#201

Not as open source and DIY as the platforms mentioned in this thread, but it’ll be interesting to see what Wordpress does with Tumblr.

1 Like
#202

My preference for this is icecast + liquidsoap + flask for the web frontend-- if you’re comfortable with installing things on a linux server and a little bit of scripting… and wobsiting. Rolling a simple homebrew setup isn’t super crazy all things considered but it might be a pain in the ass depending on how comfortable with linux & web stuff you are – there are a fair number of moving parts for setting something like this up. That said the most basic setup could look something like:

  • icecast for the stream itself
  • if you don’t care about “dead air” when you’re not live, then just skip liquidsoap, otherwise you could have a 5-10 line script that loops a playlist when you’re not live
  • an HTML page with an audio element pointing to your icecast mount
  • another HTML page with links to mp3 files you upload to a public directory on the server (and record yourself while you’re live – automating that with liquidsoap is also possible but a bit more complicated)

Bandwidth-wise, these guys are great:

The $5/mo virtual servers come with 2TB/mo bandwidth which should be way more than enough to start. If you blow up they have affordable servers with as much as 100TB/mo too.

The popular wordpress-like system is called “airtime” and its open source equiv is “libretime” – they’re both good, and many radio stations use them, but you might find you’ll need to spend just as much time configuring them as you would just rolling something simple like I described above. Both are based on liquidsoap, and can be extended with liquidsoap scripts, but they come with a web-based admin UI and calendar system etc, aimed at the needs of a typical radio station.

Otherwise I’ve seen hosted services that might be worth a shot, but if you want to host it yourself (go for it!) I really think a simple setup like icecast + liquidsoap + html is the way to go.

I started a thread to discuss this a while back if you want to get more into the nitty gritty over there: Web Radio Broadcasters

6 Likes
#203

Came across this self-hosted wiki tool the other day, I’m really into it. I believe it’s a conceptual derivative of @neauoire’s Oscean (which is amazing but over my head).

The engine is called Purity, by Victor/vi/V-OS, and uses .txt files, which are then parsed and rendered in a standard HTML/CSS format. You can ‘automatically’ interlink files using a markdownesque convention of symbols and brackets in the middle of text. So writing #[music] in the middle of a sentence would automatically create a link to music.txt, if that file/page exists.

I’ve been using it to put together a personal wiki / commonplace book, really enjoying it’s slight esotericism and constraints as a way to drill into the connective tissues between different ideas (wiki style).

Here’s an excerpted summary, from the readme.md:

Text files written in the appropriate format are parsed through Purity 's multi-layered parser into PHP objects called artifacts . Each artifact corresponds to a page, and once populated, is parsed into its html counterpart.

In short, Purity is a single-template content management system, made for (me, but also) programmers / people minimally experienced in web dev who:

  1. Don’t want to deal with creating their own parsing system.
  2. Want to create a wiki-site / have a consistent page layout.
  3. Want to use a lightweight, simple system.
  4. Want to retain control over how things look and behave.

Recommend giving it a spin!

3 Likes
#204

Hey Vi’s a friend of mine! Purity is pretty much a static php version of Oscean, or at least how Oscean used to work. I’m happy to see you using it!

1 Like
#205

2 posts were merged into an existing topic: “Stupid Questions” in Design

#206

I’m considering setting up a webpage/blog with a totally minimal look/feature set. I’d like to dump sound snippets (could be soundcloud streaming, but suggestions are welcome), and have some lines of text to accompany each snippet.

Any suggestions for what to use?

I’d like the minimum amount of effort to set up and post, but willing to make some effort or pay to keep it totally clean and ad free etc. I have some basic coding experience but would like to save (almost) all music related time for the music making.

#207

building my own website with Jekyll was remarkably simple. Perhaps you could use Bandcamp or Soundcloud (ahh, just noticed you already thought of this) embeds for the music aspect?

1 Like
#208

Thanks! I have a feeling that might be the way to go. Setting up a simple script for posts would probably be a low enough threshold. I didn’t get your link to work, but would love to see!

What do you do about hosting? I’ll look into Jekyll (and perhaps my question is answered above).

Hoping to finally get some music out there…

#209

I wrote a little about the process of setting up my website here. The short of it is I used GitHub Pages to host the site, and bought my domain name through Hover.

2 Likes
#210

Perfect - that looks a lot like what I am aiming for. Thank you for this, and all the other useful posts on here!

Edit:
Jekyll seems a great fit for me. Spent some time today setting it up. Wish I had a Linux/Unix machine handy, but got it running quite easily with the new Windows Bash utilities (Windows subsystem for Linux, WSL) with Ubuntu on Windows, on my partner’s desktop. Just ran the quick-start guide, but that already looks close to what I want. Looking into the audio embedding next. Then I need a name, and the hosting :-).

1 Like
#211

I’m a little in two minds to post a link to another publishing platform, one which I have recently been given the task/opportunity of shaping the future direction of the platform. I’ll also preface this with my opinion: if you have the time and capacity to self publish on your own platform using open source tools I absolutely think you should, it’s a rewarding and long-term solution.

In saying that, another potential outlet for you is http://vocal.media .

I can say first hand that the owners of the platform absolutely have their hearts and intents in the right place and believe in creating a quality space for thoughtful expression and a positive impact on the web. Secondarily to that, there is a commerce model similar to patreon or twitch, where readers can tip creators a buck or two for their effort and there is a token amount of money paid per-read. Everyone involved is super cautious about being remotely close to sketchy business practices or things like invasive advertising.

I’d absolutely love to hear anyone’s opinion on what could make Vocal a better citizen of the web as I’m in a place to make that happen. There’s a more landing-page type intro at http://creators.vocal.media

2 Likes
#212

Apologies if this has been brought up and/or answered before, I haven’t read through all the history yet.

What are folks using for blogs that involve audio or video these days?

Is SoundCloud / Vimeo still the best choice? Are there any self-hosted (or self managed) options that are easy-enough-to-manage, cost-effective solutions that don’t rely on a third party?

Or are we still in a place where one would be best off hosting those kinds of files via S3 anyways?

1 Like
#213

Do people here have an opinion on Ello? I have a nearly empty ello and a completely empty wordpress trying to decide which to start using, kind of surprised there’s been little to no discussion of it—is there a reason for that I’m missing?

2 Likes
#214

Ello was widely marketted at its beginning as (one of many) “Facebook replacement” website, which made it fail horribly at what it tried to acheive. I think it kind of explain where it’s at now, as this sort of weird network that no one really uses. They rebranded themselves mutliple times since then as a “creators network” but despite their efforts I still don’t see anyone using them, and fail to see their specificity / potential advantages compared to hosting your own site and trying to link people back to it on bigger and more effecient or smaller and more interestingly constrained available platforms / forums etc.

This being said, maybe Ello is great now and I’m missing a change in the community, last time I went there it still was a dead zone faking some kind of cool factor though.

2 Likes
#215

Quick question for wordpress users. What plugins or tools are you using to play audio on your site? I’m launching a site soon that will have a monthly half-hour music show.

#216

I haven’t hosted any audio with WP so maybe this isn’t exactly an answer to your question but, if I was going to serve audio I’d do through another service like SoundCloud or BandCamp. There may be other sites that host podcasts.

The pros from my perspective would be:

  • better performance from a second server dedicated to streaming audio
  • easier since you wouldn’t need to add any extra tooling to WP
  • wider reach since your audio could be hosted across two services

There’s a few cons:

  • you have to deal with another service
  • you may give up some control of your media
  • you have to work within the bounds of media streaming service
3 Likes
#217

I’ve been considering ways to overhaul my current website, since I feel it’s a tad plain.

My current train of thought is to build a site entirely around hand drawn elements/scanned art. I’d like to do something similar to this, just maybe a bit more sophisticated.

So I’m working in Cargo. Overall I enjoy its aesthetic, however it can sometimes be a little wonky. I’m experimenting with an empty template, and trying to add elements into columns to get spacing correct, with mixed results. I’m especially concerned about layout on mobile. Also, I’m not seeing a way to make separate portions of an image act as links, which could really complicate spacing/sizing.

Has anyone worked in a similar style before? What platform did you use? Any techniques I should keep in mind if I move forward with this?

#218

I’m not entirely sure if this fits in this thread but I just had to share. So, as an experiment in, huh, let’s call it “minimalism”, I’ve rebuilt our cooking blog in vanilla C99.

Live: https://grimgrains.com/site/home.html
Sources: https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Grimgrains

It’s just a handful of small C files, it wasn’t too hard to do, and I loved it so much that I might gradually migrate my other sites as well.

3 Likes
#219

Is that just an image map?
Lately I’ve been toying with the decidedly unhip / unpopular idea of just using an image map for the front page of my rebuilt site. I remember seeing a “responsive image map” plug-in somewhere.
Or just vanilla old school simple HTML, maybe linking to a blogging platform if I want a page to work as a blog with RSS.
I’m kind of a brutalist / minimalist at heart when it comes web sites though. When something pops up or even something changes when I mouse over, I just want to move on. I realize that puts me in a very small minority. I like simple, both as a user and a maker.
(Which is why I soured on wordpress. OTOH squarespace DIDN’T have things I needed eg supporting self-hosted video. I need so little of what these platforms provide but none seem to have all of the few things I DO need unless I just through hoops).

#220

Thanks for this thread! I‘ve got my nightmachines.tv website running on tumblr. I don‘t really need the whole social media blog thing though and also I don‘t want to be dependent on this service. I really just want a simple site to serve as a hub for my online activities.

So I looked into static site generators now and found Publii, which seems easy and simple enough for me to use with my existing web hosting package which I’ve been paying for for years, without actually using it.

There is just one thing that I would like to carry over from my tumblr site which I don’t know how to do: redirects. For example visiting https://nightmachines.tv/youtube will redirect to my YouTube channel URL. I’ve got quite a lot of those redirect URLs in the format above, which are posted on various online forums, etc. so I would really like to keep them as they are so people can still visit those links and be redirected properly as usual.

How can I do that with my own web hosting? Do I just create a folder nightmachines.tv/youtube/ with an index.html file in there that redirects to my YouTube channel URL?

EDIT: Found a solution. Create an .htaccess file in the root directory with 301 redirects to other URLs, as described here:

2 Likes