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Unless you expect to be in the blog software business this is the first step down a dark path into the abyss. It always starts as a "Hey, I can just have this

by dshah 15y ago

Unless you expect to be in the blog software business this is the first step down a dark path into the abyss. It always starts as a "Hey, I can just have this static page". Then, "...well I just need this simple feature, and I've been wanting to learn node.js anyways..."

_delirium 15y ago
You don't really have to balloon it if you want just a blog. Over the years my blog-generation script has slightly expanded, but it still clocks in at one Perl file of 639 lines, a lot of which is boilerplate. It generates HTML, an index, and an Atom feed, with a few options for the index, which is about all I need.
mechanical_fish 15y ago
But what simple features are these? Would you please list a few? The historical problem with "blogging" is that it was invented in an era where we didn't yet have Disqus, Flickr, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Feedburner, YouTube, Slideshare, Google Analytics, or even Digg, Reddit, or Hacker News. If you wanted any portion of the functionality of any of these things you had to build it into your "blog". And so hacker blogs were enormous code-heavy things that tended to get heavier with time. But nowadays I'd argue that, to first order, any work you do to reinvent any of the functionality of any of these things is an expensive luxury. Others have concluded the same, which is why so many blogs have shed so many features and gone back to being: A bunch of static web pages full of writing. With maybe a sitemap and maybe an RSS feed, and maybe comments with Disqus, but maybe not. But I'm always curious to know what I might be missing out on if I switch to Octopress, so please: A list? Sell me on Wordpress!
pavel_lishin 15y ago
You make a valid point. I gave up on rstblog because I wanted a simple feature - like not treating every file in a folder as a potential blog post (e.g., trying to include an image) - and after glancing at the source code, quietly closed my laptop and reconsidered whether the world needed to hear my thoughts in a blogable format.

by dshah 15y ago

_delirium 15y ago

You don't really have to balloon it if you want just a blog. Over the years my blog-generation script has slightly expanded, but it still clocks in at one Perl file of 639 lines, a lot of which is boilerplate. It generates HTML, an index, and an Atom feed, with a few options for the index, which is about all I need.

mechanical_fish 15y ago

But what simple features are these? Would you please list a few? The historical problem with "blogging" is that it was invented in an era where we didn't yet have Disqus, Flickr, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Feedburner, YouTube, Slideshare, Google Analytics, or even Digg, Reddit, or Hacker News. If you wanted any portion of the functionality of any of these things you had to build it into your "blog". And so hacker blogs were enormous code-heavy things that tended to get heavier with time. But nowadays I'd argue that, to first order, any work you do to reinvent any of the functionality of any of these things is an expensive luxury. Others have concluded the same, which is why so many blogs have shed so many features and gone back to being: A bunch of static web pages full of writing. With maybe a sitemap and maybe an RSS feed, and maybe comments with Disqus, but maybe not. But I'm always curious to know what I might be missing out on if I switch to Octopress, so please: A list? Sell me on Wordpress!

pavel_lishin 15y ago

You make a valid point. I gave up on rstblog because I wanted a simple feature - like not treating every file in a folder as a potential blog post (e.g., trying to include an image) - and after glancing at the source code, quietly closed my laptop and reconsidered whether the world needed to hear my thoughts in a blogable format.