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Personal anecdote: I refuse to blog anymore because I can't find the right CMS to use. I have weighed the pros and cons so heavily over a whole decade and just

Personal anecdote: I refuse to blog anymore because I can't find the right CMS to use. I have weighed the pros and cons so heavily over a whole decade and just can't decide what to use (And I've used them all). Posthaven, Wordpress, Ghost, WriteFreely & Write.as, Blogger, Tumblr and a few others. Now I am aware of the phrase: 'If you wait until you are ready, you will never get it done'. But I've actually blogged professionally for about 3 years and saw what that meant. You had journalists cold-calling you in the middle of the night because your blogpost was going viral, traffic going through the roof. Though the blog didn't go down because of the traffic, I was still paying for the CDN monthly which at the time because of AD revenue didn't hurt my pocket as much. Today I simply can't afford it, and out of respect for my users, I won't serve ADS. So the workaround for many in that situation, is to go with a free service like wordpress.com or Tumblr or Blogger etc. But they're all weaponized with ADs and tracking cookies, and I don't want to make my users suffer loss of privacy because of what I've written. I used to self host, but then even that comes with caveats: can you harden the VPS enough to stop bots and bad actors getting in and ruining your blog? How does the CMS bounce back after the VPS has been rebooted? All these stupid edge cases can make you go insane. Then the CMS itself has to be configured the right way. Have you got HSTS turned on? Have you got your caching right? Are all your images optimized? It's too much. I prefer to just lurk on various Internet forums since I can still reach a large audience that way, albeit even forums come with caveats. So far certain communities haven't had their Eternal September yet, and places like Tildes.net look promising. In the end, it was a good run, but it can't last. Maybe I'll take up blogging again, when I'm 'not ready' for it and DGAF anymore, who knows?

slig 5y ago
You can use a static site generator (such as Hugo), and host it for free on GitHub with your domain. Zero costs, zero maintenance and zero headaches.
- legrande 5y ago
  Tried Github; didn't like it. 1: I prefer EU companies with strict privacy laws. I only host with Switzerland. 2: Github won't be happy with 1/2 million unique IPs in a day hitting their servers when a post goes viral. (That's an expense on their part) 3: With a free GH account everything is public knowledge and every change made to your blog is visible via diffs. I don't want nosey people poring over every mistake I made in posts. I'm not sure it's possible to have a Github Pages instance that is private. 4: Whilst 3rd party tools assist in markdown generation (for use with Jekyll and Hugo), you still have to peek inside templates to customize everything to your liking. Something I am tired of doing. 5: Whilst TLS & HTTPS on Github pages is supported, I still have problems getting it to work properly. Seems to only work on {username}.github.io and not a custom domain. 6: There are issues with what URL to serve to on GH Pages. Do I use `www.site.com` or `site.com`? And how does the server negotiate which one to use?

slig 5y ago

You can use a static site generator (such as Hugo), and host it for free on GitHub with your domain. Zero costs, zero maintenance and zero headaches.

legrande 5y ago
Tried Github; didn't like it. 1: I prefer EU companies with strict privacy laws. I only host with Switzerland. 2: Github won't be happy with 1/2 million unique IPs in a day hitting their servers when a post goes viral. (That's an expense on their part) 3: With a free GH account everything is public knowledge and every change made to your blog is visible via diffs. I don't want nosey people poring over every mistake I made in posts. I'm not sure it's possible to have a Github Pages instance that is private. 4: Whilst 3rd party tools assist in markdown generation (for use with Jekyll and Hugo), you still have to peek inside templates to customize everything to your liking. Something I am tired of doing. 5: Whilst TLS & HTTPS on Github pages is supported, I still have problems getting it to work properly. Seems to only work on {username}.github.io and not a custom domain. 6: There are issues with what URL to serve to on GH Pages. Do I use `www.site.com` or `site.com`? And how does the server negotiate which one to use?