Seriously, the service is brain-dead easy to use, scales wonderfully, and took me 30 seconds to set up, rather than the <X time units> that it would take to set up what the OP describes. If you don't like tumblr, use posterous, or wordpress, or rock it old school with blogger. I don't get why so many people take the time to set these things up when there are better things to do, such as actually writing to your blog.
Pro tip: unless you're really popular, no one cares how you power your blog... they care about what you write on it.
I don't like that "Tumblr reserves the right to remove any Subscriber Content from the Site, suspend or terminate Subscriber’s right to use the Services at any time, or pursue any other remedy or relief available to Tumblr and/or the Site under equity or law, for any reason [...] or for no reason at all."
[http://www.tumblr.com/policy/en/terms_of_service]
That "or for no reason at all" part is a bit bothersome.
I thought the whole hacker nomenclature revolved around tinkering, crafting, and creating. The type of person that is compelled by an idea they had for their blog and then they enjoyed implementing it.
So unless you propose a blogging system that facilitates the hacker urge, how does it have anything to do with hackers?
An issue I had was that there is no easy/seemless way to include code snippets in tumblr. A google search brings up a couple ways you can make it possible but its not something I want to do for every post I want to have code in.
1.5. Make backups. A periodic wget would be better than nothing, though I don't think it would grab the parts hosted on AWS. e-mail to posterous does backups as a side effect, but you still need to grab Disqus comments using their API.
I'm in the process of moving my Typo4 blog to Octopress in the hopes of blogging more when there are fewer textareas to fill in.
Octopress is built on a fork of Jekyll and comes with a very nice html5 / sass default template and some other goodies. The default is markdown but it plays nice with haml too. It took me a while to grok how to make my own templates, but that would surely have gone faster if I'd actually read the docs instead of dog-paddling around in them.
AWS is a way better solution. Especially if combined with CloudFront, since some people are targeting outside of the US :)
I personally don't like the default theme that Octopress comes with, so after I tried rolling with Octopress I digged deeper and made a custom Jekyll Site. Awesome learning experience and dead-simple deploy
> AWS is a way better solution. Especially if combined with CloudFront, since some people are targeting outside of the US :)
To expand on this, you can easily host your Jekyll blog (or any static site) on Amazon S3 and use CloudFront to serve assets. I would imagine this will be more reliable than Heroku and is certainly less complicated than the OP's setup. Unless you have an enormous amount of traffic or huge assets, S3+CloudFront will be essentially free (dollars per month, if that).
I am currenly working on porting my blog to Blogofile, but the process is not the smoothest. The documentation is fairly poor, and the creator stopped committing to the repo in May.
Even so, I think it's going to be worth the effort, because the prospect of entering all the dynamic values in a YAML header and the rest in plain Markdown hosted on GitHub pulled from a static site is appealing as hell.
What's the argument against wordpress? I'm trying to figure out where to have my first dev blog hosted with minimum hassle, wordpress seemed like a popular option.
Wordpress is great for starting out and in general the smart choice as you'll find tons of already-made plugins and themes.
However, I like control and I find Wordpress to be a hassle when I want to customize or optimize the setup. But if you don't want to spend too much effort and simply don't care about customizing it, there's no better alternative than Wordpress.
But make sure to continually upgrade it to the latest version as Wordpress is the most targeted piece of software by crackers/spammers on the Internet. And if you don't, one day you'll notice Viagra-related ads or pornographic content on all of our pages. This is what I meant by static content being a lot more secure, although fortunately Wordpress is easy to upgrade these days.
I really, really dislike PHP, and so I don't muck about in the internals...in fact, I find it easier just to totally toss away whatever styles/plugins I have setup rather than dig into the internals. But the kicker is is that everything still works fine. WP, from 2 to 3.x over the last two years hasn't caused me any real issues even though I maintain it in the worst way.
[+] [-] eykanal|14 years ago|reply
1. User tumblr.
2. You're done.
Seriously, the service is brain-dead easy to use, scales wonderfully, and took me 30 seconds to set up, rather than the <X time units> that it would take to set up what the OP describes. If you don't like tumblr, use posterous, or wordpress, or rock it old school with blogger. I don't get why so many people take the time to set these things up when there are better things to do, such as actually writing to your blog.
Pro tip: unless you're really popular, no one cares how you power your blog... they care about what you write on it.
[+] [-] kjhughes|14 years ago|reply
That "or for no reason at all" part is a bit bothersome.
[+] [-] danneu|14 years ago|reply
I thought the whole hacker nomenclature revolved around tinkering, crafting, and creating. The type of person that is compelled by an idea they had for their blog and then they enjoyed implementing it.
So unless you propose a blogging system that facilitates the hacker urge, how does it have anything to do with hackers?
(I'm just guessing the definition)
[+] [-] peregrine|14 years ago|reply
Otherwise is 100% completely agree.
[+] [-] obtu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masnick|14 years ago|reply
Anyone who is trying to set up a Jekyll-based blog might be interested this method for hosting it.
[+] [-] carlsednaoui|14 years ago|reply
Example: I'd like to have www.mydomain.com/blog
[+] [-] ncarroll|14 years ago|reply
Octopress is built on a fork of Jekyll and comes with a very nice html5 / sass default template and some other goodies. The default is markdown but it plays nice with haml too. It took me a while to grok how to make my own templates, but that would surely have gone faster if I'd actually read the docs instead of dog-paddling around in them.
Edit: typo removal.
[+] [-] algorithms|14 years ago|reply
I personally don't like the default theme that Octopress comes with, so after I tried rolling with Octopress I digged deeper and made a custom Jekyll Site. Awesome learning experience and dead-simple deploy
[+] [-] masnick|14 years ago|reply
To expand on this, you can easily host your Jekyll blog (or any static site) on Amazon S3 and use CloudFront to serve assets. I would imagine this will be more reliable than Heroku and is certainly less complicated than the OP's setup. Unless you have an enormous amount of traffic or huge assets, S3+CloudFront will be essentially free (dollars per month, if that).
[+] [-] octopus|14 years ago|reply
I've noticed that with a micro instance a blog can became irresponsive when it is indexed by Google.
Probably with a static blog a better solution is to use S3 and not ec2 as I've used.
[+] [-] justinhj|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmfrk|14 years ago|reply
Even so, I think it's going to be worth the effort, because the prospect of entering all the dynamic values in a YAML header and the rest in plain Markdown hosted on GitHub pulled from a static site is appealing as hell.
[+] [-] octopus|14 years ago|reply
I'm thinking at statically integrating the comments in a post each time you rebuild your site.
[+] [-] bad_user|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BadassFractal|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bad_user|14 years ago|reply
Wordpress is great for starting out and in general the smart choice as you'll find tons of already-made plugins and themes.
However, I like control and I find Wordpress to be a hassle when I want to customize or optimize the setup. But if you don't want to spend too much effort and simply don't care about customizing it, there's no better alternative than Wordpress.
But make sure to continually upgrade it to the latest version as Wordpress is the most targeted piece of software by crackers/spammers on the Internet. And if you don't, one day you'll notice Viagra-related ads or pornographic content on all of our pages. This is what I meant by static content being a lot more secure, although fortunately Wordpress is easy to upgrade these days.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] danso|14 years ago|reply
I really, really dislike PHP, and so I don't muck about in the internals...in fact, I find it easier just to totally toss away whatever styles/plugins I have setup rather than dig into the internals. But the kicker is is that everything still works fine. WP, from 2 to 3.x over the last two years hasn't caused me any real issues even though I maintain it in the worst way.
[+] [-] masnick|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] darwindeeds|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eknuth|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matthewlehner|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] motters|14 years ago|reply