#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
#221

hi and happy new year

what would be the best (looking at price and bandwidth) way for me to host sample libraries on my website for people to download? drum samples i created, free download not commercial

i’m using a wordpress blog. would prefer a free method of sharing.

cheers

#222

How much gigabytes are you looking to host? Have you thought about Dropbox? Free up to a point and easy to use.

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#223

and if you don’t want to buy into another one of those big corporations that monopolize the internet, there’s a bunch of alternatives.
I can recommend sync.com but even better is in my experience nextcloud, there’s many providers for that since it’s open source and it’s usually easy to find one with a free plan close to you.

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#224

i don’t know if that is usually the case in the Netherlands, but your ISP might include some public storage space in your contract ?

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#225

thanks all! isp doesn’t have storage space in my plan.

i installed sync and will use that and dropbox as backup if needed.

#226

Haha got my first WP install hacked. Despite of all the precautions.
It’s a weird one though. The only thing that happened is that the title of the page now says something about it having been hacked. Nothing else to see…

#227

I was scrolling through this, I don’t know if you got this sorted or not.

You may be interested in Mixlr.com which allows you to stream and archive your shows exactly like you’re thinking.

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#228

Thanks for the tip. The project ended up turning into a pre-recorded monthly thing which I’m happy with for now, but if I want to revisit the livestream idea I’ll be sure to check this out.

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#229

This is partly related to the Distributed Web thread, but I thought folks on here might find it interesting:

That’s a fairly comprehensive rundown of the sorts of tech I’ve been plugged into for a good while now (IPFS/DNSLink, Git for static site deployement, Ethereum Name Service), but it did clue me into Textile and terminal.co, which seem promising.

3 Likes
#230

I’ve been putting off the hassle of migrating away from Squarespace for a while now. The scary part is (well, there are a few as I haven’t built anything for the web in a good 15 years) migrating my (currently inactive) podcast in a way that keeps it up and available without breaking any links.

I was thinking Indexhibit looks fine, loads fast and can be hosted for cheap. But I’m not savvy enough to understand how much work it might be to take the exported data from Squarespace and shift it to Indexhibit. I don’t really care about the rest of the site being exported, I just want my show / show notes intact.

Anyone have any experience or insight on this sort of move?

https://www.norelcomori.com/podcast

Also, is there something else I should be considering, platform-wise? I’m looking for low maintenance, low rent and not a lot of heavy lifting to get off the ground.

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#231

seeking some recommendations on ecommerce/shop backends to integrate into a small custom site. hopefully simple/cheap which seems hard to come by in this space

#232

if your question doesn’t get much traction here, it might be worth making another top-level thread about this? it’s not entirely obvious from the title “Blogging Platforms” that everyone with knowledge about ecommerce will check this thread.

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#233

What’re you selling? What kind of volume do you expect? How many SKU’s?

#234

art, small everything

#235

The most low tech way to do it is with PayPal buttons. Here’s some friends of mine that didn’t want to shell out for a product or service and wanted to be able to maintain it themselves: https://sioum.com/merch/ PayPal can generate the HTML which you then just drop in.

IMO I would steer you towards something like Bandcamp (if you can rationalize relating it to your music) or even Etsy. I’ve worked with Ecommerce plugins like Shopify and WooCommerce and they are so freaking complicated that paying a small monthly fee or transaction fee is worth the time you save from it.

If I had to choose from anything in this list I’d go with Big Cartel, Squarespace, or the Square Online Store.

(edit: I should add there’s no shame at in linking out to an external site for your shop - just brand it super minimal with a link back to your main site.)

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#236

This is good advice, IMO. I maintain a few WooCommerce sites at work, for instance, and I just… wouldn’t recommend it if you can avoid it. Regular breaking updates, lots of paid add-ons, meh.

PayPal buttons are pretty easy to set up, especially if you don’t even bother with a shopping cart and just have one-click “buy” buttons, zero maintenance required. Squarespace isn’t half bad and extensive CSS customization is easier than you might expect (but it costs money). Bandcamp is extra easy since you’ve already got one.

1 Like
#237

I’ve been searching for an ecommerce solution, building a store for myself. The biggest issue I’ve ran into is BLOAT… I’ve been a long-time Squarespace circle developer/friend of squarespace whatever… Blah I’m done with it, 4.5mb of resource load for a blank page… And there is no way you can reduce it on that platform at least…

Checked out some bigcartel sites this evening… Around 100k of their code… That’s more like it. Of course you can ruin that by slamming it full of images, but I pretty much use SVG and limited numbers of images per-page, at least if the page load is slow it wont just flash a white screen and slow their device down to a crawl while megabytes of data is lazy-loaded. Gah, i’m so sick of the web, bloated mess…

4 Likes
#238

today’s preponderance is RSS readers. i’ve been trying out miniflux.app and curious to hear other preferences. i’m pretty repelled by feedly, which feels overbuilt. for the cli people i found https://newsboat.org

more broadly, i’ve been thinking (too much) about the types of social interaction within various platforms… which of course have some blurry edges:

  • mastodon (/twitter)
  • forum (or historically, bbs)
  • irc (/slack)
  • blog
  • mailing list
  • email

it’s daunting to consider the possibility of trying to engage all of these at once.

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#239

netnewswire might be worth a look if you want a standalone RSS app for mac/ios.

It got bought up some time ago, but it’s now back in the hands of the original developer and is free and open source.

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