase DX. I personally wouldn't make that compromise, why is pre-processing not simple enough?
- lobsang 6y agoYou could use <article /> instead (which I probably would). Jest tested it using dev tools, seems to work.
- z3t4 6y agoUsing some HTML elements like section makes Safari switch to "reader" mode. Which is broken.
- chrismorgan 6y agoThe outer <code> here is simply a very poor choice due to what I can only imagine is ignorance. It would be better removed, and the `code` rule in the stylesheet changed to `body` and `font-family: monospace` added. (And `code code` would need to be changed to `code`.)
- beefman 6y agoIs this better than my 2001 solution of wrapping everything in a <pre> tag? http://lumma.org/microwave/ http://lumma.org/microwave/
- lawwantsin17 6y agoCool. But yellow on green is more readable?
- meisel 6y agoAgree that static blogging is nice, but I think this specific look needs some tweaking - for example, there's too low contrast in color between the links and the background at https://inoads.com/blog https://inoads.com/blog
- zbrozek 6y agoI had to copy all the text out into a text editor to be able to read the article, not just the links. Contrast is out of vogue I guess.
- hedora 6y agoI don’t understand the current fashion of making everything off-gray on off-gray. I guess it keeps designers employed.
- conductr 6y agoHypothesis: Whenever you’re building it, you spend hours looking at it, and want to reduce harshness of contrast. The reader is only going to spend 5 minutes and prefers contrast as it allows quick scanning of the text.
- mmackh 6y agoThanks for the feedback. The colour scheme uses https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/ https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/ as a foundation. This is how I have all my editors / IDEs set. I'll look at implementing this next: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Media_Queries/Using_Media_Queries_for_Accessibility https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Media_Queri...
- arvindamirtaa 6y agoA neat little css property aside, isn't the separation of concerns a cornerstone of web pages? Html - structure of the document CSS - appearance JS - interactivity I could be wrong, but that's how I remember it. Is there an advantage to moving away from this fairly simple and unambiguous paradigm?
- k__ 6y agoSeparation of concerns is still seen as the way to go. People just have different opinions about what a concern is. It started with markup, styling, and interactivity. But many people think, this is a too technical perspective and software should be split up into non-technical concerns (i.e. microservices).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tannhaeuser 6y agoThis structure vs appearance dichotomy was added after the fact, though, since CSS came significantly later than HTML. It has been used as a (misguided IMO) narrative to defend CSS's complexity and redundancy and is partially to blame for HTML and the web ceasing to be a straightforward medium for simple publishing, seized by big media and ad networks.
- Brajeshwar 6y agoCool. Go one step further and render the CSS inline. Of late, I have been writing with just MarkDown and dropping in some of the simplest tool (Pandoc, Jekyll) possible to render as HTML.
- smlckz 6y agoHere's some crazyness: https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2019-08-26-minimal-markdown.html https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2019-08-26-minimal-markdown.ht... I suppose it is not much hard to translate this into PHP...
- icy 6y agoI built mawkdown[0] off of solene's initial awk implementation! [0]: https://github.com/icyphox/mawkdown https://github.com/icyphox/mawkdown
- smlckz 6y agoI do not have much experience in awk, but after reading Solene's and your code, I am curious about why < > are escaped with \ ? In your m.awk, I also noticed that the markdown formattings (bold, inline and links) are not turned off in code blocks.
- codazoda 6y agoI ran to my desktop to load this up and have a look. I'm ALWAYS looking for a more simple blogging solution. I was hoping for mostly plain text plus an em tag here or there. It's a little more involved than that, but it's given me some ideas. Shameless plug, I created the NeatCSS framework to have this "simple" look and feel. On that, however, I didn't try to avoid your typical HTML code. https://neat.joeldare.com https://neat.joeldare.com
- clintonb 6y ago> I'm ALWAYS looking for a more simple blogging solution. Why?
- unicornporn 6y ago> Once you choose the technology that runs your blog, use it. Don’t replace it, ever. Never ever rewrite it.[1] [1] https://macwright.com/2019/02/06/how-to-blog.html https://macwright.com/2019/02/06/how-to-blog.html
- approxim8ion 6y agoThis is good advice, for anything that can be tinkered with. Just as applicable to setting up a window manager on Linux, for example. It's an amazing rabbit hole, but it can consume you.
- clintonb 6y agoThe antithesis of this is exactly why I asked the question. I was reminded of a tweet/post describing that most blogs have a single post: the one that describes how the author built their own static site generator/blog framework. After that, they are too tired/unmotivated to write anything else. I was on WordPress. Now I’m on Jekyll. I occasionally think of changing the theme, then I remember how little that will benefit me or my few readers.
- FalconSensei 6y agoTHIS! I'm on Hugo now, and have used both self-hosted and .com (free) versions of Wordpress. Which of the 3 do you think I wrote the most when I was in it? Yeah, free wordpress is limited, if not open-source, blah-blah-blah. But it's a few clicks to create, easy to write the posts/have drafts/change theme. And I would argue that having limited themes on free can actually be a positive thing. You have a few options, chose something and start writing. Having to write in any other editor (to have grammar checking), then paste on VS Code, deploy... it just takes more time. And this is without managing any media, which I just upload to imgur and use the link...
- ricardolopes 6y agoInteresting concept. This seems to simplify the writing part. What about the rest? Is the list of posts generated automatically (if so, how?), or does it require manual management? Do you need the code tag, or could it be something more semantically relevant, such as article?
- Tomte 6y agoYou can have it auto-generated using directory indexes in Apache. You can even customize them (within limits). I've toyed with having a minimal blog, where I simply drop text files with file names beginning with their date in a folder and rely on directory indexes as a "home page".
- ricardolopes 6y agoI too was toying with a similar idea, but was finding the devil was in the details. For instance, you want to sort by publish date, which isn't the same as file creation date. If you add it to the file name, to sort by that, then you can no longer use file names for urls, at least without some transformation. So I was really curious how others were dealing with that in a clean way.
- iamtedd 6y agoI found that using w3.org's CSS validator shows reference to the page's URI as '[...].php'. http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=https%3A%2F%2Finoads.com%2Farticles%2F2020-01-09-Next-Gen-Static-Blogging&profile=css3svg&usermedium=all&warning=1&vextwarning=&lang=en#warnings http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=https%3A%2F... With that and the author's mention of using PHP for a custom blogging setup, I'm guessing it's being dynamically generated by PHP still.
- susam 6y agoNote that closing </p> tags are optional†, so one can be an HTML purist and still write a decent HTML document with a relatively clean markup like this: <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <title>Lorem Ipsum</title> <h1>Lorem Ipsum</h1> <p> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis id maximus tortor. Sed nisi ante, fermentum vel nunc et, tincidunt sagittis magna. In ultrices commodo lacus, id tristique ipsum euismod laoreet. <p> Maecenas at neque posuere, aliquet erat at, vehicula est. Duis aliquet elit et arcu laoreet, id pulvinar eros pretium. Quisque consectetur, enim semper facilisis feugiat, velit sapien semper arcu, eu mollis libero est et odio. <p> Curabitur fringilla interdum ante vel ultricies. Mauris volutpat nisi sed turpis elementum elementum. Mauris nec eleifend lorem. Sed ac vulputate libero. A valid HTML5 document does not require† explicit <head>, <body>, or the closing </p>, </html> tags. See the spec for optional tags at https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#optional-tags https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#optional-... for more details. Similarly, the markup for lists and tables can be cleaned up too because the closing </li>, </tr>, </th>, </td> tags are optional†. Note that the opening <html> tag is optional† too but I retained it in the above example to specify the lang attribute otherwise the W3 markup validator warns, "Consider adding a lang attribute to the html start tag to declare the language of this document." † These tags are optional provided certain conditions are met. See the spec for full details. In practice, one rarely has to worry about these conditions.
- cwackerfuss 6y agoFrontend developer here -- Although you could omit the closing tags, I don't see the benefit of doing so. If you know HTML, nesting is fundamental and not explicitly closing dom nodes would lead to confusion. You would also need to concern yourself with the "certain conditions" that must be met for it to work. Consistency and clarity over brevity!
- majormjr 6y agoEspecially with HTML as it's going to get minimized and hacked up to reduce the filesize. Including the closing tags makes the transpilers job easier and less error prone.
- pickpuck 6y agoIf the only thing being removed were <div> tags, which don't have structural or semantic meaning, it would probably be just as easy to parse for screen readers and robots. Two problems I see: 1. Where you have a heading you may want it and its associated content wrapped in a <section>. Where you have a separated paragraph you really do probably want a <p>. So these newlines aren't always just replacing <div>s. The page has no structure except what can be derived from headings. 2. Wrapping everything in a <code> tag seems like it could cause issues. It would probably be better to use <main> and apply the clever one line of CSS mentioned in the post.
- kome 6y agoit's like a, messy, non-standard semantic web... at this point, and i'm totally serious, why not starting again to work on XHTML 2.0 standard? We need it badly.
- hashkb 6y ago> No need for JavaScript or any other complicated backend or client-side frameworks. I can use PHP to introduce dynamic elements to the page, but that's optional. This isn't the same "dynamic" - the author must know that JS can provide interaction without a page refresh; PHP (alone) cannot.
- chinathrow 6y agoI think you have the year off by one (2020) on your datestamp.
- mmackh 6y agoThank you, completely missed this.
- heroku 6y agoI've built the simplest static site generator. https://github.com/eguneys/jener https://github.com/eguneys/jener
- Ennea 6y agoThat <date> tag you are using does not exist in the specs. You may want to change that to <time>.
- ms123 6y agoI've been using this technique on midnight.pub as well, and it's working surprisingly well.
- ffpip 6y agoYour site is too hard to read on. Make the color of the font darker or the background lighter please. I had to copy to a notepad so I could read it. Edit: Apparently, dark mode users get this - https://i.imgur.com/5PHYac1.png https://i.imgur.com/5PHYac1.png I get this - https://i.imgur.com/5PHYac1.png https://i.imgur.com/5PHYac1.png Light mode is terrible, dark mode is okay. Please increase the contrast in both places.
- bhauer 6y agoLower the contrast? Strongly disagree. Its use of gray text on a dark blue background is pretty common. If anything, the contrast is too low; I'd brighten the text if I were the designer. But it's readable. In my opinion, what makes it a bit difficult to read is the use of a fixed-width font for body text. Fixed width is great for code, but proportional-width fonts are easier for reading prose.
- susam 6y agoI agree with ffpip's comment. I too found the contrast to be too low for my comfort. Here are the colors used for the body element in the CSS (see https://inoads.com/style.css https://inoads.com/style.css): background-color: #FDF6E3; color: #657B83; Now plug those values into https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ and we can see that this color scheme fails even the WCAG AA check (see https://i.imgur.com/iK7FRfU.png https://i.imgur.com/iK7FRfU.png for a screenshot). I think the WCAG AA is the absolutely bare minimum accessibility guideline any color scheme should conform to, otherwise we risk making the text hard to read for many people just like the text in this website is hard for me to read.
- bhauer 6y agoAh, it seems this site is aware of my preference for a dark color scheme. @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) { /* defaults to dark theme */ body { background-color: #002B36; color: #AAA; } } You are seeing the bright color scheme and I am seeing the dark. So when ffpip said either "darken the text or brighten the background," and I'm looking at the dark theme, that would mean reduce the contrast. I think we're all of the same opinion: the contrast should/could be higher.
- thayne 6y agoSo how would you do a code snippet with syntax highlighting?
- teekert 6y agoYeah if browsers would just render markdown nicely that'd be great.
- john-doe 6y agoIf you're into the monospace look, .txt is cool too.
- Ryan_Goosling 6y agoepic
- giantrobot 6y agoFor the web plain text is pretty terrible. Web browsers are terrible plain text readers, mobile browsers doubly so. Browsers render content in a "viewport". On the desktop the viewport width is the width of the window but on mobile defaults to 960 CSS pixels (pixels adjusted for screen DPI). When a page is rendered it's as if the browser window is 960px wide. This can be controlled with the viewport meta tag where you explicitly tell the browser the viewport is the window width, on desktop browsers that doesn't change anything but mobile browsers use their screen width rather than the default. When it comes to plain text there's no way to tell the browser to do that. So if the plain text doesn't have a hard column wrap it's rendered as if it's in a 960px wide window. If it is hard column wrapped it's probably to some common terminal width like 40 or 80 characters. At 80 characters the default font size ends up causing really awful wrapping in the viewport. Pinch to zoom doesn't change the font size but the viewport magnification do that doesn't help readability. You also lose hyperlinks and in-line images. The web could do with fewer stupid images bulking up pages but without hyperlinks you don't really have a web. Putting all links at the bottom of a document HN style isn't a great solution. Visitors still need to copy and paste links which is a pain in the ass at best and inaccessible at worst. If you want a monospace "look" just put 'body {font-family:monospace;}' in a style tag and you're all done. You get all the benefits of a real HTML document and the terminal chic of a monospace font. Don't waste everyone's time with plain text on the web.
- throwaway4good 6y agoSo instead of a body tag you have a code tag?! Is that next gen?
- xwdv 6y agoThis is ridiculous, only two articles on this blog and one is about static blogging. In the next generation, I implore people to focus on content, not the tech.
- toddmorey 6y agoBuild setups can get complicated and simple sites can send way to much javascript to the browser. But neither one of these are required outcomes. I think it's ok to have build tools that do small automations to make writing more pleasant yet keep the markup semantic and accessible.
- sradman 6y ago<body style="white-space: pre-line"> The idea is that an extra newline within a block with style="white-space: pre-line" acts like <p> paragraph elements. This is a separate paragraph. </body>
- MoOmer 6y agoThis was my experience... 1. Read first sentence, Take a look at the source code of this page - I rely mostly on CSS for the rendering of this article. 2. Right click, "View Page Source" on Firefox (`84.0.2 (64-)bit)`) Edit: adding that I do have `NoScript 11.1.8` and `uBlock origin 1.32.4` installed. 3. Close source pop-up/tab. 4. It takes ~10 seconds to re-render the page (with spinner gif running, in the meanwhile). 5. Tab completely frozen.
- Scaevolus 6y agoMany static site generators, including Hugo and Jekyll, have file watching support and even automatic page reloads, so their workflow is barely different from editing raw html. You have to jump through some more hoops for raw html, but I expect you save time overall.
- tomtomtom777 6y agoI like the white-space: pre-line trick and very much like the omission of unnecessary <html> and <head> tags as the parsing of such valid source is neatly prescibed. But abusing <code>, <h4> and <h5> like that is a horrendous and pointless. Please use the proper tags to keep the web clean.
- codingdave 6y agoExcellent performance, sketchy accessibility. But I applaud the effort to look for simplicity, even if it wouldn't work for many production use cases.
- rayrag 6y agoSo, instead of using semantic html and css like 'white-space: pre-line' and 'max-width: 40ch' author wrapped content of his blog post into 'code' tag and called it 'next-gen'. What is 'next-gen' about it? Either I am missing something or I'm not drunk enough. Worst thing it has 100 upvotes :/ >Simplicity is key This isn't simplicity... I need a beer.
- rpdillon 6y agoThe CSS the author uses (style.css) has both 'white-space: pre-line;' (line 6) and 'max-width: 640px;' (line 18). https://inoads.com/style.css https://inoads.com/style.css
- rayrag 6y agoThen he could use div tag instead of code tag but then it wouldn't be 'next-gen' I assume.
- ilovefood 6y agoI wholeheartedly agree with you but there isn't any amount of beer or misuse of standard HTML tags that could fix this. It kind of anti-resonates a lot with the other post currently on the front page "Woo for its own sake". It also shows how the HN crowd is split in two, those who like this kind of stuff and those who don't. For my part and in my day job these are the kind of things that I actively fight against. As a fun exercise I still appreciate OP's effort for trying out something new, it's always welcomed and I think this forum is all about that. However, I don't agree with the clickbaity title techniques. I hope it doesn't normalize the practice here otherwise I'd throw in some Vodka as well :)
- johncena33 6y agoHN content and discussion quality has gone down drastically over the last few years. And future also looks bleak. These days I spend more time on lesswrong.com community because articles and discussions quality are way better than HN.
- thunderbong 6y ago
- chiefalchemist 6y agoHow does this play with Assistive Technology?
- chacha2 6y agoIt would be nice to read a static blog that talks about more than creating a static blog.
- demifiend 6y agoI'm glad I'm not so blind that I need a screenreader for this site, because @mmackh doesn't seem to have given any consideration to accessibility. https://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://inoads.com/articles/2020-01-09-Next-Gen-Static-Blogging https://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://inoads.com/articles/... If this is "next gen", I think I'll stick to using emmet-mode in Emacs to write raw HTML, templating with m4 macros, validating with tidy, and doing the build and deployment with a makefile.
- rayrag 6y agoI bet that blind people can't wait for next 'next-gen' static blogging: html::after { content: "Welcome to my blog" }
- demifiend 6y agoWhenever people do stuff like this, alternative text protocols like Gemini make more sense.
- Ryan_Goosling 6y agoI thought the crowd on HN was more technically versed than this post. This self-titled "next-gen" blogging solution disregards SEO and accessibility. Am I wrong?
- demifiend 6y agoI'm tempted to argue the value of SEO when to me it has come to mean catering to Google and trying to game its algorithms, but no. You're not wrong.
- richsu-ca 6y agoMade me realize my own site needs work. Thank you for sharing this
- demifiend 6y agoI hope it helps. A woman I worked with a decade ago impressed upon me the importance of accessibility and sometimes I try to pay it forward.
- andyp-kw 6y agoMaybe an expert can confirm, but my understanding is that this would be poor from an SEO standpoint. I don't really see how this can be next-gen when it strips out any semantic elements.
- varajelle 6y agoWhat I think is missing for static blogs are comments.
- demifiend 6y agoI can't and won't speak for anybody else, but if I wanted to provide random strangers with a free soapbox I wouldn't bother with a static blog. I'd just fire up a new Fediverse instance. IMO, there's no need for comments. If people can't either send you an email or quote your blog with a link in their own blog, then they probably don't have much of value to say.
- FalconSensei 6y agoI think putting your email in your blog is going to get you a bit of spam... At least with comments, they are limited to the comments system
- demifiend 6y agoI don't care if contact@ gets spam. That's what it's for. If I reply, it'll come from a different address on that domain.
- TheRealNGenius 6y ago@demifiend, then don't reply to their comment with a comment of your own. Why don't you quote it in your blog or email them instead?
- Ryan_Goosling 6y agoSo I'm guessing this isn't accessible for screen readers?
- lrossi 6y agoEven simpler: serve txt files. Browsers display them just fine.
- Priem19 6y agoI applaud that simplicity seems to be trending, but the benefits of not having paragraph tags don't seem to outweigh the downsides. It's not that big of a deal, and it enables reader mode. Leaving as much as possible left to default is what I prefer; it supports the greatest number of browsers and assume is the fastest. https://www.quitfacebook.org/file/play.html https://www.quitfacebook.org/file/play.html
- FalconSensei 6y agoyeah, for me, breaking reader mode is a big downside.
- robertoandred 6y agoWhy is he bragging about being awful at web dev? <p> tags exist for a reason. You're not cool for omitting them, you're hurting your users.
- otherme123 6y agoMy browser doesn't allow the switch to read mode, for example.
- mmackh 6y agoAuthor here: Sorry for not considering accessibility more. I use solarize everywhere - I’ll look into fixing the low contrast issue. As for whether my approach is correct from an SEO or HTML5 validation perspective - evidently not. But I do value the feedback and will take your comments into consideration when expanding my personal site. It’s still a WIP.
- angus_gh 6y agoYou could also override the font-family of the main <code> to make it more readable; since it isn't code there's no need to use a monospace font. body code { font-family: sans-serif; }
- alpaca128 6y agoI'm also a huge fan of solarized, so I know from some styling experiments with LaTeX documents that solarized just has a bit too little contrast for normal text documents. Which is why I'd recommend adjusting the text brightness - it still looks relatively similar but helps significantly.
- chrismorgan 6y agoNote that when people speak of colour contrast ratios, they’re looking at a painfully simplified model that is useful, but nowhere near sufficient. The most significant way in which it is insufficient is the consideration of font weights: thinner fonts need higher contrast to be legible. This is particularly seriously demonstrated here by the use of the monospace font-family: some platforms have a default monospaced font that is way thinner than others (like, weight 250–300 instead of 400), and so Solarized, which I find unpleasantly low-contrast even with a fairly heavy font, becomes positively awful.
- thotsBgone 6y ago> The experience to writing this blog entry is very similar to using a dedicated word processor Except for the fact that a word processor does more than break lines. For example, when you type ", your word processor will convert this to a left opening quote or a right closing quote based on context. But the " in this article are still ". I guess they could have used a word processor after all.
- onion2k 6y agoI think it's a bit of a shame that this discussion has focused on the tech and (slightly odd) HTML choices here. Those are probably the least interesting parts of any discussion around what a "next gen" blog platform might look like. Where the author is correct about next-gen blogging (in my opinion anyway) is in the attempt to reduce the friction to publishing a new post. What tech stack you use, whether it's static, what your HTML looks like, are all entirely secondary to whether or not you actually use your blog to build a corpus of content that shows off your opinions, expertise, and insights over time. That's what a blog is. It isn't HTML tags and CSS. It's the content within the tags. For me any next-gen blog tech has to make 3 things trivially easy - - it needs to be simple to set up and maintain. If my laptop dies and I can't just clone my blog's repo and run a couple of commands to get back to where I was it won't work. - it needs to be really simple to publish a post. Most blogs use Markdown with either front matter or a specific file path. That's OK but it puts most of the cognitive load on me. I'm sure there's a better way but I don't know what it is. I use 11ty for my blog which is very good, and if I didn't worry about URLs as much as I do it would be could actually work. But I do. - there's nothing that pushes me to write more. This is the kicker, and no one has ever solved it. I think a blog platform that recommends posts I should write, and that praises me for writing, would drive me to actually write far more than I do. So far the only blog platform I've seen come close is Hashnode, but even that doesn't do it very well.
- billbrown 6y agoFor me, the power of a blogging platform is in automating boilerplate. This lacks: - search - categories - RSS - archive pages - header/footer/navigation It's great that the content area is simpler, but if I just typey-typey for the blog post and then have to manually create backlinks and the RSS feed item then forget it. There is such a thing as _too_ simple.
- rayrag 6y agoAuthor created static website where he manually links to each page and he claims this is 'next-gen' of blogging. You know what's next gen of blogging? Substack. You know why? It's because for most people rss is "hard" to use (mostly because they aren't familiar with it, thanks Google!), meanwhile everyone is familiar with email clients. Author says: > Managing this blog is a little more involved than dynamically generating everything. and > Simplicity is key. If he will blog for long enough that simplicity might become a technical debt. Right know this 'next-gen' blog doesn't even have an rss feed.
- sedatk 6y agoIt's funny that we've come full circle. The web had started with static web sites. Many of them had misused HTML tags to take shortcuts, and to achieve a certain look, including `<pre>`, `<table>`, etc. That had eventually caused so many compatibility issues that we thought malformed documents were a problem, so we defined a rigid structure for HTML called XHTML. We discovered the value of semantics and separated style from content with CSS. Then, we thought XHTML was too much work and just went back to loose style with HTML5 for ease of use. Then, people thought CSS was so much work that they applauded Tailwind for brining styling back into HTML. And three decades later, "next-gen static blogging" is about misusing HTML tags to take shortcuts, and to achieve a certain look. :)
- still_grokking 6y agoGiven that we're paying per CPU-seconds and MBs transmitted while running our stuff again on mainframes (The Cloud) this makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
- swyx 6y agoAnyone else found the color contrast absolutely terrible to read? i suspected this and then ran a lighthouse check and.. yup. contrast check fail. you can also use https://color.a11y.com/Contrast/ https://color.a11y.com/Contrast/ There's no point pontificating about the next generation of static blogging when you forget the basics - make the writing easy to read.
- bndw 6y agoRunning this site through an HTML validator generates quite a few errors. https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Finoads.com%2Farticles%2F2020-01-09-Next-Gen-Static-Blogging https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Finoads.com%2F...