#178

so i’ve been following this thread closely from the start. i’d been kicking the idea around of having my own blog for years now. i hadn’t had one since xanga (!!!) which i stopped using when i was like 18 or 19.

i ended up building an okay site on cargo, but then decided i wanted more control over it than what they offered. did tons of research and decided the most logical place to start was to purchase a domain and go from there. bought a domain for $3 (free hosting included) via an old friend’s web hosting company. now i think i’ll try to rebuild the (very simple) site i made on cargo inside a more powerful website builder. not sure which i’ll use, considering i have no coding experience outside of copy-pasting other people’s code! :smile: any recommendations for intuitive yet powerful website builders would be appreciated. i have no real web experience outside of a few old geocities pages i made when i was like 12, but i do have some design experience.

anyway, just wanted to say thanks for starting the thread and giving me the motivation to finally make the blog i’ve been thinking of for the past 5 or 6 years. <3

#179

I’m crazy about org mode as well. I decided not to go entirely down the Emacs rabbit hole, and so I don’t use Emacs & Org for everything, but I really enjoy writing in org mode. I use Spacemacs, with the Vim key bindings.

I’m working on converting one of my WordPress blogs to a flat file / static site and had been mostly set on Gatsby. Folks here in this thread seemed to be fond of Hugo so I gave it a look and was excited to see that Hugo supports org files. This is great because my goal is to write and publish from org mode. (I do know I can publish directly to a variety of formats from Org mode as well)

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#180

I updated the top post with links to most of the resources discussed below. Let me know if I’ve miscategorized anything—in particular I wasn’t really clear on what a CMS is beyond (excuse my French) non-technical-“friendly” middleware bloat, so the line between something like that and WordPress is a little blurry to me.

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#181

Hugo does support basic Org-mode features, but it’s hardly complete (I’ve added a couple of commits to the Go library Hugo uses, so I’m very aware of its limitations). Currently I use ox-hugo, an excellent Emacs library that does everything I need.

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#182

Maybe one day I might move to Hugo as well. How’s generating an RSS file from Hugo? That would be pretty essential to me (and I’d invite everybody who writes a blog to have an RSS feed, or something comparable).

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#183

I don’t know about Hugo but I imagine it can’t be too bad. In Jekyll it’s as easy as gem 'jekyll-feed' in Gemfile and then {% feed_meta %} in the <head> of your default layout file.

#185

Shameless self promotion here…

For those that like lightweight stuff, I wrote a simple org to HTML parser in ANSI C. It is written using a literate programming style in (you guessed it) org.

You can see a sample of the output here, where it is applied on itself:

http://paulbatchelor.github.io/res/worgle/sorg_toc.html

Here is exported HTML output on the shell script used to generate that page:

http://paulbatchelor.github.io/res/worgle/mkpage.html

For the actual code, Sorg is a part of a larger project of mine called Worgle, a lightweight org tangler for writing literate org mode programs. You can find the code here:

The actual org file can be found here:

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#186

Totally fine. Most templates have default index.xml files, but they’re easily generated and customised (as I’ve done - sticking only posts of a particular category into RSS).

Wordpress treated RSS as a kind of special case, it always felt; Hugo is more like Movable Type or Blogger, in that RSS is Just Another Template, and you just code it like you would any old template.

You can stick the header metadata in manually, or using a magic incantation, too, so that’s taken care of.

#187

Long ago I was a professional (ha!) Drupal developer, so I maintained my own personal website with Drupal for a while. Way overkill for simple portfolio and blog sites. I’ve been using self-hosted Wordpress for the last 8 years or so. I’ve never had a problem with security by following all the recommended practices: keep WP and all plugins and themes up to date, use the minimum number of plugins possible for the functionality you need, and delete all unused plugins and themes. (If a plugin’s PHP files are on your server, they may still be exploitable even if the plugin is disabled).

I’m a geek who checks the web server logs several times a week. I am amazed by the number of attacks from script kiddies that come in every single day. I see attacks against WP, Drupal, misconfigured Linux file permissions, and many I don’t recognize. I tweaked my web server configuration (Apache .htaccess file) to add extra layers of security for many common exploit attempts I see. Example: I block all access to wp-login and wp-admin pages (except from my own IP address). I also block access to the wp-json API and xmlrpc. There exist security plugins that will do these things, but that means having more plugins installed that themselves might have vulnerabilities.

After reading this thread I’m likely to switch to a static website generator. If you want a fast website, much of the complexity of running WP is setting up and maintaining the caching infrastructure. Using a static website generator will remove tons of complexity in my configuration around performance and security and backups.

I use namecheap for domain registrations and dreamhost for web hosting. I still plan to use them with whatever static website generator I end up choosing.

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#188

Hi!

After seeing some example sites on this thread I decided to go with Cargo as my platform. I’ve created sort of a portfolio website to hopefully help me get a job.

Here it is.

However, I recognize that this works best as sort of a cursory overview of a broad picture of what I do, but not so much as a repository of my actual work. I’ve been doing a lot of field recording lately, and it’s got me thinking I’d like to have some sort of audio blog or something to at least gather them all together into one spot. I currently have about 200 sounds on Freesound. I would like to figure out some way to showcase my audio work.

What would be a good way to do that?

Point of reference: Bill Wurtz’ website

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#189

I’ve looked high and low for a good embeddable media player that doesn’t require a 3rd party service. There are certainly a lot of options available but none really provide the same level of quality we’ve grown to expect thanks to the SoundCloud embed. Really curious to hear how folks have addressed this problem.

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#190

What kind of features are you looking for? For whatever it’s worth source is available for the SoundCloud player here (MIT license). On further digging I’m incorrect about this, it appears that their actual HTML5 audio wrapper is referenced by this project as a vendor dependency (@sc/scaudio-controller-html5-player).

#191

Buffering seems to be an issue. I believe there are both server side and client side facets to the problem, but I’m not entirely clear on the solution. I’d be game to start from scratch if I knew which direction to go in. I’m no stranger to JavaScript. Somewhat related is the ability to smoothly scrub around the track.

Secondarily, waveform display is a nifty feature that I appreciate, although many have commented that both the visual and the ability to scrub have altered our relationship to recorded music. (I just happen to enjoy this evolution.)

#192

If you’re OK with some javascript then HOWLER.js (MIT License) and wavesurfer.js (BSD License) might be worth taking a look at

3 Likes
#193

I knew about wavesurfer, but howler looks like it may be the missing piece I needed, I will dig in and report what I find. Thanks!

#194

Another option for waveform display is something like audiowaveform, which precalculates waveform data in a CLI that lets you then render it however you want; particularly useful if you don’t want to load the whole waveform before displaying it. Not an issue with music tracks, but may become an issue as things get longer.

Buffering is increasingly largely taken care of via the HTML5 specs: eg, for video, it’ll smartly buffer, set off multiple buffers if you scrub around, and happily report on the loading state of each of those buffers. That, combined with support across browsers including mobile ones being largely pretty good, means that a combination of presentational js and audio elements should be enough for most cases, or, at least, as a starting point.

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#195

Indeed! Thanks for the recommendation.

Thanks, I was really unclear on this bit.

#196

no worries. happy to talk more via more direct means if you have questions.

#197

I have an idea for a weekly live audio stream that I want to do, with the ability to save prior streams in an archive. I’d prefer to do it on my own site than something like YouTube or Twitch. Does anyone have suggestions for a host/platform that I could set this up on relatively easily?

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#198

As far as I know, streaming yourself would be near impossible depending on the volume of viewers. If it were me, I’d probably go with something like Vimeo Streaming over Twitch or Youtube, though there aren’t exactly a ton of options.

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