
Blogless – An articles-only publishing system for web writers - Tomte
http://blogless.datenbrei.de
======
derefr
Huh; from the title, I assumed this was going to be a service that acted like
a blog editor (with accounts, draft posts, rich-text WYSIWYG editing, etc.),
but where there was no index for the resulting posts by author, instead just
giving you "floating" pages accessible only by their URL, like Gists/Pastebins
are (but nicely formatted, like regular blog-posts are.)

I've always wanted such a thing; it'd be perfect to combine with a
microblogging site like Twitter or Tumblr, where instead of posting long
things to the microblogging site, you post links to your "floating" essays
amongst your short posts. Your microblog would then be the canonical
"blog"—the canonical index of these articles—rather than people assuming they
could subscribe to your presence at whatever article editing+hosting service
you chose to use (which might, after all, change with each article.)

Too bad this isn't that.

~~~
tyingq
It sounds like you want a CMS service (content management system) that's not
tied to a blog like taxonomy. If you can't find one, there are tools made to
build that sort of thing.

You might try one of these:

[https://modx.com/](https://modx.com/)
[https://github.com/modxcms](https://github.com/modxcms)

[http://www.razorcms.co.uk/](http://www.razorcms.co.uk/)
[https://github.com/smiffy6969/razorCMS](https://github.com/smiffy6969/razorCMS)

[http://picocms.org/](http://picocms.org/)
[https://github.com/picocms/Pico](https://github.com/picocms/Pico)

All three happen to be PHP based, not sure why most of the CMS solutions lean
towards it. If that doesn't work for you, search terms like "simple", "cms",
"your preferred language" might help yield answers that are a good fit.

~~~
derefr
You're sort of right, insofar as a CMS doesn't enforce a blog's reverse-
chronological sorting... but that's not quite what I meant; a CMS is still
fundamentally about having a collection of things by the same editorial staff
put together—e.g. on the same domain.

What I was picturing is to throw out the level where you could infer "same
editorial staff", so instead you just get the shared hosting service
([http://example.com/](http://example.com/)) and then directly under that,
articles ([http://example.com/foo](http://example.com/foo)). Like a pastebin:
there's no source attribution to a given post, even implicitly.

The lack of internal attribution is important, because any internal
attribution mechanism—e.g. mentioning the author in a <meta> tag, or putting
their name in the URL—can be used to _build_ an index of posts by author (just
googling "site:[http://example.com/author"](http://example.com/author") gets
you half-way there), which people might then treat as canonical instead of
relying on the microblog.

So, I'm not against self-hosting a CMS, but my requirement that articles have
no _article-internal_ attribution—not even implicitly based on where they're
hosted—means that self-hosting is kind of moot, unless I know a bunch of other
people I can invite to also post on my self-hosted CMS until it turns into its
own pastebin.

(Also, I have other, more fanciful requirements, like the ability of articles
to effectively have their own embedded code and databases, turning them into
their own little one-page web-app, like NYT's fancier long-form data-science
articles are. CMSes don't really go there; they expect code you want to use
_in_ an article to be added to _the site_ as a plugin, rather than being
treated as part of an article and thus isolated+not-run when on any other
article, deleted when the article is deleted, etc. The only thing that could
pull this off right now is hosting each article as its own Heroku app; and
even then it's not a perfect fit. You could theoretically write a blogging
engine that _posted_ articles by creating Heroku apps, though... hmmmm, now
_there 's_ an idea.)

~~~
tyingq
Believe or not, I did get that.

That's why it says

"If you can't find one, there are tools made to build that sort of thing"

Meaning, perhaps if you couldn't find a trustworthy 3rd party that would host
it, it might be worth $5 a month to host it yourself, and make it available to
others.

Edit: On your other points: There's nothing stopping you from buying a generic
sounding domain like "pastethings.io". Not sure why that doesn't separate it
far enough.

As for "code in a post", not sure what you mean. Javascript that runs in the
browser? Formatted source code for viewing? Server side code that actually
runs, but embedded in a post?

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patleeman
Interesting. So it's like Wordpress in that it's easy to install and has a web
interface except it generates a static site instead of using a DB. I can see
the appeal in that.

~~~
baus
Sounds a lot like the original Blogger.

~~~
icebraining
And how Movable Type still works.

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bachmeier
I'm sure there's a special feature that makes this valuable to some, but how
is it different from creating your own static pages (using Pandoc or a similar
system) and uploading them to a web server?

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qznc
Looks like it is directly inspired [0] by Feathers [1]

[0]
[http://w5x.de/index.php?page=Feathers+%E2%80%94+Schreiben%2C...](http://w5x.de/index.php?page=Feathers+%E2%80%94+Schreiben%2C+federleicht)
[1] [http://feathe.rs/](http://feathe.rs/)

~~~
jccalhoun
Then mention feathers in their "more" section
[http://blogless.datenbrei.de/more-about-
blogless/](http://blogless.datenbrei.de/more-about-blogless/) "Is it some kind
of Medium.com, Known or feathe.rs? Yes, in some way, but single-user and
without commercial interest."

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pmlnr
So we're back to the WYSIWYG HTML editors + FTP era, now with better tools?

~~~
soft_dev_person
I guess we got tired of WordPress.

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amelius
I don't know where online publishing is heading, but personally I like blogs
which are as simple as possible, formatting-wise.

For example:
[http://paulgraham.com/talk.html](http://paulgraham.com/talk.html)

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hilti
I'll give it a try and thanks for making something simple. The web should get
back to simple things. It's too bloated currently.

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garduque
Beeing. Twice.

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ben_jones
Definition of blog: "a regularly updated website or web page, typically one
run by an individual or small group, that is written in an informal or
conversational style."

This is a static site generator written in PHP meant to allow authors to
upload content-filled pages. You can call a dog a sheep but it's still a dog.
Not demeaning the project just the "we're not a blog" copy.

~~~
dang
Ok, we replaced "without a blog" and tried to use representative language from
the article. If someone suggests a better (more accurate and neutral) title,
we can change it again.

