
Where to Blog - avthar
https://monkbent.net/where-to-blog/
======
whorleater
This truly feels like [https://www.aleksandra.codes/tech-content-
consumer/](https://www.aleksandra.codes/tech-content-consumer/), where every
blog post rehashes the well tread territory of Hugo/Jenkins/Netlify/GH Pages
or Wordpress/Blogger/Ghost/Medium/Neocities, or even the newish "minimal" ones
like
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23313196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23313196).
You can even blog to specific audiences with the rise of "send a newsletter"
SaaS things!

IMO, very few people are at a loss on "where to blog" or "how to blog", but
rather actually _writing_. If you're a dev, you've got text files you can
serve (or convert to html). If you're a non-tech person, you've got a dearth
of places to blog on, with nearly a decade of tutorials about how to setup a
domain and site. It feels like the demand for these "where to blog" posts are
mostly to bikeshed on the tools and not actually the writing part.

~~~
Stratoscope
> you've got a _dearth_ of places to blog on

"Dearth" means "scarcity"; you probably mean "wide variety" or "plethora" if
you like alliteration.

------
canadianwriter
Thought I would pipe in about one thing mentioned. "social media is great for
promoting blogs" this was a throwaway comment and not the main point of the
article but just thought peeps might be curious.

Cause twitter/social is NOT a great place for promoting a blog.

Each social network has their own algorithm for what they show people. At this
point, none of them show you 100% of what is posted by the people you follow.
This isn't the worst things, but its annoying.

the question becomes, what DO they show you?

For the most part it's things written IN THE PLATFORM.

These social networks want to keep you within the network, not have you end up
on some other site.

The issue being, because of that incentive to keep you on their site, and a
preference for on platform content, your blog post that you share generally
wont be shown to very many people.

The only real solution to that is federation - reposting the content of the
blog on each network. That's what gets you the views.

That brings up a whole host of issues.

Not disagreeing with the main overall point, I have a personal blog for many
of the reasons posted, but I don't want people to think that posting a link to
their personal site will get much traction on social media unless they already
have an absolutely massive following.

------
StavrosK
I think there's a lot of analysis paralysis on deciding where to blog, so I
threw together a quick repo you can just clone, drop some Markdown files in
and it'll auto-publish to Gitlab pages and Neocities whenever you push:

[https://quicksite.stavros.io/](https://quicksite.stavros.io/)

It's not as plug-and-play as paying for Wordpress hosting, but you also don't
have to deal with all the update pain.

~~~
EwanToo
This looks really useful, thanks :)

------
otachack
Neocities is a great place to at least start if you want a static site. You
can just create an account and get to making HTML/CSS or just deploy static
generated pages to it. It also supports custom domains.

If you want something more advanced, you can easily pivot from it to some
other hosting.

[https://neocities.org/](https://neocities.org/)

------
sradman
Stratechery recommends using either Wordpress.com SaaS or the LAMP Stack based
Wordpress.org platform. He does not mention Static Site Generators like Jekyll
which is OSS and the default option for Github Pages freely hosted on
github.io.

A modern blog should be written in Markdown and stored in a git repository.
For non-devs, wordpress.com offers a slicker first time experience but
companies like Netlify are trying to provide slick WebUIs to bridge the gap.

~~~
julianeon
I'm skeptical of Markdown as the only, best practice, option. I've been
searching for this online - can I make an API call from Markdown? - and this
is one of those cases where common search terms make it hard to narrow down
the result. However, a cursory search makes it seem like the answer is, no;
or, not easily.

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60177551/calling-rest-
ap...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60177551/calling-rest-api-from-a-
markdown-template)

Want examples of blogs where you'd want to make API calls from your page and
not being able to in Markdown would be ruinous? Here's two from my blog.

A pretty much straight-from-Twitter page, nothing but Twitter API calls.

[http://www.mediazed.com/bristol-colston-
statue.html](http://www.mediazed.com/bristol-colston-statue.html)

Now you could say, that's a pretty artificial blog post structure, most
bloggers wouldn't do that. So here's a more harmonious blend - a pretty
regular blog post text blended with Twitter API calls.

[http://www.mediazed.com/thiel-fellows.html](http://www.mediazed.com/thiel-
fellows.html)

And lately I've been thinking of mixing in other embeded platform code (Insta,
YouTube) - easily done like this, potentially a hassle with Markdown.

Now, maybe you can fight with Markdown and find some way to sprinkle in the
embedded code, but if you ask me, it seems like: if I'm dealing with a lot of
raw HTML at that point, why not just go all the way and, as a dev, do it all
in HTML?

I don't see much value add in Markdown, at that point. And this is a perfectly
valid, 'real-world' blog use case.

~~~
dchest
Maybe you're thinking about sanitized Markdown, but proper Markdown allows
HTML:

 _For any markup that is not covered by Markdown’s syntax, you simply use HTML
itself. There’s no need to preface it or delimit it to indicate that you’re
switching from Markdown to HTML; you just use the tags._

[https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax](https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax)

* * *

Unrelated to Markdown: CMS like WordPress have quick tags for embeds, e.g.
your post with tweets could have been something like

[tweet id="123..."]

[tweet id="456..."]

instead of the massive amount of code that you have to copy and paste, which
will break if Twitter stops supporting that API, while this embed style would
be easy to update.

~~~
julianeon
Interesting! Thanks for adding that; I have to admit that makes the
proposition much better.

------
staysaasy
If you are a moderately technical person there are also very low effort
solutions that allow you to self host static sites from Jekyll/Hugo totally
free. Eg I haven't been a professional software engineer in ~5 years and I
could get up and running in ~60min. The biggest issue tends to be that you
need to write in Markdown with Git. I advocate for this everywhere because my
satisfaction is so high.

IMO Wordpress' biggest advantage is that the growth marketing community really
knows how to tune it and make it sing for common use-cases. If you're going to
have a team running growth strategies on your blog you'll be able to hire a
strong team to run SEO, inbound marketing, and whatever else you need. It's
boring technology in the best sense.

~~~
hinkley
In the time since I was last active on Wordpress, the ads have gone from
barely there to "I don't like this".

I suspect for active users that they boiled this frog slowly, but to me it is
not acceptable. Unfortunately running servers for free is also not acceptable.

I think the tech community needs to discover Co-ops. That we haven't already I
blame in part on our aversion to hobbies, which is where most of my exposure
comes from.

------
henrik_w
I've been using wordpress.com for my blog since 2011, plus paying for my own
domain. Nothing fancy, and has worked very well. Good value for, I think, 26
dollars a year.

[https://henrikwarne.com/](https://henrikwarne.com/)

------
Traster
>The problem — at least from my perspective — is that flexibility is
optionality. If one day down the road you want your site to be something other
than a blog, but you are using Ghost, you need to go through the same sort of
transition process I described above.

This may actually be a Good Thing. Honestly, I can't think of many things you
want to start doing where you want to adapt your existing blog. When you start
on something new, create a new sub-domain or buy a new domain, install new
software and go from there. I'd much rather focus on doing what you're doing
now well rather than make a trade for speculative optionality.

------
AnonC
Someone I respect once told me that Ghost is written for its developer’s needs
and to promote the hosted platform, and not intended to be an easy to manage
self hosted solution. I don’t know how far that’s true, but WordPress seems to
be ahead on mindshare (and likely features and plugins too). For better or
worse, PHP/LAMP hosts with control panels are aplenty.

Writing on any platform regularly is not easy for everyone. So it’s less of a
platform issue than some people perceive it to be. For most people, a “free”
wordpress.com or blogger.com (or gasp, medium.com if you really hate your
readers) is good enough to start.

~~~
sixhobbits
I've set up self-hosted WordPress and Ghost. I personally found Ghost's "5
minute set up" to be pretty close to the mark (in contrast to all other
software that advertises a 5 min set up and takes me half a day of messing
around with config + Google + documentation - maybe I'm just slow)

------
karanke
Choosing a blogging host isn't the main obstacle for most people; it is
writing consistent, high-quality articles.

Focusing on writing well and building an audience is the most important thing
while starting out.

n.b.: I've been writing at
[https://reframing.substack.com/](https://reframing.substack.com/) for the
past 5 weeks.

------
rdtwo
I don’t think he addresses the real problem of where to blog of where and how
to blog so that readers actually find you.

Generating a Wordpress blog is easy compared to figuring out how to actually
get it discoverable. I think that’s what a lot of these blog service providers
are missing is some sort of way to find content being generated on their
hosting platform.

------
rdtwo
Doesn’t google automatically downrank Wordpress sites in the search algorithm?
If so why is WP still being recommended?

~~~
rchaud
Now this is a search algo myth I've never heard of (and there are many out
there). Some of the biggest websites in the world have a WP backbone. Why on
earth would Google care what blog framework the site was built on? As long as
it's not known spam domain and the site generates machine-readable HTML,
Google will index it and rank it if it gets a good number of clicks for search
terms.

Did you mean WP-hosted sites (with the domain xyz.wordpress.com) instead of
self-hosted Wordpress?

~~~
rdtwo
Maybe I confused Wordpress hosted sites with wP backbone sites. Is there a
negative value to wP hosted sites or really any other managed Wordpress
deployments?

------
z3t4
Note that from a SEO and discovery standpoint you bring link power and
authority to the domain you blog on. So if you use a platform and not your own
domain, then the platform gets all the link juice. Platforms are only good for
spammers as they can piggyback on others authority.

------
resume384
If anyone is interested in full stack self hosting, I recently started a cloud
from scratch resource here.

[https://github.com/technomada/cloud-from-
scratch](https://github.com/technomada/cloud-from-scratch)

------
NN88
I really wish a longform document/essay/dissertation was done on how impactful
the loss of Google Reader but the thriving of Twitter and Facebook ruined the
internet and allowed clickbait and shortform incendiary content to thrive.

~~~
criddell
Why not go back further and talk Eternal September? Or maybe about the first
green card spam on Usenet?

The profit incentive is far more powerful force in shaping the internet into
what it is today than any single product demise.

~~~
Spooky23
All of those were key events. The death of Google Reader is and remains
important milestone for the destruction of the previous iteration of the web
and transition to the Facebook/Twitter/YouTube universe of today.

Profit is powerful but control is far more so. Frankly, Google fucked up and
bit the hand that fed it. That strategy has been financially successful, but
did so at the expense of hyper-stimulating Facebook and Twitter. I'd go as far
to say that if Google invested in what Reader had represented, a marginal
business like Twitter would have vanished or been absorbed long ago.

~~~
criddell
According to Google, Reader usage was in decline for a while before the closed
Reader. During that time, Twitter was exploding.

Reader was a niche product albeit an important niche with lots of important
users.

------
z3t4
Don't serve your posts from someones database. You can still use a CMS, but
make sure the content is rendered statically. Static web sites are 100x
faster, more secure, and cheaper to host.

------
SkyLinx
This thread would be a good opportunity to promote the app/CMS/service I'm
working on as another option. I wish I could share already

------
petulla
Is there an easy out of the box rendering solution for blogging that can be
hosted on gh pages, where the posts are md files?

------
earthboundkid
Self-hosting WordPress is a really bad choice in fact. Every self-hosted
WordPress blog I follow in my RSS reader eventually becomes a content farm.
The only way to not become a content farm is to use commercial hosting
(WordPress VIP, WPEngine), but at that point, why are you using WordPress
instead of Square or whatever?

If you're a developer, just build a static site. If you're not a developer,
you're going to have to pay.

~~~
rbritton
What do you mean by content farm?

I'd argue the opposite about using managed hosting -- a self-hosted WordPress
site is more likely to outlast one on managed WordPress hosting for the sole
reason of cost. Managed hosting is significantly more expensive, and
justifying that ongoing cost may cause the owner of the site to discontinue it
sooner than they would otherwise.

~~~
mynegation
Content farm means that someone takes over the Wordpress installation via a
vulnerability that the owner of the installation did not patch. Then they put
their own material to extract the google juice for their links until Google
catches up and penalizes the domain.

~~~
rbritton
Got it. I was leaning that way with my interpretation but wasn't completely
positive.

The biggest risk in all of the WordPress ecosystem are third-party plugins.
Minimizing the use of those and installing something like Wordfence (free or
paid) would go a long way towards mitigating that risk. It wouldn't be non-
zero, but it'd be acceptably low.

------
nojito
Substack is a great evolution of “blogging”

People can just focus on writing.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
Substack, AFAIK, doesn't let you own your own domain. This is arguably less of
a concern with an email newsletter than a blog, but I confess it'd be enough
to make me point back to Ghost, which added full email newsletter management
-- complete with Stripe integration, if one wishes to charge -- in v3.

(Also, I confess a bit of hesitance with any platform whose TOS restricts
content for any reason other than legality, which IIRC Substack's TOS does. If
I started a fiction newsletter and wanted, with appropriate communication to
my audience, to send out a piece that contained graphic sex, I don't _really_
want my hosting provider to tell me that's not allowable. It's surprising how
hard it is to find places that close off that possibility: as it turns out,
the vast majority of the commercial internet is not, in fact, for porn.)

~~~
indigodaddy
Looks like you can, for example,
[https://www.exponentialview.co/](https://www.exponentialview.co/)

