Blogging platforms

[howthenightcame]

Yeah, I’m getting an error too, although I switched to Opera recently and the VPN can be a bit fickle…

[jasonw22]

DNS doesn’t propagate every where at the same rate, so not surprising that a few can’t see it quite yet.

Working for me, and it’s a great Hello World! Thank you for pointing to the resources that turned the light bulb on for you. When you’re as distant from the early days as I’ve grown to become, it can become difficult to know what to tell a newcomer, especially since conditions have changed quite a bit since those days.

[zebra]

fwiw, i am also in the no-DNS-rez bucket, couple different access points in illinois. but, looking forward.

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BTW, while looking at static SSGs, one i came across is eleventy. i didn’t use it but it seems pretty nice.

(the world of OSS web platform development/promotion seems so, so weird.)

[LLK]

It’s super cute and pure. Nice conclusion to all this mess we talked about!

[smutek]

I’ve found Wordpress to be a security nightmare. Then again, I gave up on it a few years ago. I’m guessing there are strategies and configurations that reduce wordpress security issues?

With regards to WordPress security. Disabling the “admin” account is a good idea. It’s a regular target for automated attacks because it’s created by default on most installations.

There’s other things one can do, but my experience has been that the basics will take most average users a very long way. Use a unique, secure password, keep plugins and core WordPress updated, and remove plugins you aren’t using.

[jasonw22]

Much as I love all the varied advice in this thread, I also like this idea: just write HTML. No generators, no tools, nothing fancy at all. Really. Nothing.

More on this:
http://john.ankarstrom.se/html/

It’s been mentioned a few times in this thread already, but I just ran across that blog post this morning and thought it belonged here.

[LLK]

That’s mostly what I’m trying to end up doing but having an interface for editing different pages, blog posts and stuff and not write directly into the html for every new post kind of matters to so I’m quite confused as to why it becomes so complicated all of the sudden as soon as you want that aspect on top of a simple html / php / css layout.

[jasonw22]

confused as to why it becomes so complicated

Multiple files depend on each other, creates dependencies. Something has to tie it all together. The SSG that @zebra links above (eleventy) seems like a pretty simple way to do it.

Or, skip the SSG, use a desktop editor, get over any objections you have about writing directly into HTML (why is that a problem?) and give up on layout consistency (embrace quirky diversity) and you have dropped a great deal of complexity.

Nothing comes for free, really.

I still think either approach above is safer than exposing a janky scripting engine that gives write access to a database accessibile from the web. Wordpress just feels like a bad idea to me, but obviously many people use it every day. It’s just not for me (after many years of using it).

[LLK]

Yeah I’ve coded multiple websites with little to 0 knowledge so quirky diversity has always been my way of doing things and in fact I was looking for some sanity to tidy up things a bit ^^. I need a not html based system for posting because I’m not gonna be the only one writing things on the future sites I’ll code.

Yeah nothing comes for free that I understood already, it took a lot of time and effort to get to the fairly limited point where I am today! Anyhow, I’ll try the various options discussed here and see what works best for my way of thinking.

[alanza]

Every time I have to physically type </p> a little part of me dies. One reason to use an SSG (which, honestly are desperately trying to be uncomplicated, but are written by people who Are Good At Building Websites)—at least my reason—is just a good ole Maxine Waters Reclaiming My Time.

[jasonw22]

Which is great!

Before SSGs and Markdown we used text editor macros to speed things up.

Just saying that if the modern methods aren’t clicking for folks, there are less shiny/new ways and means that work just fine.

[alanza]

I definitely added a good ole imap ,/ </<C-X><C-O> to my init.vim this week

[Funch]

I’m just guessing, but it seems to me that if a clever hacker desires to hack one particular blog, they will find a way regardless of platform, especially since most of us non code tech folks aren’t big on keeping up to date with security patches.

Am I wrong?

[jasonw22]

Yes.

Most “hackers” have no idea what they are doing, and are following instructions and/or using downloaded rootkits that are pre-programmed. They’re pulling the trigger, not manufacturing the gun. PHP, WordPress, and MySQL have been favorite targets of the so-called gun makers for years.

Other targets have also been popular. Operating systems and web servers are certainly juicy targets. But for various reasons Unix based operating systems and open source web servers have proven easier to defend than PHP and WordPress. MySQL would be relatively secure if you weren’t attaching PHP to it.

[infovore]

if you have surround installed, you’ll find that ‘tag’ is a motion inside it, so cst will work for “change surrounding tag” or ysst will work for “wrap line in tag”, eg, ysstp[enter] will wrap a line in a paragraph tag.

(I only say this because you seem pretty confident with vim)

[alanza]

this is a very good point! I do have surround, but I hadn’t considered the possibility of writing a thing and THEN putting it inside tags, that’s clever!

[jlmitch5]

I’ve been porting a few sites recently to Hugo. I have enjoyed it; it is almost the opposite of an SSG like Gatsby, in that, because it’s a precompile Go binary, there’s no plugin structure (which can be a pain) and no arbitrary code execution (which isn’t); instead, you Just Write Templates. As somebody who likes templating languages, and has done deep dark things with them in the past, I’m fine with this. I like it not because I like Go specifically, but because it’s a cross-platform binary, rather than a ton of node_modules . Also, given nobody’s really solved incremental build, the promise of a platform that is fast - like, bullet-fast - means rebuilding the whole site isn’t a chore. It can be eccentric in places, but I’ve enjoyed it.

I agree with this based on my experience of Hugo. One other thing I’d add is it’s really nice that the pages Hugo renders have very little cruft…what is rendered is very simple to parse in the inspector.

Something like react and various css-in-js solutions is that they treat the DOM as something to compile to, rather than something semantic that can be written itself. Of course there are benefits to that approach (it is really quite nice working with everything being in JSX at work with a team of other devs), but it definitely doesn’t feel as satisfying as writing something where 100% of the code that’s being executed you’ve written (or is generated in a comprehensible way) and understand without a huge slew of dependencies.

[infovore]

That’s the markup in “markup language”. You write copy, and then mark-it-up, as if all your HTML tags were magic highlighter pens. I’ll write some elements as I go - links, emphasis, blockquotes - but often more structural stuff will come once I’m done with prose.

[neauoire]

Instead of using markup, I went with LISP as a templating language(I don’t have a build step, it’s parsed and rendered on the fly), I don’t think I’ve seen that used often but it’s really neat thing, something to consider

When dealing with dynamic data, like pulling the name of the current page and writing it down, it’s pretty efficient. This is what it looks like.

[carl]

I happened to have been on your wiki for the first time yesterday. Pretty cool workflow and setup, I must say!

I tend to do most of my writing in org-mode, a super powerful program hidden inside Emacs. One of the things I’ve loved about Emacs is how extensible it is with LISP scripts. LISP is so expressive and powerful!