What is annoying though is that often people who self-host their blogs make the exact same mistake. More and more often I see something that will grab my attention and when I get to the bottom of a blog post, I find something along the lines of "The full guide is available in my free e-book, which you can download from here". And when you click "here", you are greeted with "Please enter your e-mail address". Sure, everyone has a spam-mail type of thing or mailinator or whatever but this is still a terrible thing to do.

I don't see it wrong to use it as marketing strategy.

That strategy might be better than writing a long-ish blog entry as a teaser, where the reader thinks they are going to get their information for free, only to be told "Psyche! You've actually got to pay for it!"

What’s the alternative, assuming the blogger doesn’t want to give everything away for free?

I create rare, valuable information that saves people money and headaches. On a good month, 2% of my revenue will come from donations. Usually, it's 0%. At best, it pays for a meal and a beer. This website has 135k page views per month.

If that's how much I get from teaching people how to navigate German bureaucracy, I doubt you'll make anything from your opinions alone.

I insist on keeping the content unconditionally free, and donations don't work, but affiliate marketing does. I help people navigate certain boring purchases, so it lends itself to that sort of monetisation. I'd be recommending those products and services anyway.

Unfortunately, it incentivizes dishonest recommendations and passing ads as content. I chose not to do that, but I know I'd get paid more to recommend the wrong things. Since it's blended into the content, you'd be abusing people's trust in your content. At least banner ads were separate from the text.

I do not offer services either. My goal was to help as many people as possible, and that would go against it. Information should be free, especially when poor people need it the most. I also want the website to run itself. If I wanted to be on the computer full time, I'd just get a job.

And having some experience with German bureaucracy and taxes, and also having never lived in Germany nor speaking German, I'm fully aware how convoluted and complicated this can be and I could definitely see myself donating/paying for useful information if I didn't have a good accountant at my disposal.

I agree, on the grand scheme you won't make a whole lot but even with a population of 83 million, even if you add another 1 million like myself, your content still fits a relatively narrow niche. I'd love to give some advice but I honestly have no idea.

Affiliate marketing works well for my niche. I wanted to start similar sites about other topics, but if those don't naturally lead to certain purchases, they're extremely hard to effectively monetise.

In general, the internet got incredibly annoying, but I can understand why. Part of it is because we feel entitled to free content. There are few business models that allow people to be rewarded for their work while still offering a product for free. It usually involves selling something the user's data or attention.

I am personally against it for my website in particular though. I insist on keeping everything on it open and free. Immigration advice should help everyone, not just developers with a generous relocation bonus.

I'd much rather invest the effort into making the content more navigable/discoverable. This is actually what I'm working on right now.

Again though, this is just personal preference for this specific website. Selling packaged information could work. I did buy a motorcycle travel book that was a rehash of the author's YouTube channel.

The website mentioned above is more of a "visit it when you need it" resource. It's painfully boring to read, as it's written like a plain English instruction manual. It wouldn't be an interesting book.

[0] https://getpublii.com/

[1] http://runtimeterror.com/devlog/

With a properly set up cache, your website will be serving static files anyway.

But if there was something else i'd probably try it too.

a) Doesn't use node.js.

b) Has built-in syntax highlighting for C#, SQL, PowerShell and Rust at a minimum.

c) Is also good at "photo journals" or galleries.

I played around with Hugo, but the themes were ugly and it was very weak at managing pictures associated with an entry instead of the entire site.

I never found a solution for requirement C that I liked, so I’ve been building my own. It’s still very rough and not exactly in shape to publish, but its capabilities already by far exceed my previous solution: https://github.com/okeeblow/DistorteD

I left my WIP site running (‘jekyll serve’ using WEBrick) on my laptop and I’m going to bed, so these links may get hugged or just crash and become unavailable, but here you can get an idea of what I’ve been playing with for multi-image layouts: https://beta.cooltrainer.org/distorted/

And on the index page is a random smattering of some other media types I’ve been testing, like support for image-rendering SVGs, TTFs, and old DOS-codepage Nfos, mbedding PDFs, etc: https://beta.cooltrainer.org/

Anyway, big Jekyll fan. Try it out :)

You create a folder of markdown files, you have 2 template HTML files (index and blog post), and you run my program (MMSSG). It compiles the index page with a list of all the posts, then renders the HTML for each markdown file into a separate blog post. That's it. Handles the linking and everything for you.

It’s all open source and the templates are already made, modify to your heart’s content. It's also REALLY simple, so should be easy to understand my code.

It’s what I used to generate my blog, and there’s instructions in the readme to get going quickly :) It's super simple and I really love it. This is my post about it, and the github link:

https://jacobkania.com/2020-01-18-the-great-blog-project/

https://github.com/jacobkania/mmssg

--

Edit: Just reverted a couple of commits from a WIP plugins feature that I got bored of and quit, and created new versions of the binaries (Linux and Windows are untested). Also updated this comment with a better description.

I'm going to bed, feel free to respond with any feedback! Thanks for looking :)

I started collecting my writings, all in Markdown and some HTML. Just a bunch of folders as topics, and then write markdown files inside them.

Then, a week or so ago, I threw in Jekyll and now they are published as the cheapest form of Digital Garden for me and hopefully, my family - https://oinam.fyi

The crappy code is at https://github.com/oinam/oinam.fyi and is not even worth being a template.

Jekyll is really nice to use, but the photo galleries are pretty few and far between.

Disclaimer, I couldn't get this to deploy using Github pages (which is nice) because it uses unsupported plugins. I have it split across two branches and works nicely enough. Certainly the most responsive gallery I've found.

Edit: removed direct link to the person's pictures :)

[1] https://github.com/dansku/photoGallery

In addition to the above it generates static pages rather than looking into the database and templates all the time.

I have also been looking for something like this for a while and I can't find it.

All the static HTML gallery generators seem to be focused on dumping all images into them at single time. They don't have RSS feeds, or a convenient option to add entries one at a time as you go along like you would in a blog.

On the other hand, blog generators generally aren't optimized for mostly displaying images (e.g. automatic resizing, thumbnail view, etc.)

So even if a node.js solution would be the best solution, you would still not want to use it? Why?

Anyway, I'd recommend to write a static site generator yourself. It isn't very difficult, you get exactly what you need, and you never get stuck because someone abandoned their project or doesn't want to fix the bugs you reported.

It doesn't seem that strange to want to avoid it for such a project.

It's in Python (pip install...), it uses a very complete and flexible Markdown library (never found a language that it didn't support, but syntax highlighting is in a plugin), and is a site generator, not a blog generator.

But it takes some up-front programming to define your site structure.

(I'm considering node for a personal project or two, though as much as possible avoiding the mess that NPM seems to be as the projects are small enough I can manage the few dependencies manually, so insight into pitfalls I'm not aware of could be useful)

I write a post in markdown, commit and run a pelican-provided script that uploads the generated site to the hosting server. The script-running could be done with a hook.

[1] https://blog.getpelican.com/

> I write a post in markdown, commit and run a pelican-provided script that uploads the generated site to the hosting server. The script-running could be done with a hook.

This is exactly what I don't want to deal with. Sure, I could use a ci service but this is a typical case of over-engineering a simple problem.

On my end I write a new markdown post and push it to Github.

At that point Netlify takes over to rebuild and redeploy my site including the new post. It's pretty trivial to do.

https://github.com/jacquescorbytuech/Blog

https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/

Say Microsoft decides to kill github pages. OK, fine, next.

Now picture Netlify changing some policy, adding some pricing or killing off a service which you need(unlikely but not entirely impossible). You have to setup the whole thing all over again with someone else, be it circleci, jenkins, gitlab, etc. Though in different contexts, I've been in similar situations and by the third time I usually want to murder someone.

If you wanted to you could run the build process locally and commit the output HTML and CSS files to the repo, and the build process wouldn't even be necessary. You'd just need to copy the output files to a server using a git commit hook.

I DON'T want to do either of that. Add a file, push it and know everything has worked.

The topic of the thread is __specifically__ personal blogs/pages and my point is as strong as ever: having to deal with builds, cis, for your personal page is pure bs.

That's precisely what Netlify offers you.

https://caddyserver.com/docs/markdown

”Caddy is both a flexible, efficient static file server and a powerful, scalable reverse proxy. Use it to serve your static site with compression, template evaluation, Markdown rendering, and more.”

https://caddyserver.com/

Here’s a blog on doing this with the older version of Caddy:

https://blog.thomaspuppe.de/static-sites-from-markdown-with-...

Forgive me for suggesting the first thing that popped into mind, could you run the generator script locally and also push the /public dir which your server then serves directly?

A much better option. Still have to deal with the de-facto boilerplate of every html file: head, body, header, footer. Which is why I built something that does it in the browser for me.

> Forgive me for suggesting the first thing that popped into mind, could you run the generator script locally and also push the /public dir which your server then serves directly?

Same as CI - adds an extra step to the process. But as I said, services like Netlify come and go and the news might slip by you and catch you off guard. If I had to go down that road, I have ~10 raspberry pi's 6 of which are currently booted up. A 5 line shell script could easily do that. But again - I see no point in doing it if there's no need for it.

I find it fascinating that you'd go to all the trouble to build what essentially breaks down to a custom static site generator but you then balk at using an off the shelf one with a build script.

Just serve your markdown git repo using Caddy.

https://caddyserver.com/docs/markdown

”Caddy is both a flexible, efficient static file server and a powerful, scalable reverse proxy. Use it to serve your static site with compression, template evaluation, Markdown rendering, and more.”

https://caddyserver.com/

Here’s a blog on doing this with the older version of Caddy:

https://blog.thomaspuppe.de/static-sites-from-markdown-with-...

You get a lot of other “just works” goodness too.

Did something like that years and years ago as a learning project. Works great! Drop in some markdown and you’re done. The source is only a few hundred lines; no build or package manager.

The simplest solution I've used is to just have a Makefile that indexes and stitches together pages using cat/sed/ls. Sure, you have to run make (and possibly make upload if you're not doing it live), but it's not so bad.

Could you explain what you mean here?

Quoting their README:

Web server with built-in support for QUIC, HTTP/2, Lua, Markdown, Pongo2, HyperApp, Amber, Sass(SCSS), GCSS, JSX, BoltDB (built-in, stores the database in a file, like SQLite), Redis, PostgreSQL, MariaDB/MySQL, rate limiting, graceful shutdown, plugins, users and permissions.

All in one small self-contained executable.

As a side note, I can't believe how many people are salty that you don't want to use node. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.

I get it, I shouldn't complain about the quality of open-source and freely offered software and the onus is on me to audit the libraries I put in my code, but blimey some people take an awful lot of liberty with the truth when they claim something is "production ready". I reckon a lot of people just build some rushed, poorly-written JavaScript libraries so they can pad out their CVs as an "open-source contributor" but the only thing they're actually contributing is a massive headache for muppets like me who foolishly use said code in their own projects.

I've written code in PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript before, it's just not my first choice.

It's dependencies are too big?

It cannot be hosted by cheap webhost?

It's not secure ?

For me, Jekyll, Github Pages, and a couple lines of CSS were nothing[1], but there should be as little barrier to entry as possible if you have something to say

[0]: https://andrewtag.com (it's not self-promotion if it's someone else's blog)

[1]: https://amtunlimited.gihub.io (this is definitely self-promotion, feel free to ignore)

https://amtunlimited.github.io

The top one just doesn't have it, the bottom is misspelled

amtunlimited.github.io

I hosted my own blog for a short while and got hacked, so I moved back to Wordpress.com.

Also be very selective about installing plugins.

If you are extra paranoid then you can put the login/admin/api behind a vpn.

Almost all of the problem plugins weren’t even that important to the site. Someone just added it at some point and left it, maybe for years. Then there you are running old code with known exploits. Of course you’re going to get hacked.

Although I didn’t enjoy that work, I did love how excited and happy my clients were that their sites were fixed. You can’t measure the misery and anxiety some people feel when stuff goes wrong with their websites. Fixing that, with php and Wordpress no less, was a great feeling.

All that is to say that I agree; only adopt plugins you really need with a reputation you’re comfortable with.

I've recommended Hardypress (https://hardypress.com/) a couple times here on HN. Still happy with them.

For a project blog I used hosted wordpress, and I found that to be a pretty good middle ground. Honestly I can't think of a case where running your own wordpress server is a good use of your time.

If you are trusting Google to be your entry point for traffic you have to play all kinds of gross games with your content for SEO purpose and if you are adding value to an already well explored topic there will be someone out there trouncing you in SEO.

Medium was initially brilliant because it solved this by aggregating content in a slick website, with great search, and it still does a decent job of showing you new content based on your interests. I think this is a part of why its so frustrating. When I go on the home page I see a bunch of articles I would want to read, go to click them and get paywalled.

But then the money men came. I'm not convinced there is anything out there like Medium in terms of ease-of-use, ability to get your content in front of others, good at surfacing new content you would want to read and also Medium pay content authors really really well.

This to me is the key thing, and what Medium's stated goal was: to re-think the way we pay for content. You may feel fine giving away your content for free, but it's perfectly reasonable for people to want to be paid for the value they create, and I like Medium's model way better than advertising.

Not sure I'd agree with this. I've tried looking for interesting articles on Medium recently, and it seems that once you want to go outside the 'make money online/internet nomad/political rants' genre, finding anything interesting becomes real difficult.

It'a slso quite hard to find things from unknown/unpopular authors there too. Remember looking through a few Medium Digests and counting how popular each creator was, and found there was a huge bias towards people with large social media followings/existing fanbases in what was being promoted in those newsletters and on the Medium front page.

The most common hack I've seen is one where the admin doesn't even know, because it redirects some visits to their site that have Google in the referrer. Because they rarely Google themselves while logged out of WordPress, they never know every page on their site is redirecting to MyCoolMalwareDroppr.

That said I self-host other services, like Matomo or FreshRSS (also PHP apps that need a database).

The secret is in setting up auto-update policies. All the self-hosted services I host are in Docker and auto-updated [1] even if that means they can break.

Have been doing this for some time and worked great thus far, but granted self-hosting stuff is a continued investment, you can't just leave that server there to bit rot.

[1] https://github.com/containrrr/watchtower

100% agree. I even went as far as to write my own static-site generator (not that impressive, everyone seems to have one these days), but even hosted blogs are better than using the Mediums of this world.

There are trade-offs though. There is a little bit of on-going effort (and maybe expense) in keeping even an inactive blog going. Medium does take care of that side of things for you.

[0] https://plurrrr.com/

[1] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog (as of today available under MIT license)

[1]: https://pages.github.com/ [2]: https://neocities.org/ [3]: https://jekyllrb.com/

I would go with Netlify or Vercel with Gitlab.

When you get sick, poor or die, your own platform will almost certainly disappear, taking your content and ideas with it.

If it's on Medium, your content is more likely to survive your demise.

Only if your site gets picked up by archive.org though.

(That's only going to happen with static sites, not those which require login or signup, etc.)

Even then your ideas will still effectively disappear because search engines don't appear to crawl archive.org. (If they do it's incomplete - my own past content on archive.org does not get found by specific Google searches.) But perhaps search will change in future.

Brilliant idea.

> Your password for Bluehost (double check that you spelled this right!)

uhhhh

Also, you missed the fact that there's a typo on that line at the very end!

> Your password for Bluehost (double check that you spelled this right!)e

There's also the line above the password part:

> Once you've purchased your hosting - forward the confirmation email you received to: [email protected]

Which since I don't have I can't confirm if it has any sensitive information or not.

Ghost on the other hand is open source and can be self hosted.

>Own your platform. Own your content. Own your voice.

There's no way to fully own a place on the clearnet. At a minimum, you will have to rent a domain, and most people will rent the hosting as well. Moreover, authorities can seize or block both of those, while payment services can also "cancel" or "deplatform" you if you need them to pay for costs--so much for having a voice on the net.

The only way to own content on the Internet is to publish it in a free, decentralized and anonymous manner--I'm thinking I2P sites, for instance, and even that is subject to attacks that could make it inaccessible.

In any case, I wholewheartedly agree that Medium is not the home for anything worthwhile.

Precisely this.

I also have been yelling [0] about hosting your own GitLab, Gitea solution for individuals, companies and open-source organisations which frees you from the mercy of 'centralising everything' in GitHub which is nonsensical.

Medium is essentially centralising and bringing blogs back into the dark ages with paywalls, de-platforming and Google Logins on someone else's blogging site.

Own your code on your servers just like you own your website and blog. If the creator of Wireguard can do it, you can do it too.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23849565