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Why My Blog Is Closed-Source
- approxim8ion 6y agoFor the source control point, I do it this way: My entire working folder with markdown posts, drafts, templates etc is a private git repo. The output (the static HTML, CSS, images etc) is a public repo. I have a tiny shell script to commit, push and publish the site, and it works just the way I want it. His other points are understandable. I personally don't take my blog that seriously, it's just a pet project.
- aarondf 6y agoThis is one of my favorite recently-discovered blogs. His posts are so in depth and the whole thing is beautiful and slick. I too prefer for my blog to be closed-source, for many of the same reasons. Mine is decidedly less sexy, it's just Laravel + Markdown, but I did write about it recently: https://aaronfrancis.com/2021/blogging-with-markdown-in-laravel https://aaronfrancis.com/2021/blogging-with-markdown-in-lara...
- tfehring 6y ago>It might surprise you to learn that this site and its newsletter costs about $130 USD a month to run Yes it does. I know you can never criticize someone else's infra nowadays without coming across as "I could clone StackOverflow and get it to run on a Raspberry Pi over a weekend," I have no idea what or how much stuff his backend is doing, and I know serverless is an added and often worthwhile expense....but man, that's way more than I'd expect.
- Etheryte 6y agoI think is a very valid criticism, paying $1500 a year for a static site with a like button is odd. Hosting this site on something like Netlify would literally be free while also satisfying every other requirements save for the heart button. Even the Netlify pro tier would only be about $200 a year for a small site.
- silicon2401 6y agohow would you compare using Netlify to AWS? could you get started on Netlify once you just buy a domain name?
- Etheryte 6y agoNetlify is absurdly easy to get started on, it supports many static site generators etc out of the box. For my personal site it was a few clicks and no manual config required. Since you mentioned domains, you can even buy domains through them with auto-renew etc. I haven't used it for any large scale projects, but for small things, their batteries included approach is great.
- silicon2401 6y agothat's really helpful to know, I'll make sure to check it out. thanks!
- sirdavid 6y agoAWS has Amplify which is essentially their version of Netlify. It's surprisingly easy to spin up and is pretty cheap (not obviously not free like Netlify is).
- 1123581321 6y agoHe uses Convertkit to manage email, which costs him most of that figure for the “site and its newsletter” if he has 15k subscribers (about half of his Twitter following.) https://convertkit.com/pricing https://convertkit.com/pricing
- raymondgh 6y ago$130/month for a website and newsletter considered minimal! Wow!
- FalconSensei 6y agonewsletters are not cheap if you have thousands of subscribers.
- slenk 6y agoFor $130 he could easily host his own email server that could handle that much traffic AND be accepted by major email providers.
- gryn 6y agohow likely is it that the recipient would find sent emails in the spam folder ?
- slenk 6y ago1% Really depends if an organization uses its own blacklist besides the major public ones. And, if you get an IP banned on a major public list, you can easily request removal - takes less than a half hour. Just don't use AWS as the host.
- PurpleFoxy 6y agoHow do I request google stop marking 1 in 30 of my emails as spam?
- FalconSensei 6y agoif you send maillists/newsletters, that's the main reason why those services cost money. (plus analytics and other stuff)
- 6y ago
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoI can somewhat sympathize, although I don't view these arguments as strong since they could mostly be fixed with minimal effort. On the other hand, it's just a personal blog, so if you don't feel like sharing then that's cool too. * The unpublished posts would require a different workflow; you could easily keep a private repo and a public repo, and publish by pushing from private to public. * I don't really see a problem with copycats, personally. I personally feel like theme/design is just a minor style thing on top of the content and not even something that you "take credit for". Like, if someone wants to copy everything but the content of my blog, more power to them. * The security angle is basically adding obscurity, which is a reasonable additional layer, however thin.
- bellyfullofbac 6y agoYeah, what a weak post. My flippant TL;DR: "Because I'm too lazy to separate code and content."
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoI think that's a touch uncharitable; a lot of it is "because I'm not willing to put in the effort to make the code public-worthy". The security concerns, for instance, boil down to wanting the extra layer of security through obscurity. Besides... it's a personal blog. I don't really agree with the reasons, but it's their blog, so it's not like they owe anyone anything, including source code /shrug
- 3np 6y agoTBH that's a perfectly valid reason in itself.
- HaoZeke 6y agoYes. People do copy. You'd be lucky to even find attribution. This is one of the things which open source contributors need to make peace with. The way I look at it, the original grew out of my own experiences in my head and that can't be copied. As for manifestations... The more pretty / functional code and sites there are, the better! A tip from over ten years of FOSS : never try to track your FOSS code, nothing good can possibly come of it
- CodeMage 6y agoCan someone explain the part about copycats? The way I'm reading it is that the "copycats" forked the repo, and then retained the presentation while changing the content. In other words, it's like writing your own resume using someone else's publicly shared Word template. What am I missing? Why is this wrong?
- shirleyquirk 6y agobecause the sites are portfolios for web designers, so the medium is the message. it's as if a resume for a job as a Word template designer was written with someone else's template.
- CodeMage 6y agoOh, okay. Thank you for clarifying.
- dj_mc_merlin 6y agoThe repo isn't just a presentation template, it is a piece of work that proves you know your stuff. If an FE engineer's personal site is beautiful and slick, that's an obvious plus. Copying someone's handmade design (even worse, lazily) is bad manners. People are obviously going to assume you made it.
- silicon2401 6y agoThis is part of the reason I don't publish my creative works. I show them privately to friends and family, but I don't publish because part of the creative process for me is control: I may not be able to control much in the world, but I enjoy controlling every aspect of things I create, including who sees it and when. It's been very rewarding, and makes me sympathize for people like Kafka whose work got published against their explicit wishes.
- rburhum 6y ago> this site and its newsletter costs about $130 USD a month to run I have toy site that gets around 100k users a month, with background services like a postgres db... and it costs me under $20 to run. I do everything in CloudRun (serverless) with a managed DB. What in the hell is this person doing?
- dsr_ 6y agoPaying other people for their services rather than running things in a VM.
- aftergibson 6y agoIt only it was open source. Perhaps the community could suggest cost effective alternatives. In all seriousness, running a blog that relies on serverless invocations would guarantee I’d do everything I could to avoid anything popular in case I had to pay out of pocket for a huge traffic surge.
- Spivak 6y agoDoes it really matter when, presumably, your caching layer (however you choose to implement it) is handling basically all of your traffic for a nearly static site?
- francisofascii 6y agoCloud Server + CDN + Email. $130 doesn't sound that high.
- dj_mc_merlin 6y agoCloudFlare Free Plan: $0 Email: $5-$10 FastMail plan, up to 16k emails a day VM: If you manage to spend $120 here, you've fucked up somehow since you're hosting a static site with a like button.
- FalconSensei 6y agoFastmail plan is not for newsletter, right? As another comment pointed out, he uses ConvertKit for the newsletter, which can cost up to $59 per month for up to 1k subscribers[1]. If he has 10k, the cost would be way higher. [1] https://convertkit.com/pricing https://convertkit.com/pricing
- rosmax_1337 6y agoVery impressed by the looks of a lot of things on his blog. Tasteful and never over the top, but still interesting and unique. But I did not appreciate the audio being played when hovering over things, or pressing things. Audio in a browser should really only be used in a session that truly needs it, examples include: games, video/radio/media, chatting. I'm not a web-text-purist, but audio in a document is where I draw the line, that annoyed me.
- remram 6y agoWhile I agree with the overall decision, this hurt to read: > SInce it's closed-source, none of that matters to me. But if it was open, folks would want to grab it to use in their own projects. I'd feel a certain responsibility to make sure that it works well, or at least to make sure that its shortcomings are well-documented. And I don't want that responsibility right now. I see this argument over and over. I see it in academia as an excuse not to share code and data. "I haven't cleaned it", "it might not work for you". *I* will decide if it fits *my needs*, and if it doesn't I don't see how it's your fault. Code is better than no code, I always have the option of not using it.
- drenvuk 6y agoyeah it's a pretty weak argument. The first one - keeping people from ripping it off without attribution - is stronger regardless of its selfish bent.
- yur3i__ 6y ago>It might surprise you to learn that this site and its newsletter costs about $130 USD a month to run; I don't make any money off the site, so this comes out-of-pocket. I'd really like to keep that cost as low as possible http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ I really don't understand why something like a blog needs to be much more than this to be honest.
- OhSoHumble 6y agoIt's a blog that focuses on building rich, interactive, CSS heavy websites. I don't think spartan design would really speak well for the purpose of the blog.
- NicoJuicy 6y agoI run 20 home build sites on a 20€ server. ( As a comparison)
- arp242 6y agoBut you also spent more time setting this up, and need to spend some time and effort maintaining this. Years ago I told one of my coworkers that I brought in my bike to the repair shop to replace the tire for €15. "€15? You can just do that yourself?" Sure, but I'd spend 30 minutes mucking about and and getting my hands dirty. It's not like I got a stash of money to burn, but I'd rather just pay the €15.
- NicoJuicy 6y agoThe popular dogma. We had more troubles with work with "the cloud". Setting it up was just pressing publish in VS + git and 1 time the domain+site ( 5 minutes in total ). So I spend less time on it. Everyone seems to forget that every deployment needs to be configured somewhere. If not by you, someone else. The server is windows server with IIS. Nothing special, you can get it for the price of an 1 Shared App Service in Azure ( 10 € / m = 1 Windows Server) vs 8€ / month ( 1 Shared App Service). I didn't had to do maintenance in the last year. But I did create a custom statuspage. But it's used mostly to deliver updates of clients when I deploy ( it creates a RSS entry when I deploy, which clients can receive). Clients are notified 100% of the time with updates from the developer as soon as it happens, if they want it :)
- resoluteteeth 6y agoThe whole premise seems a little weird to me since it's totally reasonable not to open source your blog website to the point where it's probably not even necessary to justify it. I do like it, though, even the silly heart feature which I would have expected to hate.
- ChrisArchitect 6y agoyeah, you'd think so - but these days with so many 'blogging engines' arising out of open source, alot of activity in that space, jamstack etc, everyone like expects everything to have an associated git repository. A bit weird, but is the state of things. He mentioned he had multiple inquiries about it too.
- kevincox 6y agoI think there was some expectation as the previous version of the blog was open source. But I agree that it shouldn't be expected. My blog isn't open source and I don't feel the need to open it.
- slenk 6y agoHmm, having a like button use a Lambda function doesn't seem very efficient if it does _nothing_ as he says, even if it is cool.
- villgax 6y agoThis is the stupidest thing I've read today. It costs him $130 per mo to host his blog?!!!! If he wanted to hide his designs so much he could just put a login page for folks he wants to vet. Any page you send to the client obfuscated or not is sent to the client, period. The rate-limiting he wanted on some counter is the weirdest thing, just have users login if you are so bothered about server less bills for something so trivial.
- dinkleberg 6y agoBlog + newsletter. He has a fairly large following so the vast majority of that cost is likely from the newsletter.
- stevenkkim 6y agoMost of that cost is probably in his newsletter ESP. I believe he uses ConvertKit and has around 30,000 subscribers. But I'm not sure how that math works because the ConvertKit website says the 35K pricing tier is $216 per month.
- kemonocode 6y agoI'm not sure if I really buy most if not all of these arguments, especially the security one. Haven't we already established security through obscurity doesn't work that well? Ultimately, a simple "because I don't want to and I don't want people to copy me, thus I'm not making it trivial" would have been enough.
- barry27 6y agoAnother pointless bunch of words designed to drive traffic. There is no need to justify a blog being closed source. He just wrote that post to get a few more people on his site. Oh and the sparkle thing is rubbish.
- jens-c 6y agoOne of the reaons the author gives is that they have drafts for unpublished posts, and that it would be too complicated to keep those apart from the public repository (separate repo, git submodule). Wouldn't it suffice to just have them in a different, private branch? The public stuff would be in the main branch pushed to the public repo, the private stuff would remain local in the private branch?