

Posterous: A reminder of why you should own your online presence - dendory
http://dendory.net/blog.php?id=511ecb55

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ebiester
Sure... but I want to spend less than 15 minutes a month administering said
online presence.

That means not looking to see if there's a 0 day exploit.

That means not even thinking about upgrades.

That means not having to be the one to figure stuff out after an upgrade goes
wrong.

That means someone else worrying about if it's being overloaded. (The DDOS of
love...)

That means being able to quickly send off an email (a la posterous) or similar
to post. Markdown is preferable.

That means, unlike static generators, I don't have to think about re-deploying
when I do anything.

I have too much to do with programming and administrations for pay -- a blog
is not where I want to have to think after hours. Administration isn't fun
anymore. I want to own my service, but I don't want to have to babysit it.

I don't even mind paying for the privilege, though the amount needed to
justify it might be more than I'm willing to pay.

What is everyone else doing that fits the above? This seems like dumb
duplicated effort.

~~~
jackowayed
This is why I use GitHub pages. Jekyll is good enough, and with GH pages it's
super simple. If GitHub were to ever do something weird with it, I can get any
static hosting and do the jekyll stuff myself and still control it.

And a static site is much simpler than, say, a Rails-based site (the other
thing I was considering when setting it up). Any hosting will do, and I only
have to worry about exploits in the web server, not the framework.

~~~
ebiester
That's the route I think of going, but I still don't think that's controlling
your presence on the web -- you're losing all your google juice if you ever
have to move.

What's the difference between that and any other system that allows you to
export your data?

~~~
pyre
You can use your own domain with GitHub Pages, then you don't lose any 'Google
juice' if you move to another hosting provider.

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networked
>Own your domain name. If you want to post content, anything more substantial
than cat pictures, things you may want to come back to in the future, you
should own your domain name. It's cheap and ensures that your links won't have
to change even if you need to move to a new platform.

I have been meaning to get a set of personal (as opposed to project-centered)
domains for a while for exactly those reasons. Should I get the .me and the
.name along with the .com? What best practices would HN recommend?

~~~
mattmanser
Buy just one. Any more and all you're paying for is the utter retardedness
behind TLDs and domain name system. What are you going to do with the .me and
.name? Just redirect them? If someone else comes along and you've not built
the domain authority you'll still lose out if they build a better online rep
than you, it really doesn't matter if they get the .name or the .org or the
.eu or the .xxx or the .arenttldsgreatandnotatotallystupididea.

Preferably not from a really dodgy country.

~~~
nwh
I'd avoid .xxx, some web filters seem to block that indiscriminately.

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codva
The number of small businesses that have abandoned their web sites and are
relying on Facebook as their web presence is frightening.

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danielsiders
I already mentioned this on another thread today
(<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229643>), but this is what we're
trying to solve with Tent (<https://tent.io>).

~~~
legutierr
This is very interesting. Can I ask some questions? How is what you are doing
different than diaspora? Is it interoperable with it? And what kind of
traction have you gotten?

~~~
danielsiders
Tent is just a protocol that can be used for all sorts of applications. It's
easy to make microblogging or traditional social networking apps (think
Twitter and Facebook or Diaspora _) on top of Tent, but apps like Dropbox,
Evernote, Tumblr, Loopt, etc are also possible.

Diaspora_ is an app with a great UI and its own (unfinished) protocol. We've
been working with the Diaspora* team ([http://wiki.diaspora-
project.org/wiki/Diaspora,_Powered_by_T...](http://wiki.diaspora-
project.org/wiki/Diaspora,_Powered_by_Tent)) to create a port of the Diaspora*
UI to Tent (basically take the Diaspora* front end and a standard Tent app
back end). That would let the Diaspora* community continue to use the app they
love, but take advantage of the other capabilities of Tent and apps in the
Tent ecosystem. It's easy to import the old posts from Diaspora as well. The
only problem is that the Diaspora* community is currently based on a pod
infrastructure (dozens of medium community-run servers (100s-1000s of
users/server). Tent assumes that users will either run their own server or use
a hosting provider (think wordpress). So far, the only Tent server
implementations capable of hosting thousands of users are closed source and
belong to the hosting companies. Eventually that may change, but it means
there's no drop-in replacement for Diaspora* pod admins. Users would need to
either set up their own Tent server (really easy to push to Heroku
<https://github.com/tent/tentd-admin>) or use a hosting provider. There aren't
any UX or technical complications, the D* community is just used to community
run pods. As it stands now they'd need to write a multi-tennant Tent server
implementation themselves. Additionally, the idea of part time admins and a
giant shared server might work for apps like Diaspora (or even some Wordpress
installations), but Tent is intended for highly sensitive personal data as
well. I'm not sure that part time administrators should be responsible
(technically or legally) for sensitive data (imagine storing your medical and
financial records, persistent location data, file backups, etc on a server
with a single part-time admin).

Right now there are a few dozen Tent apps of various types and a handful of
server implementations. Some of the reference apps and servers as well as the
protocol validator (in development) are available at
<https://github.com/tent/>. The first Tent host currently has about 19,000
registered users. A dozen or so users are hosting their own Tent servers
(similar to running your own Wordpress) and three other Tent hosts are
preparing to launch. There's a lot of big announcements coming in the next few
months that should cause an increase in those numbers.

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jamescun
The problem isn't necessarily with services providing Open APIs/Data Exports,
it's with people themselves and the trust they ensure to the services they use
regularly. Pretty much all of this advice most of us should know: along with
regular backups and different passwords/password manager for different sites;
and I am willing to bet a large proportion of people will know this advice,
advise it to others, but not follow it themselves. That is until its too late.

Even when following said advice it is not fool proof. So you own your own
domain name. But do you really own it? Not really, you are essentially leasing
it from a registrar who probably have terms and conditions for seizure of that
domain name for whatever reason.

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Amarandei
This is why you shouldn't use GeoCities or MySpace. </sarcasm> Just because a
single website is shutting down doesn't mean you should spend extra time
installing stuff on your own. I disagree with the article.

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aaronpk
Also see:

<http://indiewebcamp.com/why>

<http://indiewebcamp.com/POSSE>

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shuri
I agree with the sentiment. I just wanted to point out that you could own your
own domain and point it at posterous. Not perfect, but still.

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drivebyacct2
File this in the category of: making backups, not using GoDaddy and using a
password manager. It's easy, everyone knows it, but yet most people don't take
the tiny up front effort to do it right.

Just last week, another GoDaddy rant. How quickly are these startups closing?
How many startups' products do you use that have no business model other than
"attract users and content and figure it out later". Enjoy when the next one
that you're "actually using" succumbs to the same fate!

