I've been yelling about this for years, but please start & own your own blog.
Use webflow, ghost or whatever you like, but wordpress is good enough for most people.
HN audience can likely handle their own, but if ease-of-setup is an issue - I created StartABlog.com to help people do this (and we'll actually set up your site for you for free - https://startablog.com/start).
Own your platform. Own your content. Own your voice. Use everything else as distribution methods - not core dependencies.
I agree. Many years ago I was really happy with medium as a reader. And the feed algorithm was decent enough. By no means the perfect content but for the most part it pushed forward things I was interested in. However, the monetization model turned medium(originally a decent blogging platform) into tumblr and it was a race to the bottom from that point. Any website that asks you to register in order to read a blog post immediately goes on my blacklist.
What is annoying though is that often people who self-host their blogs make the exact same mistake. More and more often I see something that will grab my attention and when I get to the bottom of a blog post, I find something along the lines of "The full guide is available in my free e-book, which you can download from here". And when you click "here", you are greeted with "Please enter your e-mail address". Sure, everyone has a spam-mail type of thing or mailinator or whatever but this is still a terrible thing to do.
It's rather telling that the first thing Medium does is flash a login prompt in your face when landing on one of their pages. At that point I tend to go elsewhere.
I agree there's nothing wrong with it. But does it work? Does Medium make money? It might be, despite the whining, they have it right in that they don't let an expectation of "this is free" ever develop.
That strategy might be better than writing a long-ish blog entry as a teaser, where the reader thinks they are going to get their information for free, only to be told "Psyche! You've actually got to pay for it!"
If the content is of any real value, I'd be more than happy to pay for it with money. 10 bucks? Sure, here you go. A much better option than getting emails such as "20 lessons I learned from my job interview" or whatever.
Everyone says they'd do that, but I find really hard to believe.
I create rare, valuable information that saves people money and headaches. On a good month, 2% of my revenue will come from donations. Usually, it's 0%. At best, it pays for a meal and a beer. This website has 135k page views per month.
If that's how much I get from teaching people how to navigate German bureaucracy, I doubt you'll make anything from your opinions alone.
I dont think you can make money by sharing information to individuals in that sort of way today. There are people that manage to do it (self help books and all) but I dont think people will pay for online content. I can think of 3 ways that this might be monetize able. The first is to put it into a book. People will buy books. The second is targeting businesses. They'll pay for market research etc. And the third is offering consulting services to navigate the beuorocracy based on your expertise. Even if the info is free amd online, some people want to pay, and you'd be making money off of sharing that information.
I insist on keeping the content unconditionally free, and donations don't work, but affiliate marketing does. I help people navigate certain boring purchases, so it lends itself to that sort of monetisation. I'd be recommending those products and services anyway.
Unfortunately, it incentivizes dishonest recommendations and passing ads as content. I chose not to do that, but I know I'd get paid more to recommend the wrong things. Since it's blended into the content, you'd be abusing people's trust in your content. At least banner ads were separate from the text.
I do not offer services either. My goal was to help as many people as possible, and that would go against it. Information should be free, especially when poor people need it the most. I also want the website to run itself. If I wanted to be on the computer full time, I'd just get a job.
Some of us actually do. A quick scroll through my paypal, I've donated somewhere over 1000 euros in the past two years to various foundations and individual content creators.
And having some experience with German bureaucracy and taxes, and also having never lived in Germany nor speaking German, I'm fully aware how convoluted and complicated this can be and I could definitely see myself donating/paying for useful information if I didn't have a good accountant at my disposal.
I agree, on the grand scheme you won't make a whole lot but even with a population of 83 million, even if you add another 1 million like myself, your content still fits a relatively narrow niche. I'd love to give some advice but I honestly have no idea.
You are an exception. If one in 83 unique visitors donated I'd be well off, but it's not the case. I'm a bit tired of people pretending the internet could survive on donations and micropayments.
Affiliate marketing works well for my niche. I wanted to start similar sites about other topics, but if those don't naturally lead to certain purchases, they're extremely hard to effectively monetise.
That's another pattern I really dislike, and deliberately avoid. I don't want to use my content as a bargaining chip to collect emails or what-have-you. I have that luxury because my topic is easily monetised. Most content creators don't.
In general, the internet got incredibly annoying, but I can understand why. Part of it is because we feel entitled to free content. There are few business models that allow people to be rewarded for their work while still offering a product for free. It usually involves selling something the user's data or attention.
I saw the following model work: offer a compilation of your best (or themed xyz..) articles for money. Add that you can mostly find these scattered on the site anyway. Very fair, and people would pay for getting an organized package vs clicking through random posts.
I am personally against it for my website in particular though. I insist on keeping everything on it open and free. Immigration advice should help everyone, not just developers with a generous relocation bonus.
I'd much rather invest the effort into making the content more navigable/discoverable. This is actually what I'm working on right now.
Again though, this is just personal preference for this specific website. Selling packaged information could work. I did buy a motorcycle travel book that was a rehash of the author's YouTube channel.
Maybe you just need to package it differently? I know I've bought Kindle books on similar issues and that there are people who work as consultants doing such things. Not to say that you necessarily want to become a consultant, but you don't even necessarily need to create new content... just stick some of it behind a paywall or in an ebook.
I started writing a reference for long distance motorcycle travel, and that's how I intend to distribute it. I don't expect to make anything from it, but the more linear, prosaic format would fit nicely on a Kindle screen.
The website mentioned above is more of a "visit it when you need it" resource. It's painfully boring to read, as it's written like a plain English instruction manual. It wouldn't be an interesting book.
So you read the full blog post for free, then you get to the bottom and see that they are promoting an e-book free in exchange for an email address and that's terrible to you? Does it piss you off when authors don't give away their books for free as well?
Another easy solution, both for hosting and ownership, is using a static site generator/editor. I like desktop-based visual WYSIWYG tools so i use Publii[0] (example[1], though i really need to write something more :-P or at least move some older articles i had in now-defunct blogs that were hosted by others). I'm not a big fan of the program though (i dislike how it is based on Electron while not even taking advantage of it being based on Electron - e.g. no full WYSIWYG and not even an in-app site preview - and the UX has all the issues i dislike by modern apps like a design that pretends i'm using an oversized tablet) but it is the only one that does what i want without requiring me to enter cryptic codes (ok, markdown isn't so cryptic but i really prefer using WYSIWYG tools), having inline images/galleries and some (primitive) site management while generating static HTML (though a bit too heavy and i really dislike the themes... but again, not much of a choice and the tech used to make the themes look like a PITA so i avoid touching it for now).
Personally, I prefer a good ol' CMS. I manage my website by visiting a URL. I edit the content in a WYSIWYG editor, and it goes live when I press "Save". I don't need to install anything on my machine to write new content.
With a properly set up cache, your website will be serving static files anyway.
Well, this is claims to be a CMS too though it seems to be more mainly for blogs than something too generic. I guess you are supposed to make "posts" for individual pages and use the custom menus to make navigation. But personally i only wanted the blog feature so i never bothered setting up the menus or anything like that.
+1 for Publii. I struggled to get non-technical users to use a static site generator like Hugo but the WYSIWYG tools of Publii made it very easy to move users over.
I love Publii! Best combination of a WYSIWYG editor and static site gen. Beautiful themes and built in publishing for github pages, netlify, AWS S3, etc.
I’m a big fan of Jekyll, and it meets your A and B requirements out of the box. Hugo lit a fire under them with regard to build speed, and the 4.x line is a huge speed boost. It does syntax highlighting with Rouge, and the default Markdown engine is Kramdown.
I never found a solution for requirement C that I liked, so I’ve been building my own. It’s still very rough and not exactly in shape to publish, but its capabilities already by far exceed my previous solution: https://github.com/okeeblow/DistorteD
I left my WIP site running (‘jekyll serve’ using WEBrick) on my laptop and I’m going to bed, so these links may get hugged or just crash and become unavailable, but here you can get an idea of what I’ve been playing with for multi-image layouts: https://beta.cooltrainer.org/distorted/
And on the index page is a random smattering of some other media types I’ve been testing, like support for image-rendering SVGs, TTFs, and old DOS-codepage Nfos, mbedding PDFs, etc: https://beta.cooltrainer.org/
You might check out mine!! Been waiting ages to share this.
You create a folder of markdown files, you have 2 template HTML files (index and blog post), and you run my program (MMSSG). It compiles the index page with a list of all the posts, then renders the HTML for each markdown file into a separate blog post. That's it. Handles the linking and everything for you.
It’s all open source and the templates are already made, modify to your heart’s content. It's also REALLY simple, so should be easy to understand my code.
It’s what I used to generate my blog, and there’s instructions in the readme to get going quickly :) It's super simple and I really love it. This is my post about it, and the github link:
Edit: Just reverted a couple of commits from a WIP plugins feature that I got bored of and quit, and created new versions of the binaries (Linux and Windows are untested). Also updated this comment with a better description.
I'm going to bed, feel free to respond with any feedback! Thanks for looking :)
I started collecting my writings, all in Markdown and some HTML. Just a bunch of folders as topics, and then write markdown files inside them.
Then, a week or so ago, I threw in Jekyll and now they are published as the cheapest form of Digital Garden for me and hopefully, my family - https://oinam.fyi
Regarding (c), have a look at this jekyll theme [1] for photo galleries.
Jekyll is really nice to use, but the photo galleries are pretty few and far between.
Disclaimer, I couldn't get this to deploy using Github pages (which is nice) because it uses unsupported plugins. I have it split across two branches and works nicely enough. Certainly the most responsive gallery I've found.
Edit: removed direct link to the person's pictures :)
Since you mentioned Rust and since this is turning into a "suggest a static site generator" thread, I'll mention Zola: https://github.com/getzola/zola , although I can't say how well it works for photo galleries.
I have also been looking for something like this for a while and I can't find it.
All the static HTML gallery generators seem to be focused on dumping all images into them at single time. They don't have RSS feeds, or a convenient option to add entries one at a time as you go along like you would in a blog.
On the other hand, blog generators generally aren't optimized for mostly displaying images (e.g. automatic resizing, thumbnail view, etc.)
> What's the best static site generator that meets the following requirements: a) Doesn't use node.js.
So even if a node.js solution would be the best solution, you would still not want to use it? Why?
Anyway, I'd recommend to write a static site generator yourself. It isn't very difficult, you get exactly what you need, and you never get stuck because someone abandoned their project or doesn't want to fix the bugs you reported.
Not OP, but asking for a static site generator implies simplicity. Node is pretty famous for generally having large dependency trees and churn with tooling.
It doesn't seem that strange to want to avoid it for such a project.
Not the author. But my main concern would be maintainability issues from package churn. But also that I don't enjoy working with JS and its tooling. It is so common a choice now so it might be worth calling out explicitly.
It's in Python (pip install...), it uses a very complete and flexible Markdown library (never found a language that it didn't support, but syntax highlighting is in a plugin), and is a site generator, not a blog generator.
But it takes some up-front programming to define your site structure.
Any particular reason for "Doesn't use node.js", given that a static site generator isn't going to use the runtime once the site is (re)generated so you don't have any efficiency or stability concerns from your reader's PoV?
(I'm considering node for a personal project or two, though as much as possible avoiding the mess that NPM seems to be as the projects are small enough I can manage the few dependencies manually, so insight into pitfalls I'm not aware of could be useful)
Some time ago I asked myself the same question. Ideally I wanted not so much a generator but rather something that is completely self-contained. Essentially add a markdown or html file, commit and move on. Surprisingly enough I couldn't find anything that does that so I ended up building one myself. Doesn't support syntax highlighting at the moment but I've considered looking into it. Perhaps I should open source it and see if someone wants to give a hand, who knows...
Pelican [1] works this way, and I love it for my blog/website.
I write a post in markdown, commit and run a pelican-provided script that uploads the generated site to the hosting server. The script-running could be done with a hook.
> I write a post in markdown, commit and run a pelican-provided script that uploads the generated site to the hosting server. The script-running could be done with a hook.
This is exactly what I don't want to deal with. Sure, I could use a ci service but this is a typical case of over-engineering a simple problem.
Say Microsoft decides to kill github pages. OK, fine, next.
Now picture Netlify changing some policy, adding some pricing or killing off a service which you need(unlikely but not entirely impossible). You have to setup the whole thing all over again with someone else, be it circleci, jenkins, gitlab, etc. Though in different contexts, I've been in similar situations and by the third time I usually want to murder someone.
You're overestimating Netlify's build tooling. It literally just spins up a virtual machine with Node on it, clones your repo, and does an `npm install && npm build`. When that finishes it copies the output directory to a server to host. Moving to a different host is a case of finding something that will let you do the `npm install && npm build` bit, which practically every modern hosting company does these days. Netlify's automated builds aren't even close to the complexity of running a CI process.
If you wanted to you could run the build process locally and commit the output HTML and CSS files to the repo, and the build process wouldn't even be necessary. You'd just need to copy the output files to a server using a git commit hook.
Which brings us back to my original question: Why????? Why bother doing all that and relying on third party tooling, regardless of how simple it is to run a command? If this is what I wanted, I could write a 5 line shell script on a raspberry pi which can do just that.
I DON'T want to do either of that. Add a file, push it and know everything has worked.
The reason I have things set up to deploy from github to Netlify is mainly because I'm not the only contributor to things I work on. As soon as you work in a team it's far simpler to have a central service that people push to doing the builds, especially if you don't want contributors to have access to the host server.
I'm not questioning the scenario where you have multiple contributors. This is one of the major reasons why the concept of ci/cd exists.
The topic of the thread is __specifically__ personal blogs/pages and my point is as strong as ever: having to deal with builds, cis, for your personal page is pure bs.
Netlify simply adds an abstraction layer over a task which I don't want to be performed __AT_ALL__. I don't care if I'm doing it myself or someone else is on a server somewhere on my behalf. It is utterly stupid to have all that to serve a static file.
”Caddy is both a flexible, efficient static file server and a powerful, scalable reverse proxy. Use it to serve your static site with compression, template evaluation, Markdown rendering, and more.”
So write HTML and push that directly to your webserver.. what do you want from the world haha
Forgive me for suggesting the first thing that popped into mind, could you run the generator script locally and also push the /public dir which your server then serves directly?
> So write HTML and push that directly to your webserver.
A much better option. Still have to deal with the de-facto boilerplate of every html file: head, body, header, footer. Which is why I built something that does it in the browser for me.
> Forgive me for suggesting the first thing that popped into mind, could you run the generator script locally and also push the /public dir which your server then serves directly?
Same as CI - adds an extra step to the process. But as I said, services like Netlify come and go and the news might slip by you and catch you off guard. If I had to go down that road, I have ~10 raspberry pi's 6 of which are currently booted up. A 5 line shell script could easily do that. But again - I see no point in doing it if there's no need for it.
> A much better option. Still have to deal with the de-facto boilerplate of every html file: head, body, header, footer. Which is why I built something that does it in the browser for me.
I find it fascinating that you'd go to all the trouble to build what essentially breaks down to a custom static site generator but you then balk at using an off the shelf one with a build script.
The difference is that ci-type of solutions might end up requiring maintenance for a million and one reasons. This won't and building it took me roughly the same amount of time it would take me to navigate through a ci-solution and test that I've set it up correctly(3 hours in total).
Something must turn the .md into HTML, and something must also publish it. You end up with 2 choices: the above one, or sth like GitLab pages, where you need to provide a CI script but then can just commit & push.
Yep, you're right, something must turn the markdown into an html. In my case, I let the browser do that and by doing so, I avoid the hassle around builds, cis which is what I didn't want to deal with. For something so brutally simple anyway.
”Caddy is both a flexible, efficient static file server and a powerful, scalable reverse proxy. Use it to serve your static site with compression, template evaluation, Markdown rendering, and more.”
Redirects may have been wrong form? This was top link in Google and DDG for ‘caddy markdown’... but to your point, it didn’t respond. So I figured right page based off of the snippet and visited status. Right form of redirect should update the index, no longer show the old page.
Did something like that years and years ago as a learning project. Works great! Drop in some markdown and you’re done. The source is only a few hundred lines; no build or package manager.
So you're talking about a static site generator implemented in javascript in the browser? I don't see why it wouldn't work as long as the webserver supported directory listings, but it would obviously completely break for clients not using javascript.
The simplest solution I've used is to just have a Makefile that indexes and stitches together pages using cat/sed/ls. Sure, you have to run make (and possibly make upload if you're not doing it live), but it's not so bad.
Essentially yes, this is what my personal site is currently running(though it is empty as it stands, largely due to time constraints). Except I wrote it in Dart because I abhor javascript with a passion, even if the final output is still javascript.
> Ideally I wanted not so much a generator but rather something that is completely self-contained. Essentially add a markdown or html file, commit and move on.
As I said, make it fully self-contained without relying on "builds" or any other mumbo-jumbo, the way you would with sphinx or hugo or whatever. Essentially add a new html or markdown file, put whatever you want in it, let's call it "something.md". Then add a link from your index page to "#/something.md" and not deal with builds or styling or whatever, simply commit and move on and have it take care of all the html. And in the case of markdown, parse it and render it as html on the client.
Web server with built-in support for QUIC, HTTP/2, Lua,
Markdown, Pongo2, HyperApp, Amber, Sass(SCSS), GCSS, JSX,
BoltDB (built-in, stores the database in a file, like
SQLite), Redis, PostgreSQL, MariaDB/MySQL, rate limiting,
graceful shutdown, plugins, users and permissions.
I searched for something similar. Considered Caddy and Nginx/Apache with markdown plugins, but wanted to be able to create and edit pages/files and made a small script with Flask instead.
Not a static site generator (if that's what you mean), but I personally went with Grav: https://getgrav.org/. It's a small CMS written in modern PHP where the content is defined and managed via markdown files (so no need for a database). You have a bunch of themes and plugins directly installable through the admin interface and the documentation is good.
It doesn't seem like an arbitrary restriction to me though. The node.js ecosystem is a complete disaster if you're not tuned in to it, and if I want a fire and forget blog generated from static files then that's the complete opposite of node.js where you have to unfuck the imbred dependencies that form in the bloated, always changing ecosystem when someone decides to go CADT with their components.
I'm one of them, the most frustrating thing with working with modern JavaScript is definitely the ecosystem rather than the language. React Native is particularly an issue, the recommended react-native-community geolocation library just flat-out fails on many Android vendor's phones, and the replacement someone made for it still isn't exactly reliable (although to be fair, it only broke on OnePlus devices which were later patched so it could well have been an phone-level issue).
I get it, I shouldn't complain about the quality of open-source and freely offered software and the onus is on me to audit the libraries I put in my code, but blimey some people take an awful lot of liberty with the truth when they claim something is "production ready". I reckon a lot of people just build some rushed, poorly-written JavaScript libraries so they can pad out their CVs as an "open-source contributor" but the only thing they're actually contributing is a massive headache for muppets like me who foolishly use said code in their own projects.
I have set non-technical people up using Markdown+pelican. I have no idea what made us use Pelican instead of something else, nor if those advantages still hold weight, but it’s been great.
My brother wanted to start writing about his recovery process[0] and asked me to help him make a blog. He said he wanted to learn a bunch of stuff so he could be self-sufficient enough to not have to ask me/"need my permission" to go from written post to publish. He had already bought a domain that came with some bottom-of-the-barrel free shared hosting service. I pointed him towards Wordpress, he set up the entire thing himself, and now has a sense of ownership he really appreciates.
For me, Jekyll, Github Pages, and a couple lines of CSS were nothing[1], but there should be as little barrier to entry as possible if you have something to say
Being selective about plugins is so important. When I first started working independently, I was blown away by how much work could be had just saving people from the misery of Wordpress plugins. Not glorious work, but wow, you could work until the sun is gone just churning out plugin updates for Wordpress site owners.
Almost all of the problem plugins weren’t even that important to the site. Someone just added it at some point and left it, maybe for years. Then there you are running old code with known exploits. Of course you’re going to get hacked.
Although I didn’t enjoy that work, I did love how excited and happy my clients were that their sites were fixed. You can’t measure the misery and anxiety some people feel when stuff goes wrong with their websites. Fixing that, with php and Wordpress no less, was a great feeling.
All that is to say that I agree; only adopt plugins you really need with a reputation you’re comfortable with.
Install Wordfence. The free version is enough. Regularly checks the site for dodgy files, blocks spammers and offers 2FA for login. Big fan since it prevented multiple hack attempts to several of my sites.
I'll add my experience as a counterpoint -- I've been running my own wordpress blog for several years now, and the amount of effort involved has been surprisingly high. I've had to tune apache numerous times (seriously, who wants to tune apache in order to write a blog), I have to regularly defend it against malicious traffic, and I've had to manually fix the installation after a plugin installation prevented wordpress from starting. Plus since it's a one-off, I'm not convinced that I could bring it back if anything were to happen to the server it runs on.
For a project blog I used hosted wordpress, and I found that to be a pretty good middle ground. Honestly I can't think of a case where running your own wordpress server is a good use of your time.
One thing you really miss when leaving Medium is the audience. It is easy for people search Medium for a topic they are interested in and find it within the first couple of articles.
If you are trusting Google to be your entry point for traffic you have to play all kinds of gross games with your content for SEO purpose and if you are adding value to an already well explored topic there will be someone out there trouncing you in SEO.
Medium was initially brilliant because it solved this by aggregating content in a slick website, with great search, and it still does a decent job of showing you new content based on your interests. I think this is a part of why its so frustrating. When I go on the home page I see a bunch of articles I would want to read, go to click them and get paywalled.
But then the money men came. I'm not convinced there is anything out there like Medium in terms of ease-of-use, ability to get your content in front of others, good at surfacing new content you would want to read and also Medium pay content authors really really well.
> and also Medium pay content authors really really well.
This to me is the key thing, and what Medium's stated goal was: to re-think the way we pay for content. You may feel fine giving away your content for free, but it's perfectly reasonable for people to want to be paid for the value they create, and I like Medium's model way better than advertising.
> One thing you really miss when leaving Medium is the audience. It is easy for people search Medium for a topic they are interested in and find it within the first couple of articles.
Not sure I'd agree with this. I've tried looking for interesting articles on Medium recently, and it seems that once you want to go outside the 'make money online/internet nomad/political rants' genre, finding anything interesting becomes real difficult.
It'a slso quite hard to find things from unknown/unpopular authors there too. Remember looking through a few Medium Digests and counting how popular each creator was, and found there was a huge bias towards people with large social media followings/existing fanbases in what was being promoted in those newsletters and on the Medium front page.
Agreed, but don't host your own wordpress unless you're planning to run a botnet. Everyone I know who's hosted their own wordpress in the past two decades has eventually regretted it.
I upvoted this because it's also my experience. It's so frequent that I've stopped telling people when I discover their Wordpress is hacked, because half the time they don't care (!), and the rest of the time they beg me to help them fix it for free - instead of paying one of the many WordPress consultants who specialize in fixing hacked WordPress sites.
The most common hack I've seen is one where the admin doesn't even know, because it redirects some visits to their site that have Google in the referrer. Because they rarely Google themselves while logged out of WordPress, they never know every page on their site is redirecting to MyCoolMalwareDroppr.
I don't self-host Wordpress, my blog is a static site made with Jekyll and served by Nginx. A static site ages well.
That said I self-host other services, like Matomo or FreshRSS (also PHP apps that need a database).
The secret is in setting up auto-update policies. All the self-hosted services I host are in Docker and auto-updated [1] even if that means they can break.
Have been doing this for some time and worked great thus far, but granted self-hosting stuff is a continued investment, you can't just leave that server there to bit rot.
> Own your platform. Own your content. Own your voice. Use everything else as distribution methods - not core dependencies.
100% agree. I even went as far as to write my own static-site generator (not that impressive, everyone seems to have one these days), but even hosted blogs are better than using the Mediums of this world.
There are trade-offs though. There is a little bit of on-going effort (and maybe expense) in keeping even an inactive blog going. Medium does take care of that side of things for you.
I strongly agree. I have a (mostly) link blog [0] (for which I wrote the SSG [1]) and do link to Medium articles but am getting more and more tired by the nag-screen that shows up every 5 or so posts after having deleted the medium cookies (again). I guess there is an extension for that, but I am too lazy to install it :-) But a bigger question is for those who publish on Medium: how many people get scared away daily from your articles after hitting the sign up nag screen?
IMO, a really easy way to start would be with a GitHub pages repo[1] or a Neocities site[2]. You really shouldn't need anything more than basic HTML and CSS for most blogs. If you want tags or sidebars or RSS, you can use a static site generator like Jekyll[3], and it's still pretty simple.
I suspect the content on Medium is now sufficiently valued that if Medium doesn't stay around, someone will make sure the content is copied and served somewhere else.
Assuming that Github static pages infrastructure is maintained without breaking CNAMEs for the next half century, and assuming you pay for your domain 50 years in advance, maybe the static website can remain for that long?
Only if your site gets picked up by archive.org though.
(That's only going to happen with static sites, not those which require login or signup, etc.)
Even then your ideas will still effectively disappear because search engines don't appear to crawl archive.org. (If they do it's incomplete - my own past content on archive.org does not get found by specific Google searches.) But perhaps search will change in future.
It's kind of free but your service's landing page requires a domain name and hosting provider, so it's free setup but paid hosting is required (which appears to support multiple companies, not just yours to your credit).
Thanks for the info. Just curious why you would mention webflow next to ghost? Webflow seems like a paid service, and as far as I can see on github it platform not open sourced.
Ghost on the other hand is open source and can be self hosted.
>Own your platform. Own your content. Own your voice.
There's no way to fully own a place on the clearnet. At a minimum, you will have to rent a domain, and most people will rent the hosting as well. Moreover, authorities can seize or block both of those, while payment services can also "cancel" or "deplatform" you if you need them to pay for costs--so much for having a voice on the net.
The only way to own content on the Internet is to publish it in a free, decentralized and anonymous manner--I'm thinking I2P sites, for instance, and even that is subject to attacks that could make it inaccessible.
In any case, I wholewheartedly agree that Medium is not the home for anything worthwhile.
> Own your platform. Own your content. Own your voice. Use everything else as distribution methods - not core dependencies.
Precisely this.
I also have been yelling [0] about hosting your own GitLab, Gitea solution for individuals, companies and open-source organisations which frees you from the mercy of 'centralising everything' in GitHub which is nonsensical.
Medium is essentially centralising and bringing blogs back into the dark ages with paywalls, de-platforming and Google Logins on someone else's blogging site.
Own your code on your servers just like you own your website and blog. If the creator of Wireguard can do it, you can do it too.
Use webflow, ghost or whatever you like, but wordpress is good enough for most people.
HN audience can likely handle their own, but if ease-of-setup is an issue - I created StartABlog.com to help people do this (and we'll actually set up your site for you for free - https://startablog.com/start).
Own your platform. Own your content. Own your voice. Use everything else as distribution methods - not core dependencies.