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Mataroa blog – Naked blogging platform for minimalists
- Jack5500 5y agoThis looks great. Everthing (at least) I want for a very reasonable price.
- morsch 5y agoI like it. Looks great in reader mode, too. Not that you really need it. I think posts should have a link to the previous/next post in the blog. And I wonder if there is custom CSS.
- shaolinspirit 5y agoI like modern web minimalism and modest design wave. Laconic and elegant.
- tomrod 5y agoIs self hosting an option?
- kseistrup 5y agoIt's open-source: https://git.sr.ht/~sirodoht/mataroa https://git.sr.ht/~sirodoht/mataroa
- tomrod 5y agoNice! $9 for annual services on top of a well constructed platform you can also self host is a really aim-for-the-moon commitment. I hope mataroa finds phenomenal success with their business.
- cpach 5y agoThere’s always Hugo, Jekyll, Zola, right?
- tomrod 5y agoTrue. Much like Dropbox, the tooling exists beforehand. It's nice when a company brings it altogether, maintains the expert knowledgebase, and creates the process to be simple (including setup).
- lowwave 5y agothat is first thing popped to mind as well.
- kareemm 5y agoEdit: leaving up as an embarrassing reminder to myself fully rtfm before opening my mouth. I thought this did NOT have comments and sub by email but it does. Glad y’all provided me with some feedback to realize I was wrong. —- Original comment: I don’t get it. If you want to write and don’t care how much you’re read, write privately (Google Docs, a journal, text file, etc.) If you’re writing publicly presumably it’s for public consumption. The way you know if your writing is read is through feedback - comments, shares, email subs, etc. Feedback on your writing both helps you understand where you need to think more deeply about what you wrote AND provides valuable positive reinforcement: somebody is reading what you put into the world. Not providing hooks for these seems to defeat the purpose of writing in public.
- chaps 5y agoMaybe consider that you're not their target audience.
- kareemm 5y agoI’m trying to understand who the target audience is. Phrasing my comment a slightly different way: what’s the point of writing *in public* if you don’t get feedback?
- wepple 5y agoToo much feedback (especially when it comes to sharing your own thoughts) poisons the purity. It’s a cliche that every musicians best work is their early stuff. Once you become popular, famous, entangled in expectations and opinions, you lose the thing that made you great.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- detaro 5y agoYou are misrepresenting it: Not caring about numbers/analytics isn't "no feedback". People can still leave comments, email, ... And the usefulness of writing isn't connected to if people can reach the author or not.
- bnt 5y agoFalse advertising, no nudes anywhere to be found!! /s
- code_duck 5y agoI honestly thought this was about nudism, initially.
- knowledge-clay 5y agoSeems very similar to https://bearblog.dev https://bearblog.dev — another cool project
- r2222 5y agoYeah the “example post” names Bear Blog as a direct source of inspiration. > Created out of authentic admiration of Herman's genius idea of Bear Blog, Mataroa.blog is like Bear Blog but also a bit different. Namely, it has built-in first-class support to export your blog, and it also supports image hosting.
- knowledge-clay 5y agoI missed this. Cool!
- 88840-8855 5y agoLooks great! I will try it out. Thank you for sharing. The pricing seems to be very fair and something that i would pay to support the project. addition: i wonder how non mainstream opinions are moderated there, e.g. conspiracy theories, pro Russian content, pro Chinese content, etc.
- tomrod 5y agoRe: your addition--As an oldie on the internet, this has been through a few pendulum swings. I personally think it's fine to have non-coercive weird content exist (freedom of speech sans CP and similar exploitation) without it being shoved into people's faces (newsfeed). This let's people vote with their feet.
- xinsight 5y agoIs there a reason reader mode doesn’t work on mobile Safari? (Pinch zooming and horizontal scrolling is painful.)
- ms123 5y agoGreat service, and an inspiration for https://smol.pub https://smol.pub
- teitoklien 5y agosmol.pub is awesomeeeeeee Been a happy user of it :D Thanks a lot for building it !
- ms123 5y agothank you teitoklien <3
- nerdponx 5y agoWould you say there are significant differences between these two services? Or were you just inspired to build your own?
- olah_1 5y agoIs the “key” for an account a one-time purchase of $5?
- alecst 5y agoI was using and loved mataroa. It was the fairest, most painless option I had found for blogging (as of 2020.) I eventually switched away from it because the default font was small and I couldn’t change it. I wonder if this has been updated since. (At the moment, I’m hosting my blog as a static site with NFS. I go back and forth about wanting comments/email sign-up.) The developers were nice though, and I used their source code to learn Django. Really grateful.
- quickthrower2 5y agoThat sounds easy to fix, just some custom css?
- olah_1 5y agoI was wondering about the typography too. Specifically for multi-language support, the chances are high that you’d want something better than the one default font they provide. Not to mention that you may want to edit the language meta code if you are writing in a different language.
- sirodoht 5y agoI built mataroa. Not sure if your comment is referring to mataroa, but in case it is: I care a lot about typography and making a platform in which non-latin scripts can be read well. Mataroa does not provide any font. Rather, it uses the end user's system fonts. System fonts are most probably better than webfonts. They can define a large set of characters, including as many languages as they can, without caring about how big they get. This is in contrast to webfonts, of which all character glyphs need to be sent to the client—so size matters. I've also written this text on the topic: https://nutcroft.com/blog/in-defense-of-user-defined-web-fonts/ https://nutcroft.com/blog/in-defense-of-user-defined-web-fon...
- ldjb 5y agoThanks for your comments. However, for certain languages it is important to specify the language in the HTML with the `lang` attribute. Otherwise incorrect glyphs may be displayed. More info: https://heistak.github.io/your-code-displays-japanese-wrong/ https://heistak.github.io/your-code-displays-japanese-wrong/
- swayvil 5y agoI do a minimal thing too. A css, a bit of php, a markdown-to-html converter. Content in markdown files. Directories for structure. Pig-ignorant and unbreakable.
- jslakro 5y agoI consider write.as another good minimalist blogging option. It provides some features above its free tier
- forgotpwd16 5y agoThis is the first service, which unfortunately just found shut down free registrations, that came to my mind when opened the link.
- giorgioz 5y agoCheckout https://www.polyblog.io https://www.polyblog.io It's a choose your own adventure blog platform where you can go headless and customize everything or choose battery included and get a yourblog.polyblog.io out of the box [disclaimer, I'm the founder of Polyblog.io]
- pictur 5y ago> Data centers in the EU, operated by a German company so?
- dustymcp 5y agoGdpr etc.
- nerdponx 5y agoI had more or less this exact idea a few months ago, but wasn't able to block out time to develop it. Happy to see it exists in the world!
- cx201 5y agoLooks really polished and I love the minimalist design. One thing I've been wondering that a lot of web platforms offer: how do you allow users to bring their custom domain with TLS? What's the tech behind that and how does the process work?
- vbezhenar 5y agoJust letsencrypt, I guess.
- sirodoht 5y agoThat was one of the hard things to figure out how to do in a simple way on mataroa. Just using Let's Encrypt directly was the first iteration. Now mataroa is using a combination of: - Let's Encrypt with a wildcard certificate for mataroa.blog and all *.mataroa.blog domains - Caddy's automated certificates for all user custom domains You can see a few more details about this setup in the server playbook doc [1] and the Caddyfile [2] [1]: https://github.com/sirodoht/mataroa/blob/master/docs/server-playbook.md https://github.com/sirodoht/mataroa/blob/master/docs/server-... [2]: https://github.com/sirodoht/mataroa/blob/master/Caddyfile https://github.com/sirodoht/mataroa/blob/master/Caddyfile
- Alacart 5y agoYou can do this a variety of ways, most of which boil down to automating a reverse proxy server and generating acme certs. My favorite is Caddy server if you want to build and manage it yourself. Things get trickier if you want to handle this well for globally distributed servers, since you'll need to have a cluster of reverse proxies near or colocated to your app servers. That needs an anycast IP address to handle A records for apex domains, and usually you want them coordinating to share certs, cache, etc. efficiently. In that situation I'd recommend reaching for a paid service, since there can be a lot to build and maintain. Source: I built approximated.app, which is a service that does all of that for you.
- mypalmike 5y agoWhatever terminates the connection (e.g. nginx, haproxy, apache) needs to be configured for each supported domain. As a platform this would mean having code to modify and reload the config and put certs in place on behalf of users.
- derekzhouzhen 5y agoIf anyone is looking for a free and privacy respecting feedback gathering option for blogs, I have one here: https://roastidio.us https://roastidio.us It is designed to complement SSG style blogs, but should work with blogging platforms as well.
- chubot 5y agoI would like to try writing a post before signing up, or at least see what the import/export looks like I want to see if source code snippets, SVG, LaTeX, etc. works Same issue with bearblog.dev. They show you example rendered posts but not the example source
- sirodoht 5y agoGood points. For the post source, it's just simple text markdown. SVG and LaTeX do not work. Most custom HTML and CSS does not work. The allowed HTML elements/attributes and CSS rules that work are these: https://github.com/sirodoht/mataroa/blob/2d1524e1f3ba968efcb6bba5eda22b7ab1af6dbf/main/denylist.py#L85-L167 https://github.com/sirodoht/mataroa/blob/2d1524e1f3ba968efcb...
- cheschire 5y agoCould you sign up using a mailinator.com account just to kick the tires?
- ldjb 5y agoYou can sign up for an account without an email address, so I don't think there is a need for Mailinator here.
- throwmeariver1 5y agoYeah, sadly the only demo sites you see anymore are mostly for b2b services.
- nqzero 5y ago> I would like to try writing a post before signing up "signing up" is completely painless - no cost, no email required - choose a subdomain name aka login - choose a password - done they've alredy given you exactly what you're asking for
- roshansingh 5y agoLooks great. Please increase the font size to 16px or at least 15px. It is very difficult to read smaller texts which has become the norm these days.
- gkbrk 5y agoIf this is a common complaint that you have, why not just increase the font size and pick fonts you like in the browser settings? The settings are there for a reason.
- extra88 5y agoThis home page doesn't honor the browser's font-size setting, it sets it to 14px. It should be changed to 1rem so it uses what's set in the browser. The font-family is sans-serif, so it does honor that browser setting, but if you'd prefer to read it in a serif font, too bad.
- iviv 5y agoHow do I do that in iOS Safari?
- derekzhouzhen 5y agoOne nice thing I recognized is that the generated RSS feed contains full html text. I wish more blogging platforms are like this; save a lot of effort for feed readers. I'd also recommend to add open graph meta for the blog posts. Presumably people will want to share the posts somewhere; a nice set of open graph metas goes a long way.
- lousyd 5y agoI haven't checked it out yet, but... Wouldn't one not want html text in the feed, if one chose to use a blogging platform whose focus was text and simplicity? I prefer to read feeds with plain text myself.
- jolmg 5y agoImages are a feature many articles benefit from.
- gumby 5y agoDe gustibus I suppose, but to me, “Images are a feature many or most articles use and which a very small number benefit from.”
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jolmg 5y agoYou're right. I shouldn't have said many. I forgot some like to put memes in their articles. I still think the ability to use images can be important, depending on topic. Quite simply a blog about anything graphics-related would benefit.
- gumby 5y agoI've been told Medium requires a huge photo at the top of each post, regardless if it makes sense or not for the article. Most of the time those articles are simply junk.
- thisistheend123 5y agoI see nothing here that is minimalistic or different. First of all, having a dark mode by default is not minimalistic. Edit: wow, downvotes without any explanation. You guys must be having a lot.
- extra88 5y agoIt's not dark mode by default. The text color is initially undefined and the background-color transparent. If the user's device is set to prefer dark mode, color and background color are set to be white text on a dark background. It would be good if it was possible for a reader to choose to use the opposite of their device setting but that would would less minimal (needs a UI, JavaScript, and client-side storage of the setting).
- mariusor 5y agoProbably because you're commenting without being familiar with how your browser sending information to pages to use a dark scheme for you. A website that supports "@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark)" is not really a maximalist design these days.
- they4kman 5y agoDoes mataroa, or a similar platform, offer syntax highlighting? I'm on month 80 avoiding setting up a blog to capture my occasional thoughts and frequent side project adventures – mostly because I'd rather fiddle with the side projects than set aside time spinning up some blog platform (which often begins with promising I'll use asciidoc, and ends in frustration trying to render asciidoc _juuuuust_ right). I would love to have a dead-simple interface (for writing and reading) to collect words. But since most of those words will be about code, a lack of syntax highlighting will take residence in my mind. (Tangentially related: I _love_ reader mode, because I like to read an article or two while rocking my baby to sleep, and reader mode offers dark mode, even on websites in stunning retina-burn white. The only downside of reader mode is how it kills syntax highlighting.)
- didip 5y agoHow do you plan on making the business sustainable? Pretty much anyone can make this using Hugo, no?
- robjan 5y agoThis is easier than setting up a Hugo blog and for many I am sure that's worth $9/year. If I wasn't already self-hosting ghost I would probably use this service.
- systemvoltage 5y agoI think this is great and easy for most people, but if you are a developer, you ought to host it on your own. There is no excuse.
- robjan 5y agoThere is an easy excuse: time. Most people have better things to do than fiddle around with setting up a blog. The setting up process provides minimal value to most people.
- systemvoltage 5y agoIf you’re spending the time to write articles, it takes no more than an hour to setup a simple blog. As a developer, it is the right thing to do. It provides tremendous value to people - a sense of pride, enterprise of building something, owning it and then showing it to others. You might as well give up on writing then. Drew Devault gives out $20 to start your own blog. We need to perpetuate this culture, not oppose.
- DarkSucker 5y agoNice. Almost what I want: simplicity, images (for plots), and no adds or tracking. However, I want to author pages on optics, and I want to use MathJax (https://www.mathjax.org/ https://www.mathjax.org/) for equations. Please let me know how I might use MathJax with Mataroa if I've misunderstood. Or, please suggest something similar that supports MathJax. Rolling my own static site (as many NH postings describe) is enticing but beyond my ability. I am not a Web programmer, and Mataroa's simplicity is perfect for me.
- smm11 5y agoOneDrive.
- replwoacause 5y agoI want something like this that lets me password protect certain pages/posts. Does anyone know of something besides for Wordpress?
- prxtl 5y agoI moved my personal blog to mataroa, and then wrote a love letter to the service on how much it gets right — https://pratul.net/blog/mataroa-just-works-for-me/ https://pratul.net/blog/mataroa-just-works-for-me/
- vinay_ys 5y agoThe truly naked blogging setup would be: - a git repo containing a Hugo (or similar) SSG site. – push this git repo to a couple of free private repo hosting services (GitHub, GitLab, GCP CloudCode, AWS CodeCommit etc) – and optionally use their free CI integration to generate the static site (or do it locally on your laptop). - and push to a free cloud storage (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle etc all give storage in their free tier). - Use Cloudflare CDN or AWS CloudFront (or both) to serve this static website from the storage origin. – Use Cloudflare DNS for hosting your custom personal domain name and point it to the CDNs. All this is free, with a bit of effort of initial setup in an afternoon. And it is super resilient with multiple independent CDN, Storage and Git hosting.
- olah_1 5y agoI don’t enjoy the process of having to build the site and push the built site to a service like github. It adds a certain kind of friction to the process of “saving” my work that just isn’t life-giving for me.
- ray__ 5y agoThis is a huge factor for me. The best blogging/knowledge share/writing tools are the ones that have minimal overhead.
- loloquwowndueo 5y agoYou could keep the source files in GitHub and use their web editor to add or update content, then build and push to the publishing server via a GitHub action. You can find descriptions of such a setup by googling.
- olah_1 5y ago> then build and push to the publishing server via a GitHub action I have looked into this before, but it honestly just seemed very esoteric and complex. I'm surprised that Github doesn't provide pre-made "recipes" for this stuff.
- 5y ago
- hiptobecubic 5y agoNot gonna lie, the appeal of these things is entirely lost on me. Who is sitting around thinking, "I wish I could find somewhere that would let me write plain html with basic CSS to make it legible?" Literally anywhere that will host a page can be a minimal blogging platform if you just don't use django or whatever to host your blog.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- opentokix 5y agoLove text and white space =)
- JFKKFJ 5y ago
- chx 5y agoHow does this compare to https://blot.im/ https://blot.im/ ?
- suyash 5y agoI love this mostly but often need some customization, can I attach image or bikes to post ?
- thirdplace_ 5y agoLike it. The main page has a rss <link> but blog posts can have too.
- xsace 5y agoNo one mentions it so there you go: mataroa means "hope" in Maohi
- nabaraz 5y agoHow did Markdown, originally created for writing documentation got so popular that we are using it to create web pages? Wouldn't Rich Text be a better choice here?
- digitallyfree 5y agoIt has a nice simple syntax that can be easily understood by someone unfamilar with the language. Also many forums, Github, and Reddit use it.
- siavosh 5y agoCurious if willing to share the market size:revenue for the premium service?
- shila_muhamad22 5y ago
- reliwa 5y agoThanks, exactly what I was looking for! Just created my first blog in a long time: https://reliwa.mataroa.blog/ https://reliwa.mataroa.blog/
- kwhitefoot 5y agoIs there an API? Can I prepare a blog offline and run a script to publish it?
- garbagetime 5y ago>Content in mataroa blogs is unfiltered and unmonitored. Users are free to publish any combination of words and pixels. However, content of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, colour, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation will be taken down immediately. >If one notices something along those lines in a mataroa blog please let us know at admin@mataroa.blog. There should probably be something explicit in there about what kinds of pornography is allowed on the site. Also, the first part of the paragraph seems contradicted by the second: I would say users aren't really free to publish any combination of words given the sentence that follows. P.S. it looks like a great service
- sirodoht 5y agoMade a small adjustment to improve clarity in that paragraph. Thanks :)
- rpmisms 5y agoThis seems far too broad, mainly because of the religious restriction. A blog on comparative religion could be removed for using the word "heterodox". Faith is a choice, unlike all the other protected characteristics in this list.
- automatic6131 5y ago>Faith is a choice Faith isn't a choice for the faithful
- rpmisms 5y agoHaving been faithful at one point in time, and no longer being faithful, I can invalidate that.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- chaosprint 5y agoIt looks nice. I will give it a shot.
- victor_e 5y agoThis is everything I need except analytics. I need basic analytics like page views and visitor locations. Does anyone know of a naked blog that also includes some analytics? I this there is space between simple analytics and privacy invading tracking analytics.
- clorohk 5y agoThis is fantastic, was thinking about doing something similar as a side project but given that this exists, I’ll probably simply go with this. Thanks for implementing and posting on HN
- a_lanfranco 5y agoI've recently published an overview of the best platforms and architectures for blogging, given different technical expertise levels and budgets. Mataroa is the top choice for the category "Free and easy, without much control/ownership of the platform". Here's the link if you are interested: https://lanfranco.me/posts/resilient-lean-low-cost-blogging/ https://lanfranco.me/posts/resilient-lean-low-cost-blogging/
- Antinyani 5y agolike it! Very simple yet very good at doing its job. Is there a feature for anonymous upload?
- Terretta 5y agoSee also https://posthaven.com https://posthaven.com by those who made Posterous: “Garry Tan and Brett Gibson were two of the co-founders of Posterous in 2008. Posterous was acquired by Twitter in 2012, and while we were happy that it was a meaningful acquisition for the team and investors, we were bummed to see something gets shuttered that we believed should last forever.” https://firstsiteguide.com/posterous-is-gone/ https://firstsiteguide.com/posterous-is-gone/ Posthaven is pretty minimalist and still there. PS. As many comments here are about fonts, the most recent (rare changes, as in, back in 2016, which is a "good thing") feature update to Posthaven was customizable html/css: https://blog.posthaven.com https://blog.posthaven.com. Also does post by email, custom domains, and rss feeds.