Author says: > Managing this blog is a little more involved than dynamically generating everything.
and
> Simplicity is key.
If he will blog for long enough that simplicity might become a technical debt. Right know this 'next-gen' blog doesn't even have an rss feed.
I mean... I expect that putting more work into it would be a tradeoff for more features, not less
- search - categories - RSS - archive pages - header/footer/navigation
It's great that the content area is simpler, but if I just typey-typey for the blog post and then have to manually create backlinks and the RSS feed item then forget it.
There is such a thing as _too_ simple.
Blogs need to go back to document publishing formats. It doesn't get more user-friendly than 1. WYSIWYG word processor; 2. Save As PDF; 3. Dump the file on a web host.
I'm switching to PDF/A: https://lab6.com/0#page=2
What exactly do you have against HTML? (It's not like we have any better alternative...)
IMHO the .mhtml format should be resurrected.
EDIT: And the Pdf format can be abused as well. At least it's easy to block JavaScript on HTML, even selectively (uMatrix).
I expect to be able to use video in an electronic document, PDF readers don't seem to be even able to support MP4, much less the upcoming AV1 !
I want to read the content, so just give me the content, not a pretentious image of it. Just give me <p> and image tags. Basic data.
I don’t want your “document”.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24258193
Largely I am baffled, because the end result seems worse in almost every way than the starting point of HTML.
I wouldn't even bother reading a PDF and I am on a desktop. I make some exception: Books & Papers, device manuals and legal documents & the like.
I would never read a blog in PDF, unless it's the last blog on earth.
Where the author is correct about next-gen blogging (in my opinion anyway) is in the attempt to reduce the friction to publishing a new post. What tech stack you use, whether it's static, what your HTML looks like, are all entirely secondary to whether or not you actually use your blog to build a corpus of content that shows off your opinions, expertise, and insights over time. That's what a blog is. It isn't HTML tags and CSS. It's the content within the tags. For me any next-gen blog tech has to make 3 things trivially easy -
- it needs to be simple to set up and maintain. If my laptop dies and I can't just clone my blog's repo and run a couple of commands to get back to where I was it won't work.
- it needs to be really simple to publish a post. Most blogs use Markdown with either front matter or a specific file path. That's OK but it puts most of the cognitive load on me. I'm sure there's a better way but I don't know what it is. I use 11ty for my blog which is very good, and if I didn't worry about URLs as much as I do it would be could actually work. But I do.
- there's nothing that pushes me to write more. This is the kicker, and no one has ever solved it. I think a blog platform that recommends posts I should write, and that praises me for writing, would drive me to actually write far more than I do. So far the only blog platform I've seen come close is Hashnode, but even that doesn't do it very well.