
Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead? - robertnealan
http://robertnealan.com/is-self-hosted-blogging-dead/
======
verusfossa
The intimidating thing for me was always how heavy blogging software was.
Never really liked the idea of centralized hosting, but hosting some huge PHP
blob with a database never felt like it was worth it. I'm hosting my own site
now running Hugo and I love it. I agree that most people have moved to
centralized hosting, but I'm seeing a resurgence of self-hosting with static
site generators like jekyll, middleman or hugo. Things like static search[1]
and static comments[2] are possible with some thought. Really neat and
lightweight and with gitolite, I can keep my git repo containing the blog code
on the server too, setup commit hook to rebuild the site and I'm maintenence
free. I have some npm postcss scripts that build my scss, autoprefix it, etc
and dump it into the assets for hugo to build from all in one go.

A lot of this is unncessary, I could just be using css. I like that there's
not all this asset-flow magic built out, just simple npm with bash cli. Unix
philosophy and very little heavy lifting. I think there's still hope.

Now if we can just teach casual users git...

[0][https://gohugo.io/](https://gohugo.io/)
[1][http://www.blevesearch.com/news/Site-
Search/](http://www.blevesearch.com/news/Site-Search/)
[2][https://tlvince.com/static-commenting](https://tlvince.com/static-
commenting)

~~~
_yosefk
I use WordPress, a huge PHP blob with a database, for my self-hosted blog. I
somewhat agree with the parent and sister comments in that, as a programmer,
the way these things work irks me out.

However, I don't agree with the apparently widespread conclusion that it
follows, from this sentiment, that not publishing is better than publishing
using a less-than-lovely platform. I also don't agree with the widespread
corollary, "build your own blog", when as a result you get less features than
the irksome WP would give you (a common omission is support for comments - I
got some amazing comments over the years, if you think it's not worth having
this feature, I think I see where you're coming from, and I think you should
reconsider.)

I treat blogging software as I treat any other - I dislike most programs that
I run, but I often still choose to run them because the result is worth it. I
can't see how "it's not worth" to run PHP+DB in order to be able to publish
your thoughts. This is not to say that, given today's alternatives, WP or
similar should be chosen over those alternatives, just that not using _any_ of
the available options because they're all too irksome feels over the top.

~~~
lmm
I use github pages for my blog, disqus for comments. Pages is just a
convenient place to host - I have my entries in a git repo, the pages are
statically generated with Jekyll, I'm sure I could run it myself if github
started doing anything onerous. For comments it's just become too hard to
self-host anything given how much spam there is, so I've given in and use
disqus in the same way that I've stopped self-hosting email and use gmail.

~~~
_yosefk
It's pretty easy to hack a comment form so that there's no real heavyweight
craptcha but on the other hand a bot will not know to fill it unless your site
is specifically targeted. Security by obscurity. Works like a charm for me.

~~~
roghummal
Have you ever had to change your form because a spammer added an exception for
you?

------
burningion
It's amazing that the web, which was really originally built primarily as a
distributed publishing platform, has gotten so damn complicated to publish to.

Right now I've got my own self hosted platform, running Wordpress on a Digital
Ocean droplet. The constant security updates for Wordpress are a nightmare,
and it seems I have to hack both my theme and my post code every time I want
to make a slightly interactive post. Never mind that there doesn't seem to be
a decent way to preview posts on mobile.

As others have mentioned, it seems the best way to get more people in control
of their own platforms would be with easier static tools.

On that note, I've been really impressed with org-mode and pandoc. I've been
writing and generating code within a text based environment lately, but it
still feels as though the process hasn't really budged or improved much at all
in the past 15 years. With org-mode and pandoc, along with babel, I can write
and test code, embed images, and generate decent html/pdf all in one go.

But for the casual user, I think it's become more difficult to self publish
over the years, not less. The tools we've built have gotten pretty
embarrassing if our goal is to get as diverse of a population as possible
speaking and sharing their ideas openly on the web.

Cheers to everyone still working on tools like org-mode, pandoc, and latex.
It's still relevant, and it still does a great job. If you haven't checked
them out, take a look. I was certainly surprised by how far these projects
have been taken.

~~~
cfcef
What is complicated about it? I'm not sure what you have in mind - there was
never any Edenic period where you could run dynamic web blogs for free on your
own server without any configuration or investment of time and dedication. All
the old tools still exist, but better and polished by time.

Let's compare modern blogging to how you would have blogged in 1996, or when
Berners-Lee launched the first documents at CERN, your workflow looked like
'write .html file, FTP to server, Apache serves static files to anyone who
visits'. In 2016, your workflow, _if you want to_ , looks like... 'write .html
file, SCP to server, nginx serves static files to anyone who visits'. You can
still write HTML5 by hand, it's not harder than original HTML (may be easier).
You can write Markdown which compiles to HTML with no more fuss than
'markdown.pl foo.md foo.html' or 'pandoc foo.md -o foo.html'.

You don't want to run a server? That's fine, find a host like S3 and instead
of 'scp', 's3cmd'. It'll cost you next to nothing compared to back then.

You want some sort of blog software? There must be a million which are not
named 'Wordpress' and do not have endless security nightmares. You want static
site generators? Likewise, millions. WSIYWG HTML editors? Likewise. Free
hosting? At this point almost any large site offers blog-like functionality
because hosting is so cheap.

But what is _harder_? If you want to run your own server, everything is
infinitely easy than in 1996. Apt-get may or may not have existed in 1996, but
I'm sure it was far less comprehensive and reliable than it is now. You can
let your server run for many years without upgrading if you want, and when you
do upgrade, it's a few commands. Why, you don't even need to compile a kernel
or buy a server edition of your OS. It has never been easier nor cheaper to
run your own website in a myriad of different methods. So what exactly has
gotten 'so damn complicated'?

The reality is that most people, and especially casuals, do not care that much
about high-quality publishing or control or reliability, and instead care more
about extreme convenience and network effects, and often either have nothing
to say or don't want to say it and so no matter how polished your static site
generator is, they couldn't care less. As Yogi Berra said, "if people don't
want to go to the ballpark, how are you going stop'em?"

~~~
burningion
> there was never any Edenic period

Agreed.

I'm not suggesting there ever was and Edenic period where things were easy,
but I do think an argument could be made that things have gotten worse for the
non-technical beginner looking to host their own site.

First, they've got to make a decision of which publishing platform to install
on their site. They'll probably see some online debates, talking about static
site generators vs Wordpress, etc. They'll waste a few hours trying to figure
out what choice to make. Once that decision is made, it's next time to find
and install a better looking theme, because no platform seems capable of
looking decent enough out of the box.

Compare this to handwriting and uploading html files, and it seems like we've
gone backwards.

> the reality is that most people... do not care about high quality publishing
> or readability

I'd argue the opposite. Empires of platforms have been built around being high
quality and easily readable. Look at medium, and look at instagram. A slightly
better publishing experience dominates.

And to further that note, how would you self host a photo site for mobile? Is
that even possible? How would you begin?

What if you wanted to make a self hosted snapchat type site for your friends
to see your photos?

I've made a few unfair points, but I think the general idea remains, the self
publishing tools haven't kept up with the rest of technology, in general.

~~~
cfcef
> Compare this to handwriting and uploading html files, and it seems like
> we've gone backwards.

But this isn't apple and oranges; a blog with themes and whatnot is much more
sophisticated than the HTML CSS rendering defaults. IMO, a HTML page without
any CSS is not that bad looking and you don't really need it. Heck, even a
text file written with a little bit of care is perfectly readable.)

And the information overload isn't much of a problem: most people know
immediately that static site generators aren't for them.

> Look at medium, and look at instagram. A slightly better publishing
> experience dominates.

Look at all the blogs using Wordpress, and everything written on Twitter and
Facebook.

> And to further that note, how would you self host a photo site for mobile?
> Is that even possible? How would you begin?

I am not entirely sure what a 'photo site for mobile' is, but I am sure that
it has no equivalents from before 2006 or so which you could claim it is
harder or more complicated than, and I suspect that you could get 95% of the
value from a static HTML page sitting on S3 containing a bunch of <img> tags
and a 'viewport' <meta> tag that you copy-pasted from a StackOverflow post you
found by googling 'how to make a mobile html page'.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> IMO, a HTML page without any CSS is not that bad looking

There's one exception to this: an HTML page without styling has line width
equal to the browser window. Narrow text columns are a dramatic increase in
readability.

(And I don't even maximize my browser window... a shocking number of people
do, despite the fact that they're using ultra-wide 16:9 screens.)

------
scandox
My problem with Medium is that it lends this amazing aura of credibility to
everything that is published on it. I think they've hit on the design
equivalent of the brown note (of South Park fame) which makes readers mentally
incontinent vis-a-vis the credibility of the source of the actual text...

Or maybe it's just me?

~~~
lmm
I think they've just managed a good design - mostly by resisting the
temptation to show off as so many designers do. It's very minimal - if
anything it looks similar to the hand-written no-styles websites that
academics often write (that look like
[http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/) )

~~~
PuffinBlue
Actually more like
[http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/)

:-)

~~~
pdm55
Simplicity! I'm in love. Thanks.

Actually, your simple design is not the only one to make my day. I have
finally found a guy who puts all the HTML5 etc. on the one page. He's a
physics lecturer. He has dead easy html files that illustrate Newton's Cannon,
using canvas and javascript. Finally, I am "getting" it. See
[http://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/html5/](http://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/html5/).
(And the bonus was to see that, with uniform circular motion, the acceleration
is towards the centre of rotation. I mean I really need things explained
simply without any extras getting in the way.) Of course, I had to play with
it to understand it. But the beauty was that, with the source code all there
on the one page, I could easily make changes and see the effect immediately.
Thanks Dan Schroeder.

PS I need to remind myself that posting pdf files is another straightforward
way to get information online.

~~~
PuffinBlue
Oh this isn't my design, though I do like it!

The guy who made it is:
[https://twitter.com/drew_mc](https://twitter.com/drew_mc)

------
lkrubner
I am curious when this short-lived moment was suppose to be?

From the article:

"There was a promising short lived moment where smaller, topic-oriented blog
networks like Svbtle (amongst others) started appearing, but even those seem
to have gone by the wayside and are increasingly being replaced by Medium."

Back in 2002 I co-founded a blogging company. At that time we were competing
with the likes of Blogger.com and Typepad.com. There were many other
companies, at that time, which I've since forgotten. At one point, around 2003
or 2004, we created a list of all our competitors, and there were at least 100
names on the list.

My point is, the vast bulk of all blogging has always been on 3rd party hosted
blogging sites. Self-hosted blogging has always been rare. I self-host my
blog, smashcompany.com, on a server at Rackspace, but this has always been a
rare option.

All the same, I am intrigued by the question. If anyone has historical data on
this, it would be fascinating to know when self-hosted blogs hit their peak.
If Technorati.com has survived in its original form, then it would be in
possession of this historical data, but sadly, the original Technorati.com is
dead.

~~~
robertnealan
I was referring less to general blogging companies like Typepad/Blogger - IMO
those are pretty similar to Medium in functionality but minus the community
aspect (blogs only linked to one-another by intentional choice, versus Medium
where everything is aggregated and quasi-curated by the application).

When Svbtle first came out it seemed to cater to almost purely tech audiences
and allowed new authors on a limited basis - this might have been coincidence
due to the creator's roots or connections, but it created a sense of community
and credibility within that social sphere (similar to Hacker News in the tech
world). Unfortunately, since they've opened signups to everyone it seems like
its lost that sense of community and become just-another-blogging-platform.

Also would be extremely curious as to the stats on historical blogging data.

~~~
dasil003
I seem to recall that Medium was initially invite only as well?

------
squeakynick
I'm embarrassed to say that I still hand write my blog directly in HTML using
Notepad++ and manually FTP changes to the hosting company. Most of my blog is
static HMTL, with a smidgen of script for analytics or occasional interaction.
Every now and then I'll use some light PHP (typically when I need interaction
with a database on the server).

~~~
akerro
I'm going to do the same. I modified a wordpress theme to fit better my needs,
after an update all my changes were gone (I had a backup ofc), but it's
irritating that I have to patch my theme after every update. I'm going to
create a few scripts that will host my blog on gitlab and post it
automatically on my server. Static pages are the future.

~~~
moepstar
This is most probably because you've done it wrong ;)

WordPress has a concept called "child [1] which shouldn't result in behavior
like that.

[1]
[https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes](https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes)

~~~
akerro
Thing is, I never wrote any php code and I have no idea about CSS. My
modification included only removing existing code which I didn't like.

------
evancordell
I've recently settled on a mostly-free self-hosting platform: Jekyll + Github
Pages + Google Domains + Kloudsec.

Jekyll and Github Pages keeps the deployment simple and Google Domains has
proven to be simple, cheap, and reliable. I tried Kloudsec out last week on a
whim after seeing it on HN, and so far it's great - simple, free SSL with
let's encrypt.

[https://evancordell.com](https://evancordell.com) if interested. It needs a
little more love before I'd really say I'm pleased with it, but I'm very happy
with how cheap and easy it was to set up a personal blog with SSL.

~~~
terminalcommand
I wish I had chosen github pages as my hosting platform too. Instead I bought
a shared hosting on cyber Monday. I'm using middleman.

Coding the stylesheet for the blog and getting the whole site working was
certainly fun but writing handcoded markdown and publishing via the shell
surely requires some getting used to.

My advice: use github pages for your blog to avoid the guilt of paying for
hosting services that you don't need.
[http://unixheaven.com](http://unixheaven.com) if anyone's interested.

------
blakesterz
I've been running a small hosting company since 2002. Started hosting just my
blog, then friends, then their friends and so on. I used to have about 300
blogs total, now I'm down to about 250, and it's slowly dropping every month.
A few of those people moved to other hosting, and kept the blogs, but really
most of them just said "I'm giving up, no time to blog when I'm busy on
Twitter and Facebook"

I think many people feel like they get out what they needed to get out on
Twitter/Facebook. They used to write on their own blogs to get things out, now
it's elsewhere.

------
27182818284
I self-host using a static site generator. I've found it to be very nice in
the sense that it just takes pennies for the site to run.

I think a lot of folks are still running WordPress of some kind on their own
Dreamhost, etc, accounts which feels like self-hosting to me.

~~~
minimaxir
Static site generators are not a good answer for non-engineers, especially if
customizations are necessary.

I had self-hosted WordPress on Dreamhost until I got kicked off due to a viral
post and my site deleted. Recovering my posts and learning how to use
Jekyll/GitHub Pages in less than 24 hours was fun.

~~~
sleepyhead
"Static site generators are not a good answer for non-engineers, especially if
customizations are necessary."

Could be. Content and templates could be hosted on S3. Unfortunately I haven't
found a good admin GUI for a static site generator yet. I use Jekyll myself
and as a developer that's great, not something I would recommend to normal
users though. Which is a shame because most users (or small businesses) don't
really have such complex requirements. Most don't really need their site to be
dynamic, and what requires some server functionality can be solved with an
external service (save data, send email etc).

~~~
tedkimble
I recently launched Static Website Manager
([https://www.staticwebsitemanager.com](https://www.staticwebsitemanager.com))
which aims bring static sites to a non-technical market. Would love to chat
more if you have questions.

~~~
asteadman
Looks cool, but at first glance (screenshots) it appears to lean heavily on a
"git"-like model with branching and merging and rebasing. These are not
concepts that I would expect a so-called "non-technical" market to understand
or embrace. Something much simpler may be required for such people.

------
davnicwil
I own a self-hosted blog and am actually in the process of deciding whether to
transfer over to medium. To be honest I'm pretty much decided that I will,
because it's just easier, not to mention I can save myself some hosting fees.

The key questions of the debate on the cons side of switching, assuming you're
blogging for fun and not thinking particularly about advertising or massively
customised SEO strategies, seem to be:

1\. do I own my content 2\. will my content be accessible forever

As this post highlights, the answer to (1) on medium is YES. So, no problems.

The answer to (2) is also, for all practical purposes, YES, but you shouldn't
depend on it.

But is this really such an issue anyway? I certainly assume that the vast
majority back up their photographs, just by nature, and how difficult is it to
back up the plaintext of your blog pieces too? If you have backups, and the
answer to (1) is yes, then really, it starts to look like an easy decision.

~~~
j45
What would you have in place in case Medium went away or lost the data
compared to what you already have?

~~~
davnicwil
If Medium does go away, I suppose I'd take the backups and just go through and
repost everything on another platform, or simply set up my self-hosted blog
again.

Yes, that would be immensely annoying, but it's not really that terrible of a
downside in a calculated risk offset against how much easier (and, again,
free-er!) medium is to use, and to maintain.

~~~
j45
I think Medium is nice too and will be doing some writing there.

I think I'm looking at things over the span of 2 decades of keeping one's
presence and information online whether self-hosted or with a service, both of
which come and go.

------
forrestthewoods
I used Ghost for over a year. I was relatively happy with it.

I recently switched to Medium and couldn't be happier. With Ghost I was
spending more time tweaking and maintaining purchased themes than I spent
writing.

It's really really really fucking hard to run a blog that works well on
desktop/tablet/phone and doesn't crash if you get a traffic spike. How many
self hosted blogs can handle 500,000 hits in less than a day? Not many.

Medium will probably die someday. That's fine. I own my content and my content
URLs. I'll simply port it to a new platform. It wouldn't be the first time.

[http://blog.forrestthewoods.com/](http://blog.forrestthewoods.com/)
[https://gamedevdaily.io/](https://gamedevdaily.io/)

~~~
Andrex
Those Smash articles were a welcome surprise! Follow'd. :)

I love "owning" my content on my server (since '09) but in the past year I've
been thinking of going back to a "serviced" solution. My initial thought was
WordPress.com since I run WP, but it's $99 a year! It decreases the hassle of
upgrading versions constantly, but still, that's a dealbreaker.

What's attractive about Medium is the same thing that attracted me to
Facebook: all profiles/posts use the same theme, and that theme is pretty
good. In addition, following people to get their content in your feed feels
great.

However, I'm not sure if I'm completely ready to give up control yet. Will
probably continue to check into Medium + custom URLs for the next year.

The decision would be much easier if my posts were written for a large
audience, but they're mostly just self-involved journal entries I doubt people
want to go back and read. :) Right now I just publish short fiction to Medium,
which is what I want people to share, like, etc.

------
ThomPete
No of course it's not dead. Just like the desktop isn't dead just because
mobile is exploding.

------
K0nserv
I don't think that it's dead and self publishing I'd argue is easier and
cheaper than ever. My blog has all the power of s3 for scaling with free SSL
from Cloudflare and I pay peanuts for it. Current bill is $0.03 some months it
gets closer to $1.

I've written about it here
[https://hugotunius.se/aws/cloudflare/web/2016/01/10/the-
one-...](https://hugotunius.se/aws/cloudflare/web/2016/01/10/the-one-cent-
blog.html)

~~~
pjc50
This is going to sound like a stupid question, but how does one use Jekyll on
Windows? I've also never been quite clear whether the github Jekyll is
supposed to be run locally before push or is run automatically on their side.

(also, what is S3 adding in your case? As far as I'm aware github.io sites are
free, while AWS billing is not a hard limit and you're still liable for
potentially huge charges if someone decides to DDOS you while you're away from
a computer)

~~~
K0nserv
Jekyll should work on Windows because Ruby works on Windows. The reality of it
is that many library developers are very bad at making sure their stuff work
on Windows. [http://rubyinstaller.org/](http://rubyinstaller.org/) might be
something to look into. Another option is to use some other static site
generator instead of Jekyll.

> I've also never been quite clear whether the github Jekyll is supposed to be
> run locally before push or is run automatically on their side.

Depends on the setup. In all setups you are going to want to be able to run
the page locally in a watch mode. `jekyll serve --watch --drafts`. When it
comes to deployment it differs a bit, if you use the approach outlined in my
post the actual building of the page happens on Travis which pushes the
generated site to s3. With Github pages it's all taken care of by Github when
you push.

> also, what is S3 adding in your case? As far as I'm aware github.io sites
> are free, while AWS billing is not a hard limit and you're still liable for
> potentially huge charges if someone decides to DDOS you while you're away
> from a computer

When running Jekyll with Github pages there are limitations to what kind of
plugins and gems you can use. However it's a perfectly valid approach. I have
a billing alert set up at $5 on AWS and to a degree Cloudflare protects me
from DDOS. Honestly though most of my pages are extremely lightweight and s3
is cheap enough that even millions of requests is not going to incur huge
costs. All my static assets are cached by cloudflare as well.

~~~
mediumdave
> Jekyll should work on Windows because Ruby works on Windows.

Jekyll is a bit of a nightmare on Windows at the moment, at least if any
significant part of your workflow is based on cygwin. (I helped a colleague
get it running a couple weeks ago.)

Cygwin ruby + gem install jekyll -> fail.

rbenv to build ruby from source under Cygwin, gem install jekyll -> fail.

The one solution I found that works is using Chocolatey [1] to install ruby
and then gem install jekyll. Even so, I wasn't able to get pygments working
for syntax highlighting, and the Chocolatey Ruby does not play nicely with
cygwin terminal for interactive programs.

[1] [https://chocolatey.org/](https://chocolatey.org/)

------
skybrian
The hard part is not getting a website to serve an HTML page. It's that modern
UI standards for HTML publishing are pretty high. Finding a theme that you
like and most other people will like (let alone writing one yourself) is a
hassle for most people who aren't front-end developers.

You can point to lots of web sites that are hard to read, but that just proves
the point that people are rather finicky about it these days.

~~~
dredmorbius
The main problem with Web design, I'm increasingly convinced, is that Browser
Defaults Suck.

Seriously: if Motherfucking Website, (or Better Motherfucking Website) were
the defaults, we'd be ahead of the game. A few other hacks (use "http { font-
size: medium }" for example, to default to the user's preferred font size) to
further address that.

I'm looking for a browser that defaults to Reader Mode by default. Maybe
including comments.

~~~
carussell
It's fairly straightforward to outline a set of heuristics to use that would
trigger automatic reader mode, if you start by looking at the types of pages
you'd expect it to work on (e.g., motherfuckingwebsite.com, cr.yp.to, etc) and
work backwards. The hard part isn't speccing it out or implementing it, it's
convincing Firefox or Chromium that it's a worthwhile thing to roll into the
browser.

I've been thinking about this exact thing every other day or so since Maciej
Cegłowski's slides[1] for his "Website Obesity Crisis" talk got posted here
last month.

1\.
[http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)

~~~
dredmorbius
Maciej is definitely one of the people whose absolutely dab smack on with his
criticisms. Bloat, tracking, annoyances, poor design. Most are a direct
consequence of advertising-based content support.

I'm thinking of a Reader-Mode browser, period.

Stock stylesheets. Ignore the site's styles. Maybe provide various themes for
the user. Further heuristics to strip other cruft. And a "mercy killing" mode
which simply abandons all native markup and presents a page stripped of
everything, if it's sufficiently bad.

Say the green text on blue background, with every paragraph individually
absolutely positioned, centered justification, H2 headings used for body text,
and Microsoft "smart quotes" throughout. I've seen all this (though perhaps
not _quite_ all on the same page).

------
lips
As a blog consumer, rather than producer, I also have reservations about
Medium-esque sites, but from the opposite perspective.

There's already an infinite quantity of interesting content to read, and it
seems reasonable to expect rising quantities of worthwhile, as I find writing
and creations that I was unaware of when they were being made. With all this
_stuff_ , I want to be able to control where and when I read, and how I
filter, manage, follow, and store all this stuff. At some point, platform
operations reflect a business plan, and that plan may or may not allow for one
or more of my preferences, for reasons of $. I guess I just prefer a
relationship where a standard or pseudo-standard allows the user control, to
select differing vendor options at the very least.

Then again, as I'm barely capable of managing a basic server install, I'm
fully aware of why people throw in with hosted systems. I'm hoping for great
things from stuff like Sandstorm.

~~~
dredmorbius
The failure of the Web ecosystem as _a readily viable_ document _management_
system is a pretty scathing indictment.

As I write this, I'm desparately trying to winnow my way to "tab zero" (by
analog to "inbox zero"). And, at some point, organise the pages I've turned up
as interesting to be filed for later research and assimilation.

I'm using a tablet as my primary browsing device lately (battery life, weight,
portrait aspect for long-form reading, plus keyboard), but this means _hugely_
stripped down browser capabilities. While I've got bookmarks, there's no
tagging or other organisation possible. Even Readability's app (abandonware
for the past 3 years) lacks tags. Calibre and Zotero don't have a full-fledged
Android apps, Mendeley is owned by Elseveir (no fucking _way_ I'm getting
close to that).

And so it goes.

~~~
lips
My mind turns towards a Pinboard archival account with tag searches in browser
bookmarks.

~~~
dredmorbius
That seems to be the standard solution, and speaks to Maciej's results. It
doesn't lessen the indictment any.

------
yumaikas
I host my own blog ([http://junglecoder.com](http://junglecoder.com)) on a VPS
at the moment. But I went rather overboard with it, as I built my own CMS-lite
in go. I was in college, wanted to learn how the web worked at a decently low
level (lower than wordpress or rails).

What I've discovered is that having a VPS opens up a world of opportunities
for network related things. I've used that site to host Ludum Dare entries,
ClickOnce .NET apps, and a Wiki Profile image that I used to see if anyone was
looking at my page on a company wiki. An SSH tunnel has allowed me to bypass
some firewalls that block the majority of ports.... I've learned a lot on that
server. Some of the best $50/year that I spend in terms of hosting stuff.

------
ne01
At sunsed.com we are 100% dedicated to create the best blogging (and in the
near future, a full CMS) platform. We hope to re-energize the world of self-
publishing with a managed solution that lets you import/export to any other
CMS/Blogging platform!

Right now we are working on an IDE inside SunSed so anyone can create their
own template with HTML++ (our own templating/programming language).

Here is a screenshot of of our IDE (I'm working on it right now):

[https://cdn.sunsed.com/0/images/shared-on-web/htmlpp-ide-
pre...](https://cdn.sunsed.com/0/images/shared-on-web/htmlpp-ide-preview.png)

We are going to announce HTML++ and SunSed 2.0 on HN in the next few months.

Happy hacking & blogging!

------
cookiecaper
I think the age of everyone having their own domain running their own code is
starting to expire, just like the age of running your own email server.
There's just too much spam and bad actors out there, you have to prove your
site innocent to the big indexes before you can get anywhere. If you publish
on Medium, Facebook, Blogspot, or another platform that has "rep", people
assume the spam is filtered out by the platform, and they treat your content
less skeptically.

Turns out AOL had the right idea the whole time -- people want platform-
specific keywords and they want to trust the platform's caretakers to decide
what's OK for them to see.

------
joelgrus
I "self-host" using Pelican + S3. It's super cheap (< $1/month) and pretty
easy, the only real downside is that all of the Pelican themes are really
ugly, and I'm not good enough at design to make a better one.

~~~
dexterdog
I'm assuming Pelican is a generator. I don't understand why there aren't
better, simple solutions to do this and just host the site in a bucket on S3.
Most people will fit in the free tier of usage and you stay in complete
control of your domain and content.

------
onion2k
I use and highly recommend hexo.io with it's S3 deployment plugin. It's as
good as Jekyll but easier to modify and theme if you come from a web dev
background as it's written in NodeJS rather than Ruby.

~~~
PuffinBlue
What's the generation speed like with Hexo? I'm using Hugo but I'm not really
enjoying Go templates so I'm curious as to how Hexo performs.

~~~
fenomas
Behind the scenes it's just running the usual packages for templates,
markdown, minification etc., so for a fresh build it's about as fast as any
typical grunt-based setup. But AFAICT it correctly detects when things don't
need to be regenerated, so incremental builds are quite fast no matter what,
unless you're editing templates.

I recently converted my wordpress blog to hexo and blogged about it, if you're
interested:

[http://aphall.com/2016/01/migrating-wordpress-to-
static/](http://aphall.com/2016/01/migrating-wordpress-to-static/)

~~~
PuffinBlue
I like the full width code blocks you have in your design. Your site looks
great, and all the better to know it's static!

~~~
fenomas
Thanks very much! Yeah, there's a kind of peace of mind that comes from
knowing there are no updates pending, SQL server to configure, etc.

The other nice thing about SSGs is emitting modern output (minified, etc).
What comes out of wordpress is a horror show...

------
dberg
honest question, how did Medium become so dominant for all blog posting so
quickly ? The design is no doubt beautiful but there is nothing special.
Curious why so many bloggers magically decided to publish there all of a
sudden. I see tons of tech posts there now.

~~~
hboon
Read what 37Signals/Basecamp who has spent 15 years building their (huge)
audience on their own site says:

[https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-moves-to-
medium-c8...](https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-moves-to-
medium-c8083ce19686#.lka3ttxc8)

I think the number 1 reason is reach.

~~~
adajos
Reach is exactly right. Also good for audience building.

That said, I agree with most of the complaints about Medium as well.

------
peterwwillis
Getting hosted by someone else is incredibly convenient. They take care of all
the work of maintenance, security, reliability, and even give you tools to
increase your visibility on the web and design your blog. IMHO only hobbyists
or people with a very good reason should self-host. If you don't like one
company's terms, look into the many other blog providers out there.

~~~
PuffinBlue
You could still happily roll your own Wordpress site but have it hosted with a
managed provider. Also stick something like Headway Theme in there and you get
a pretty easy setup even for not technical folks.

~~~
peterwwillis
Even considering Wordpress probably makes up 50% of the compromised sites on
the internet, due to its terrible security track record and that nobody
patches their own blogs?

~~~
mmaunder
You can get auto-updates and we do a pretty good job of protecting WP sites.
But the situation is dire. A survey we did recently showed that 38.9% of
respondents (out of over 7000 WP site admins) were hacked within the past 12
months.

[https://www.wordfence.com/learn/2015-wordpress-security-
surv...](https://www.wordfence.com/learn/2015-wordpress-security-survey/)

~~~
mynewtb
Heavy selection bias.

------
EvanPlaice
Lots of comments are covering how Wordpress is a maintenance hassle, static
sites require a programmer to update.

What about a 3rd option?

Use a web application that can asynchronously fetch markdown files and render
them client-side.

That's basically how my site I've been working functions.

[http://evanplaice.com](http://evanplaice.com)

Here's the code Http://gihub.com/evanplaice/evanplaice.com

I haven't fleshed out the journal section yet but the majority of the rest of
the site is all markdown driven with a clean separation between application.
It's also hosted on S3.

In theory, I could change the content directly to be loaded on Dropbox,
although it would be preferable to provide inline caching of requests. For
example use AWS lambda to frequently check for updates.

Eventually, when it's ready, I plan to extract the journaling portion and
release it as a server-less journaling platform.

------
therealidiot
For those who aren't scared of using Git with their blog, there's fugitive.

It's a few {pre,post}-{commit,receive} hooks which generate a static html blog
from html articles (though you can configure it with an external parser iirc,
so it shouldn't be hard to get Markdown support.) It probably wouldn't suffice
for many use cases, but for simple blogs it might be enough.

[https://gitorious.org/fugitive/fugitive](https://gitorious.org/fugitive/fugitive)

------
tuananh
I still self-hosted my site (jekyll) on a tiny instance (128mb ram) from
RamNode. free ssl by cloudflare.

it costs a bit more than $1 a month to run it.

------
dba7dba
My observation is that about 90% of the Wordpress sites out there don't need
Wordpress. All they really need is html/css.

~~~
KhalilK
This! They are so boated and for no reason whatsoever.

~~~
dba7dba
The bloat caused by even a bare minimum WP site versus html/css is
breathtaking.

Let's say you need to put up a simple brochure type site. You can do alot wih
just 2-3 MB text/pics. With WP, it takes about 10MB just to get it running.

And let's not forget the DB backend of WP. This alone vastly increases
complexity, at least for average users.

Scale this up and you see how bloated WP is. You want to put up 100 brochure
sites (each about 5MB). With html/css sites, that translates to what 500MB of
data? With WP, that already is 1000MB. And add requirement for a DB backend
for 100 websites. The bloatness jumped by at least a factor of 2 with just the
requirement for more storage. With DB requirement, the bloatness jumped imo by
a factor of 5 or so.

------
mark_l_watson
I went from years of using blogger.com to trying Wordpress for a few months.
Then I switched to Jekyll and statically generated blog articles. In the end I
went back to blogger.com because I figured that if I needed a 3rd party like
discus for comments, then I might as well use blogger.com

------
zwischenzug
I used Docker recently to host my own blog, in an attempt to put ads on it and
whatever Wordpress extensions I wanted. Despite getting a healthy number of
views (nothing extraordinary) the income was basically 0. It just wasn't worth
the candle.

~~~
axx
Does it always have to make you money?

I feel blogging is much more about sharing content, building a community and
meeting new people. In my personal experience i met a few people through
various blogs and it was worth much more, than a few dollars.

If you're only blogging to make money, you're doing something wrong. It's the
same with startups and other things. Do it for the fun, and not for the money!

------
dredmorbius
I've been looking for intelligent conversation online for over 25 years. For a
time it was Usenet. I mostly missed the Well, though I caught mailing lists,
Slashdot, and for a brief moment, G+ (it's still there, and I've cultivated a
useful community, though the reach is small).

I've done some exploration of just where intelligent conversation online lies,
and frankly was surprised at the results:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/)

The methodology uses the _Foreign Policy_ Top 100 Global Thinkers list as a
proxy for "intelligent discussion", the string "this" to detect English-
language content, generally, and the arbitrarily selected string "Kim
Kardashian" as a stand-in for antiintellectual content. Google search results
counts on site-restricted queries are used to return the amount of matching
content per site, with some bash and awk glue to string it all together and
parse results.

As expected, Facebook is huge, as is Twitter. When looking at the FP/1000
ratio (hits per 1,000 pages) KK/1000, and FP:KK ratios, more interesting
patterns emerge.

Facebook beats G+, largely.

Reddit makes up in quality what it lacks in size, but Metafilter blows it out
of the water. Perhaps a sensible user filter helps a lot.

The real shocker though was how much content was on blogging engines, even
with a very partial search -- mostly Wordpress and a few other major blogging
engine sites. Quite simply, blogs favour long-form content, some of it
_exceptionally_ good.

But blogs suck for _exposure_ and _engagement_.

This screams "Opportunity!!" to me. I've approached several players
(G+/Google, Ello) with suggestions they look into this. Ello's @budnitz seems
to be thinking along these lines (I'm a fan of what Ello's doing, but its size
is minuscule, and mobile platform usability is abysmal.)

One of the most crucial success elements for G+ is the _default_ "subscribe to
all subsequent activity on this post" aspect. Well, that and the ability to
block fuckwits (though quite honestly _ignore_ would be more than sufficient).
There's a hell of a lot else to dislike, but those two elements are crucial to
engagement.

As for blogging, I'm a fan of a minimal design
([http://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB](http://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB))
and static site generators.

~~~
FiatLuxDave
Very interesting post. I've also been looking for interesting content online
since Usenet days, although my interests are a bit more .sci than .soc.

If you ever do a similar analysis using say, science Nobel Prize Winners or
some other similar list, I'd love to see it.

~~~
dredmorbius
More to the point: the FP Global 100 list was simply a proxy for "what's a
list of search tokens that's likely to indicate meaningful conversation?". I
picked the FP list as it was available, comprehensive, and Not Mine (that is,
I didn't select the names, and disagree fairly markedly with several
inclusions).

The individuals named cover a range of backgrounds, from natural and social
sciences to politics, religion, and a few authors, artists, and other
creatives.

------
xylon
I just write my blog direct in HTML and host it on a Raspberry pi running
FreeBSD and darkhttpd:
[http://www.naughtycomputer.uk/](http://www.naughtycomputer.uk/)

------
cyphar
Nope. I run my own blog, which I implemented myself (using some nice Flask
markdown thing as a base).
[https://www.cyphar.com/blog](https://www.cyphar.com/blog)

~~~
cyphar
Most notably, there's no dynamic content on my site. My blog is generated from
source and creating a new blog post just requires me to make a new markdown
document in doc/published/. I've never like solutions like Ghost or Medium.
They never support specific thing X that I want for my blog.

------
erikb
It's certainly not dead, but the relation maybe has changed a little. It
started off as a public diary service and place for discussions and now it's
more of a traffic driver for marketing purposes.

------
j45
Before looking at self-hosted blogs it would have to be looked at how many new
beginners are being created in self-hosting alone? Before we can self-host
blogs, we have to self-host anything.

------
KhalilK
I spent a couple of weeks developing a blogging system in Django last summer.
Doing so allows for great customization and fits exactly my needs.

It was more fun than writing actual blog content though.

------
facepalm
Self hosted blogs miss the social graph, which drives traffic. That's why
Tumblr took off, and I suspect it is also what is driving Medium.

------
praveenster
I am surprised nobody seems to mention indiewebcamp.com and withknown.com as
alternatives to Wordpress or Ghost.

~~~
welly
I'm not. Who are either of those?

------
manuw
Medium & Co. are good for write stuff down in a simple way. I prefer self-
hosting with jekyll.

------
z3t4
I guess there are as many static site generators as there are blogging
developers :P

------
torbit
nah. people (content marketers) post on medium in hope they click on their
personal link in the author bio, which has their blog and content they
wouldn't put on medium.

------
tronathan
[https://s3.amazonaws.com/f.cl.ly/items/072W0F1l3Q1C2b3u3T2r/...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/f.cl.ly/items/072W0F1l3Q1C2b3u3T2r/xs2nv.jpg)

------
stolk
What's wrong with blogger.com ?

------
pcurve
Remember Movable Type?

------
elcct
I am working on a project that combines DNS, WWW and WebDav servers to
simplify blogs self-hosting, so your blog can always sit connected on a mapped
network drive and to add new website, you can just create a directory with new
domain name.
[https://github.com/parkomat/parkomat](https://github.com/parkomat/parkomat)

------
misiti3780
yes - why self host when I can host my blog at github using jekyll in < 10
minutes ?

~~~
volaski
You'd be lying if you say it took you less than 10 minutes the very first time
you attempted it.

------
Zyst
In this particular ecosystem (HN)? Probably not.

Half the time I see Medium posts, the other half I'll see something hosted
with Jekyll + github pages. Which technically isn't Self Hosted, but still
quite different from just writing in Medium or something of the sort.

However I suspect HackerNews readers are not the average, and I do think
there's a down trend on self hosting blogs, versus using
Medium/Wordpress/Tumblr or even Blogspot.

------
fenomas
I don't follow the author's complaints about terms and conditions. I suppose
language like "we can change these terms any time and your use of the site
constitutes acceptance" sounds ominous at a naive level, but what's the
alternative? It would amount to some form of preventing users from using the
site until they click "agree", and then doing that again every time the T&Cs
change, right?

~~~
mbreese
We're talking about the authors here, not just readers, so yes, having an
click-though for a change in Terms of Service seems appropriate.. Sending an
email to users when they change is also appropriate.

Terms of Service shouldn't change often enough that this should ever be an
issue.

