This truly feels like https://www.aleksandra.codes/tech-content-consumer/, where every blog post rehashes the well tread territory of Hugo/Jenkins/Netlify/GH Pages or Wordpress/Blogger/Ghost/Medium/Neocities, or even the newish "minimal" ones like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23313196. You can even blog to specific audiences with the rise of "send a newsletter" SaaS things!
IMO, very few people are at a loss on "where to blog" or "how to blog", but rather actually writing. If you're a dev, you've got text files you can serve (or convert to html). If you're a non-tech person, you've got a dearth of places to blog on, with nearly a decade of tutorials about how to setup a domain and site. It feels like the demand for these "where to blog" posts are mostly to bikeshed on the tools and not actually the writing part.
Thought I would pipe in about one thing mentioned. "social media is great for promoting blogs" this was a throwaway comment and not the main point of the article but just thought peeps might be curious.
Cause twitter/social is NOT a great place for promoting a blog.
Each social network has their own algorithm for what they show people. At this point, none of them show you 100% of what is posted by the people you follow. This isn't the worst things, but its annoying.
the question becomes, what DO they show you?
For the most part it's things written IN THE PLATFORM.
These social networks want to keep you within the network, not have you end up on some other site.
The issue being, because of that incentive to keep you on their site, and a preference for on platform content, your blog post that you share generally wont be shown to very many people.
The only real solution to that is federation - reposting the content of the blog on each network. That's what gets you the views.
That brings up a whole host of issues.
Not disagreeing with the main overall point, I have a personal blog for many of the reasons posted, but I don't want people to think that posting a link to their personal site will get much traction on social media unless they already have an absolutely massive following.
I think there's a lot of analysis paralysis on deciding where to blog, so I threw together a quick repo you can just clone, drop some Markdown files in and it'll auto-publish to Gitlab pages and Neocities whenever you push:
Neocities is a great place to at least start if you want a static site. You can just create an account and get to making HTML/CSS or just deploy static generated pages to it. It also supports custom domains.
If you want something more advanced, you can easily pivot from it to some other hosting.
Stratechery recommends using either Wordpress.com SaaS or the LAMP Stack based Wordpress.org platform. He does not mention Static Site Generators like Jekyll which is OSS and the default option for Github Pages freely hosted on github.io.
A modern blog should be written in Markdown and stored in a git repository. For non-devs, wordpress.com offers a slicker first time experience but companies like Netlify are trying to provide slick WebUIs to bridge the gap.
I'm skeptical of Markdown as the only, best practice, option. I've been searching for this online - can I make an API call from Markdown? - and this is one of those cases where common search terms make it hard to narrow down the result. However, a cursory search makes it seem like the answer is, no; or, not easily.
Now you could say, that's a pretty artificial blog post structure, most bloggers wouldn't do that. So here's a more harmonious blend - a pretty regular blog post text blended with Twitter API calls.
And lately I've been thinking of mixing in other embeded platform code (Insta, YouTube) - easily done like this, potentially a hassle with Markdown.
Now, maybe you can fight with Markdown and find some way to sprinkle in the embedded code, but if you ask me, it seems like: if I'm dealing with a lot of raw HTML at that point, why not just go all the way and, as a dev, do it all in HTML?
I don't see much value add in Markdown, at that point. And this is a perfectly valid, 'real-world' blog use case.
If you are a moderately technical person there are also very low effort solutions that allow you to self host static sites from Jekyll/Hugo totally free. Eg I haven't been a professional software engineer in ~5 years and I could get up and running in ~60min. The biggest issue tends to be that you need to write in Markdown with Git. I advocate for this everywhere because my satisfaction is so high.
IMO Wordpress' biggest advantage is that the growth marketing community really knows how to tune it and make it sing for common use-cases. If you're going to have a team running growth strategies on your blog you'll be able to hire a strong team to run SEO, inbound marketing, and whatever else you need. It's boring technology in the best sense.
In the time since I was last active on Wordpress, the ads have gone from barely there to "I don't like this".
I suspect for active users that they boiled this frog slowly, but to me it is not acceptable. Unfortunately running servers for free is also not acceptable.
I think the tech community needs to discover Co-ops. That we haven't already I blame in part on our aversion to hobbies, which is where most of my exposure comes from.
I've been using wordpress.com for my blog since 2011, plus paying for my own domain. Nothing fancy, and has worked very well. Good value for, I think, 26 dollars a year.
>The problem — at least from my perspective — is that flexibility is optionality. If one day down the road you want your site to be something other than a blog, but you are using Ghost, you need to go through the same sort of transition process I described above.
This may actually be a Good Thing. Honestly, I can't think of many things you want to start doing where you want to adapt your existing blog. When you start on something new, create a new sub-domain or buy a new domain, install new software and go from there. I'd much rather focus on doing what you're doing now well rather than make a trade for speculative optionality.
Someone I respect once told me that Ghost is written for its developer’s needs and to promote the hosted platform, and not intended to be an easy to manage self hosted solution. I don’t know how far that’s true, but WordPress seems to be ahead on mindshare (and likely features and plugins too). For better or worse, PHP/LAMP hosts with control panels are aplenty.
Writing on any platform regularly is not easy for everyone. So it’s less of a platform issue than some people perceive it to be. For most people, a “free” wordpress.com or blogger.com (or gasp, medium.com if you really hate your readers) is good enough to start.
I've set up self-hosted WordPress and Ghost. I personally found Ghost's "5 minute set up" to be pretty close to the mark (in contrast to all other software that advertises a 5 min set up and takes me half a day of messing around with config + Google + documentation - maybe I'm just slow)
I don’t think he addresses the real problem of where to blog of where and how to blog so that readers actually find you.
Generating a Wordpress blog is easy compared to figuring out how to actually get it discoverable. I think that’s what a lot of these blog service providers are missing is some sort of way to find content being generated on their hosting platform.
No. In fact, WordPress sites generally rank better due to the free SEO plugins like Yoast--I believe Matt Cutts stated these a while back. Google itself has also built great plugins for WordPress like AMP and Site Kit (https://sitekit.withgoogle.com).
Now this is a search algo myth I've never heard of (and there are many out there). Some of the biggest websites in the world have a WP backbone. Why on earth would Google care what blog framework the site was built on? As long as it's not known spam domain and the site generates machine-readable HTML, Google will index it and rank it if it gets a good number of clicks for search terms.
Did you mean WP-hosted sites (with the domain xyz.wordpress.com) instead of self-hosted Wordpress?
Note that from a SEO and discovery standpoint you bring link power and authority to the domain you blog on. So if you use a platform and not your own domain, then the platform gets all the link juice. Platforms are only good for spammers as they can piggyback on others authority.
I really wish a longform document/essay/dissertation was done on how impactful the loss of Google Reader but the thriving of Twitter and Facebook ruined the internet and allowed clickbait and shortform incendiary content to thrive.
Don't serve your posts from someones database. You can still use a CMS, but make sure the content is rendered statically. Static web sites are 100x faster, more secure, and cheaper to host.
Self-hosting WordPress is a really bad choice in fact. Every self-hosted WordPress blog I follow in my RSS reader eventually becomes a content farm. The only way to not become a content farm is to use commercial hosting (WordPress VIP, WPEngine), but at that point, why are you using WordPress instead of Square or whatever?
If you're a developer, just build a static site. If you're not a developer, you're going to have to pay.
Not true at all. I've been running my blog on WP since 2011, doing over 100k monthly readers since 2012. Not a since hack incident. It's the world's biggest CMS, its security has come a long way since the early days.
Wordpress has a powerful ecosystem, great usability, and it's free. Hard to beat.
I'm playing with Webflow for one of my other sites. Content editing capabilities and large scale content management is lightyears behind Wordpress still.
I have the cheapest possible hosting and a WP blog I never use, the hosting keeps WP update and I just get the email notification when the update happens. I imagine you might have problems if you use some weird WP plugin to integrate with some X feature. Most people that just want to blog are perfectly fine with cheapest hosting.
Any tool turns into shit if not taken care off. Enable auto updates in wp-config.php. Limit login attempts. Use ManageWP to easily manage several WP installations through a single interface. Add a (free) security plugin like Wordfence.
I've been running WP installations for years and never had a problem with them getting hacked.
For a lot of people, I think overcoming inertial energy is among the hardest parts of starting to blog. For that reason, I think there's a strong temptation to start with wordpress.com, because it's a standard 30-second sign-up process.
That's what I did many years ago, and I'm still there. Wordpress.com is easy and that's why it's big.
(Note: this is not an argument against rolling your own. Do it if you want to!)
I'd argue the opposite about using managed hosting -- a self-hosted WordPress site is more likely to outlast one on managed WordPress hosting for the sole reason of cost. Managed hosting is significantly more expensive, and justifying that ongoing cost may cause the owner of the site to discontinue it sooner than they would otherwise.
[+] [-] whorleater|5 years ago|reply
IMO, very few people are at a loss on "where to blog" or "how to blog", but rather actually writing. If you're a dev, you've got text files you can serve (or convert to html). If you're a non-tech person, you've got a dearth of places to blog on, with nearly a decade of tutorials about how to setup a domain and site. It feels like the demand for these "where to blog" posts are mostly to bikeshed on the tools and not actually the writing part.
[+] [-] Stratoscope|5 years ago|reply
"Dearth" means "scarcity"; you probably mean "wide variety" or "plethora" if you like alliteration.
[+] [-] fenwick67|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] compiler-guy|5 years ago|reply
"That led to a number of questions as to where one should create a blog..."
So apparently, enough people are at a loss on where to blog that asked him that he thought it was worth a post.
[+] [-] F_J_H|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] canadianwriter|5 years ago|reply
Cause twitter/social is NOT a great place for promoting a blog.
Each social network has their own algorithm for what they show people. At this point, none of them show you 100% of what is posted by the people you follow. This isn't the worst things, but its annoying.
the question becomes, what DO they show you?
For the most part it's things written IN THE PLATFORM.
These social networks want to keep you within the network, not have you end up on some other site.
The issue being, because of that incentive to keep you on their site, and a preference for on platform content, your blog post that you share generally wont be shown to very many people.
The only real solution to that is federation - reposting the content of the blog on each network. That's what gets you the views.
That brings up a whole host of issues.
Not disagreeing with the main overall point, I have a personal blog for many of the reasons posted, but I don't want people to think that posting a link to their personal site will get much traction on social media unless they already have an absolutely massive following.
[+] [-] StavrosK|5 years ago|reply
https://quicksite.stavros.io/
It's not as plug-and-play as paying for Wordpress hosting, but you also don't have to deal with all the update pain.
[+] [-] EwanToo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otachack|5 years ago|reply
If you want something more advanced, you can easily pivot from it to some other hosting.
https://neocities.org/
[+] [-] sradman|5 years ago|reply
A modern blog should be written in Markdown and stored in a git repository. For non-devs, wordpress.com offers a slicker first time experience but companies like Netlify are trying to provide slick WebUIs to bridge the gap.
[+] [-] julianeon|5 years ago|reply
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60177551/calling-rest-ap...
Want examples of blogs where you'd want to make API calls from your page and not being able to in Markdown would be ruinous? Here's two from my blog.
A pretty much straight-from-Twitter page, nothing but Twitter API calls.
http://www.mediazed.com/bristol-colston-statue.html
Now you could say, that's a pretty artificial blog post structure, most bloggers wouldn't do that. So here's a more harmonious blend - a pretty regular blog post text blended with Twitter API calls.
http://www.mediazed.com/thiel-fellows.html
And lately I've been thinking of mixing in other embeded platform code (Insta, YouTube) - easily done like this, potentially a hassle with Markdown.
Now, maybe you can fight with Markdown and find some way to sprinkle in the embedded code, but if you ask me, it seems like: if I'm dealing with a lot of raw HTML at that point, why not just go all the way and, as a dev, do it all in HTML?
I don't see much value add in Markdown, at that point. And this is a perfectly valid, 'real-world' blog use case.
[+] [-] mintone|5 years ago|reply
Why?
[+] [-] httpsterio|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staysaasy|5 years ago|reply
IMO Wordpress' biggest advantage is that the growth marketing community really knows how to tune it and make it sing for common use-cases. If you're going to have a team running growth strategies on your blog you'll be able to hire a strong team to run SEO, inbound marketing, and whatever else you need. It's boring technology in the best sense.
[+] [-] hinkley|5 years ago|reply
I suspect for active users that they boiled this frog slowly, but to me it is not acceptable. Unfortunately running servers for free is also not acceptable.
I think the tech community needs to discover Co-ops. That we haven't already I blame in part on our aversion to hobbies, which is where most of my exposure comes from.
[+] [-] henrik_w|5 years ago|reply
https://henrikwarne.com/
[+] [-] Traster|5 years ago|reply
This may actually be a Good Thing. Honestly, I can't think of many things you want to start doing where you want to adapt your existing blog. When you start on something new, create a new sub-domain or buy a new domain, install new software and go from there. I'd much rather focus on doing what you're doing now well rather than make a trade for speculative optionality.
[+] [-] AnonC|5 years ago|reply
Writing on any platform regularly is not easy for everyone. So it’s less of a platform issue than some people perceive it to be. For most people, a “free” wordpress.com or blogger.com (or gasp, medium.com if you really hate your readers) is good enough to start.
[+] [-] sixhobbits|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karanke|5 years ago|reply
Focusing on writing well and building an audience is the most important thing while starting out.
n.b.: I've been writing at https://reframing.substack.com/ for the past 5 weeks.
[+] [-] rdtwo|5 years ago|reply
Generating a Wordpress blog is easy compared to figuring out how to actually get it discoverable. I think that’s what a lot of these blog service providers are missing is some sort of way to find content being generated on their hosting platform.
[+] [-] rdtwo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gmays|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|5 years ago|reply
Did you mean WP-hosted sites (with the domain xyz.wordpress.com) instead of self-hosted Wordpress?
[+] [-] z3t4|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] resume384|5 years ago|reply
https://github.com/technomada/cloud-from-scratch
[+] [-] NN88|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] criddell|5 years ago|reply
The profit incentive is far more powerful force in shaping the internet into what it is today than any single product demise.
[+] [-] StavrosK|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] z3t4|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SkyLinx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petulla|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] earthboundkid|5 years ago|reply
If you're a developer, just build a static site. If you're not a developer, you're going to have to pay.
[+] [-] peeplaja|5 years ago|reply
Wordpress has a powerful ecosystem, great usability, and it's free. Hard to beat.
I'm playing with Webflow for one of my other sites. Content editing capabilities and large scale content management is lightyears behind Wordpress still.
[+] [-] markx2|5 years ago|reply
Nonsense.
I've been using WordPress since Jan 2004 and followed a huge number of sites. Not a single one has turned into a 'content farm'.
Yes some have stopped blogging. A very very small number have switched to a different way of creating their site. But what you say is nonsense.
>"The only way to not become a content farm is to use commercial hosting"
Junk statement. It's the owner of the blog that determines the content, not the host.
I would suggest that you followed the wrong sites.
I still use WordPress
[+] [-] simion314|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arkitaip|5 years ago|reply
I've been running WP installations for years and never had a problem with them getting hacked.
[+] [-] jseliger|5 years ago|reply
That's what I did many years ago, and I'm still there. Wordpress.com is easy and that's why it's big.
(Note: this is not an argument against rolling your own. Do it if you want to!)
[+] [-] rbritton|5 years ago|reply
I'd argue the opposite about using managed hosting -- a self-hosted WordPress site is more likely to outlast one on managed WordPress hosting for the sole reason of cost. Managed hosting is significantly more expensive, and justifying that ongoing cost may cause the owner of the site to discontinue it sooner than they would otherwise.
[+] [-] jjjbokma|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xueyongg|5 years ago|reply
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