

Google+ as your blog (using G+ API) - jaynate
http://www.minimali.se/

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bad_user
I think it's a bad idea hosting your blog on Google+.

It kind of depends on what type of blog you have of course - if you're hosting
a blog of opinions that are a little longer that what you'd write on Twitter,
then sure, Google+ is all you need.

Otherwise you need control.

Did you know for instance that Wordpress.com does not allow advertising of any
kind without profit sharing with them? And many of us don't expect any profits
from our blog, but it is sure nice to throw an Amazon link to a book that
you'd really like to recommend anyway, and get a month worth of hosting back.

And sure, Google+ is not Wordpress.com, but IMHO they are worse as their
primary business is not hosting blogs. Even if the product is new it already
has a history of blocked accounts (WTF is that all about?). If Google blocks
you, your identity is gone.

This is not how the web should work. You can host your blog in GitHub pages,
static content is all you ever need. You're a developer, so you don't need a
stupid WYSIWYG interface that never works as you expect it to. You can write
Markdown or Textile or plain HTML and keep it in a Git repository.

For comments you can just use Facebook or Disqus, or implement your own quick
and dirty solution in PHP or something cheap for starters, like GAE or Heroku.
Well, Heroku is not cheap, but you can host 250MB worth of comments in CouchDB
for free by installing an add-on.

Personally I have my own $20 Linode. I host there 2 blogs and a personal app
I'm working on. Nginx is a very light process, it's easy to setup and can
withstand an HN-effect on only a small instance. It's also good enough for a
Wordpress install if I wanted that, but I just don't bother with Wordpress.

Don't host your blog content on third-party providers. Get your own domain,
host static content for free or pay for a small instance - make sure you can
rebuild that blog if banned from the service provider - and only submit the
links to Google+ or Facebook or whatever, otherwise you'll later regret it.

~~~
sunsu
Someone should just create a script to backup the content of Google+ posts on
your blog. Could just save it the first time its loaded on the blog via the
API with an option to manually trigger a resave on a post.

Sure Google could ban me, delete my content, or delete my account. But a
competent hacker could write some code that did what I suggested and post it
to Github for others. It would probably be less work (ok maybe slightly more)
than setting up and managing your own Wordpress install.

Maybe I've found a new weekend project.

~~~
bad_user
You don't get it - it's not only about content, it's also about identity.

It's about owning your own domain such that links spread through the web (that
also added to your ranking in search engines) will not be invalidated when
shit happens.

Your content should be your property, including the URL as that's an important
part of said content and comments too.

~~~
sunsu
How is it that I don't get it? I can own my own domain and still use Google+
to power my blog just fine. I can automatically backup and store my Google+
posts in case Google goes nuts. In the process of backing up those posts, I
can also store the Google+ ID so I can ensure that I can always keep my back-
links intact.

Whats the problem?

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inopinatus
G+, as Wave did, supports more vectors of communication than other tools, and
this may be an achilles heel. Regular social media consumers, as much as we
bitch about Facebook and Twitter and co, in truth find it convenient to be
constrained to certain patterns; simply because the mental and temporal
expense of making a communication pattern decision (along with the associated
weighing of privacy risks etc) is greater than the perceived (low) value of
each microblog entry / sharable communication.

Perhaps I'm just saying "not enough people care enough".

~~~
stdbrouw
Could you expand on that? Isn't twitter's big "thing" that it created an
ecosystem of apps and sites all using the service in their own unique ways?

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dustingetz
@antimatter15 did preliminary work to do exactly this with wave and wordpress,
comments and all. it never took off. i actually used some of @antimatter15's
work to use wave as a draft management system, and i can publish from wave to
my blog in one click.

This has value to me for various reasons, namely I blog a lot more since the
wave client is awesome for draft management. I'll probably move to wordpress
soon because i don't want to maintain my own blogging software.

I'm exploring possibilities for incorporating plus into my online identity.
But, it's not going to host a programming blog until I can embed snippets. I
hear rich text or HTML is coming soon. Google obviously sees the potential,
and is good at learning from experience, I don't think they will screw it up
this time.

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jasonkolb
I like thus idea, especially if comments can be pulled across to the Web site
version of the blog. I think it's become clear to me that "something" is going
to happen to the traditional blog, a pro version of a G+ profile just might be
it.

Will have to chew on this, thanks for the nudge.

~~~
nrbafna
Comments are being pulled to the website. Just that you can post a comment on
the website as of now, because of G+ API limitation.

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bozho
I think Google+ is supposed to be a medium for sharing content, not for
creating content. And while we've seen some blog-like posts there, sharing a
link to your blog/tumblr/.. looks like a better option. Why? Because When you
post it on google+, you don't have the many extras you can get in a dedicated
blog. Especially the sharing buttons "tweet", "like", "digg", "stumble", etc.
You only get a +1. In short - it takes a lot of control and a lot of options,
and gives you nothing back.

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samg_
I would happily use G+ as my blog for programming related things, but I would
need to be able to make posts public and not spam my non-technical circles. Is
that possible?

~~~
john_horton
I'd like the same feature but I don't think it's possible right now. FWIW, I
asked whether this was possible on Quora awhile back and got a negative
response: [http://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-way-to-make-a-
Google+-post-p...](http://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-way-to-make-a-Google+-post-
public-without-pushing-it-to-everyone-in-my-circles)

------
ntoshev
I hope G+ will evolve into a nice blogging tool by itself. The amount of G+
posts linked to from HN and other aggregators indicate the potential is there.
I wish it were able to format code nicely and posts' urls included a title
instead of a meaningless id (for SEO as well as humans).

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djtidau
I'm glad this has created a bit of discussion surrounding the possibility of
using G+ as a primary blogging platform. I put together minimali.se over a
couple of nights just as a concept, but many people seem quite drawn to the
idea.

Personally I don't believe by itself Google+ offers enough to totally forfeit
your current blog, but what it does do it does well. An implementation like
this allows you to have the best of both worlds. I'm hoping in time the API
will allow writes (in the form of comments at least) to make it possible to
comment from external sources (like a blog), yet keep the actual engagement in
one place.

------
acpmasquerade
I tried to do the same. When G+ made the first ever public release of the G+
API, My first thought was to create a nice blog out of the G+ public posts.

But, it didn't go well as I felt it wouldn't be better to compromise with the
limitations.

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nmcfarl
This looks rather cool, and I’d be willing to outsource the guts of my bog to
Google+, leaving me with just the UI. But it looks to me like there’s still no
way to post to Google+ via the API, which makes this a non-starter for me.

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vidoss
Sounds like G+ is settling for competing with tumblr instead of facebook.

~~~
chwahoo
This isn't G+ "settling" for anything. This is a user's clever way of using
the G+ API to present G+ posts on his outside blog.

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StavrosK
On a semi-unrelated note, that blog design is _beautiful_!

~~~
dustingetz
looks like shit in xp/chrome. moral of this story: test your damn designs.

~~~
jQueryIsAwesome
Maybe the moral of the story is that you should upgrade your OS.

~~~
dustingetz
i was at my mother's house. -50

