Well one of the main points of the article is that you should have your own website so your content isn't hosted on another service that could censor what you write. Given the whole 'retard' fiasco at GitHub, I don't think it would be the best place to host things

I think since the premise of the author's article is that everyone should have a place where they can take more deliberate care of their online presence, it's pretty reasonable to infer that it goes without saying that one shouldn't use pejoratives like "retard" except in cases where the word itself is under discussion (like critiquing the use of the word in society, as we're doing now). Even still, I'd consider that a pretty hazardous topic to write about unless I were a linguist or in some field that made it appropriate to discuss it intellectually.

Admittedly, it's not clear whether GitHub would take down such a repository/site, but my hunch is that when it's deliberate and not casually thrown around, people wouldn't have as much footing to complain about a charged word. That being said, I'm not willing to test it, which says your point has merit just by virtue of a chilling effect.

Nevertheless, a sibling comment mentions using S3, which (I think) would be less likely to get taken down (although I've never heard of Amazon outright refusing to take down such content, so maybe the request simply hasn't happened yet).

>>> Admittedly, it's not clear whether GitHub would take down such a repository/site, but my hunch is that when it's deliberate and not casually thrown around, people wouldn't have as much footing to complain about a charged word.

The point is, it's not your website if some moderator somewhere can search-replace your content, probably without you knowing.

>>> use pejoratives like "retard"

Retard should not be a pejorative. It is a medical term.

>Wait, retard is a pejorative now?

It's fairly well-documented[0], and the GitHub incident in particular has been discussed on HN at length[1]. I think I gave the exclusion that if you're talking about it in a context that's socially acceptable (e.g. critiquing the use of the word, or as you point out discussing it medically), then I imagine that's fine (but I don't know, and I'm not about to test GitHub on how readily they'd censor content in a gray area).

This point about whether a site is yours or not is a red herring. For the purposes of technicality, you could argue that you don't really own your online presence unless you own the servers and the service providing access (per example: Wikileaks used Amazon's S3 service until AWS dropped them[2]). For the purposes of this discussion, however, it suffices to say that you "own" your online presence if your front page (absent a personal site, your profile pages on social networking sites) is determined by you rather than potentially influenced by friends (e.g. tagging you in a photo at a party).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retard_(pejorative)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118

[2]: https://aws.amazon.com/message/65348/

Paying for Ghost for hosting means you can be censored too...

What is the "retard" fiasco?

I'm using the exact same combination for my website (http://r3bl.me). GitHub + Jekyll + Namecheap's domain.

Actually, the reason why I created a website was that there was already a designer, a photographer, an actor and an alleged war criminal who I share the exact same name with. Of course I have to do my best to get to top Google results, otherwise, my potential employer could stumble upon a term "war criminal" and think that was me.

Off-topic: Am I the only one who thinks that managing a Jekyll-powered website is _way_ more easy than Wordpress?

I wouldn't recommend Jekyll for beginners either. I think you are right. Github pages require html knowledge.

All the options I suggested were geared towards beginners. I never intended this post to be seen by the Hacker News community.

S3 is another option

Is it easy to set up? One of my non-tech friends tried it and gave up.

Hi, I'm the writer of this blog post. I love the simplicity and speed of Jekyll, but honestly I'm too lazy to use static site generators. WordPress is heavy and bloated, but it efficiently gets the job done for me. I'll add Jekyll to the list!