I stopped blogging several years ago. Over the last few years, I've been writing plenty of private essays. However, very recently I have been considering starting to publish my writing and, well, start blogging again publicly. I have no desire to waste time on templates, look-and-feel, visual stuff, etc. I just want to write a bog-standard html file, and then publish it...I do value leveraging html elements that help with meta data (e.g. microformats, etc.), but don't care about how things look - and these elements that i value are all invisible to most users anyway. I would be fine with just crafting html by hand, deploying it via sftp or some boring deployment pipleine, and that's it. But, then, I started thinking: what about having an RSS/Atom feed? I used to consume content via an rss reader, but have not done so in years. But, I don't want to manually craft that feed file; nope, sorry. But, I've heard a comment or two from acquaintances that rss/atom feeds and syndication are really something that people - like my potential audience - might really desire. So, I should really consider having one. This means that either I have to craft several things manually (from the blog post itself, the list of archived posts, the feed file, etc.), or use a static site generator that will handle all this for me, etc. I don't want to get trapped down a rabbit hole where I am spending so much on the tooling, the scaffolding, twiddling with templates, or the publish process itself. I just want the minimal for writing and publishing, I want it to live on my domain name, and that's it. Am I crazy or extremely lazy for not wanting to generate an RSS/Atom feed file?

So, here's my ask of you all nice people: are feeds like RSS/Atom feeds even worth it? If so, does anyone have recommendations for a manual process where i can craft the blog post's html by hand, but somehow leverage a portion of a static site generator (or some minimal tool) to only automate the creation of the RSS/Atom feed file? Thanks in advfance for any constructive feedback!

P.S. - One thing that re-ignited my desire both to write more in public, and keep it alive with minimal fuss was my re-reading of Jeff Huang's excellent "This Page is Designed to Last" post: https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/

Hey there everyone,

I've been on here since near the start, and spend too much time finding content to post on here, but I just love this place. One thing I've noticed over the years is a severe lack of personal articles, blogs, or the similar and I think it's to do with the 'officialness' of a lot of the topics.

Would it be beneficial to just have a ~blogs section, to post links and thoughts on our personal writings? Even if that includes things like ~tech or ~cooking or whatever? Just to have a central place for our articles.

I don't mind posting my own in ~tech, but I can imagine the hesitation for everyone else as those areas feel more in-tune with "news" than personal thoughts. We have ~creative, but that feels more for artistic endeavors and projects.

Any ideas how we might be able to encourage more topics or links to personal (small-web) blogs (either your own, or someone else's) in the culture here? We seem to be becoming more and more a news aggregator, which is great because of the relevance and discussions (best on the web) but we have no real culture for small-web indie blogging.

For the metalheads here, wondering what you all are reading for news, releases, tour announcements, etc that's primarily focused on metal.

I really enjoy black metal so would definitely be interested in sites/forums that focus on that!

Have you been visiting just too many different social media platforms lately, checking them out to see what the deal is? Well, same here. It feels like I've been a guest every night in different houses for the past month and I must say: I am exhausted.

But it's not over, far from it.

And I'm here to give you a heads up: we've witnessed platforms dying in the past, I'm guessing most of us have been a part of some sort of digital exodus before but I have a feeling that this one is going to be more painful.

Mainly because we've created so much data over the years and the majority of it got collected by centralised platforms. There are very few ways to take it with us and move elsewhere, it's all locked in.

Backing up your data now would also be a good idea, before some CEO comes with up the plan that it should be a paid feature.

I just want to say that this is all to be expected because the social web is in a transition period, and that golden bookmark doesn't exist yet. However, I think there are some contenders for it. What I want to ask is: where will you go next?

I've got some ideas, feel free to add your preference if I'm missing anything.

• Threads: Meta's Twitter clone that will be out some time this summer. It will be a federated (ActivityPub-enabled) platform.
• Bluesky: Jack Dorsey-backed Twitter clone. This one is also federated but it uses AT Protocol.
• Mastodon: The Twitter clone. It's got a fairly large userbase now, with lots of instances to choose from.
• Blog: Maybe it's not a bad idea to set up shop on a platform like Micro.blog (which is ActivityPub-enabled and has got community features built-in) and lead a quiet digital life.
• Threadiverse: Reddit-alikes.

I'm a solo freelance programmer who codes on small to medium sized projects, and I realize that I can upskill myself a lot by keeping up with the industry trends, by listening to what the best in this field have to say. The problem is that there is just so much information overload everywhere, just so many youtube videos and articles that it seems overwhelming to differentiate the wheat from the chaff!

Since reading is my preferred medium of instruction, I want to know what are the blogs, journals, etc. on this topic with some street cred? And preferably individual experts and blogs, not companies. Company or corporate sites and blogs seem to be more hype than substance these days.

Which ones do you refer for keeping up to date?

I remember I came across it here, probably posted by @Deimos in the course of a thread about Tildes' philosophy. The essence of the blog was that the truly nice, sweet people among us that make online forums a better place with their positive interactions are more sensitive to tensions and negative interactions than the average person, so they'd be likely to leave at a lower level of trolling than most of us would, resulting in a net negative for everyone on the site. Could have sworn I bookmarked it...

I used to use a random FOSS Python program to manage my blog. The software honestly wasn't the best (partially my own fault for not setting it up super well) and I stopped using it, lost my blog's source code, and haven't updated the blog in a long time because of that. So I'm looking for a static site generator that is simple, well maintained, and no-frills.

Hey all, I'm looking to expand my stable of long-form, "crunchy" reading material. I'll recommend three. ( I think I found all these through tildes.)

Casey Handmer's Blog
A blog about the new space industry with a specific focus on SpaceX and the industrialization of Mars.

Construction Physics
A newsletter that analyses trends and data in the construction industry with a focus on modular construction.

ACOUP
Essays about medieval and ancient history as well as their interaction with popular culture, with a focus on methods of production and common people in history.

Another type of content I've really enjoyed is detailed breakdowns of zero-day vulnerabilities and large software catastrophies.

Hey guys,

I have been flip-flopping back and forth on this idea for a while, and would love some feedback on whether peeps would find this valuable.

Although I still call my self a "software developer" (and try to code daily), for the last 8 years I have ran a small 5-person agency that I started from the ground up, so my role was really CEO/CTO/CFO/Everything-O. My company focused on delivering high-quality custom software. Not brochure websites, and not Wordpress - our niche was internal business software (or as I like to call it "boring software for boring businesses") - and for a client service company we got very high margins of return.

Last year my business was acquired by a larger company which was an amazing result after the time and effort I had poured into it. I have realised I now want to help other developers who want to start their own software agency, or maybe they already have and are looking for hints or advice on certain topics.

So I have started Dev to Agency - a part blog part guidebook for how a full-stack developer can start and successfully run a software development agency, the things to pay attention too (and the things to ignore), and the key-values that I feel helped my business go from nothing, to 7 figures per year, and then to being acquired (if that is a path people would want to take).

I have just published my first couple of posts, About Dev To Agency that is a rundown of what I hope to achieve with this, then a post about My small custom software development agency - which gives an overview of what I built and where I think my articles will add value, and lastly You are the gold standard which covers how I feel an owner/maker should set the businesses standards and practises based of their personal values.

I have never written a blog before (or really done any writing before), so it would be fantastic to get some feedback from the community, and if there are any developers that this could interest then please subscribe on the website.

Cheers,

Chris.

Somewhat inspired by this post, I wondered what (non-personal) blogs/online jounrals you read? Here are some of mine in no particular order.

• opensource.com for open source devlopment

• Glimmer for tech culture as a whole

• lwn.net for linux kernel articles etc..

• WeDistribute for content on federated networks/the fediverse

• PrivacyTools Blog, The Privacy Issue and decentralize.today for privacy articles*

*I'm a team member at PrivacyTools.io

I'm thinking of registering a new domain to host a personal blog and a few other pages that is somewhat separate from my current personal portfolio page, as the blog will likely not be directly relevant to my work. But since this is a more personal project, I want to branch out in terms of TLDs - I've previously used exclusively .com endings as they lead to the least confusion and are the most accepted.

I'm a little overwhelmed by the number of options these days, so I wanted to take a little straw poll to see which ones people think are the best. The name itself will be my initials "gpxl", and the endings I am considering are

• .info
• .xyz
• .fyi
• .computer
• .me

But I'm curious to see what others think. I would go with .xyz but I feel like then my domain name becomes an unintelligble string of letters - gpxl.xyz, so I'm wondering what others think and what arguments exist for choosing one over another.

P.S. If anyone has recommendations for registars I'm open to those too. Currently using google domains but open to switching.

I limited the intake of high volume news and I'm currently taking a break from social media. I've been enjoying to occasionally visit blogs directly as my source of online reading. I tend to enjoy short essays, opinions, and honest observations. What blogs have you been following lately that you think are worth taking a look at?

P.s.
If it's your own, please shoot me a direct message: I'd love to check it out.

Back in the day I was a hardcore Google Reader (RIP) user, and following that I continued to use https://feedly.com/ for many years, but eventually I found myself falling behind on all my feeds and stopped checking it.

Recently, I signed for Inoreader and I've started reading more blogs again. It also has the nice feature of letting you subscribe to email newsletters too, which is quite nice since I find them annoying to deal with in my email inbox but convenient in the feed reader.

I'm wondering what blogs and newsletters folks on Tildes subscribe to.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Blogs:

• bellingcat: Independent investigative journalism often based on online "open source intelligence." e.g. The Boogaloo Movement is Not What You Think
• BLDGBLOG: Geoff Manaugh's blog about everything related to the space we inhabit, both built and natural. e.g. Underground Cathedrals of Radiation and Zones of Irreversible Strain
• Flowing Data: Nathan Yau's blog about data visualization. e.g. Racial Divide
• Idle Words: The blog of Maciej Cegłowski, creator of the Pinboard bookmarking service. Covers tech and lots of unrelated topics. e.g. Superintelligence: The Idea that Eats Smart People

Newsletters:

• BIG by Matt Stoller: A newsletter about economics and in particular the economics of monopolies and disruptive startups. e.g. The Slow Death of Hollywood
• Data is Plural: A weekly newsletter of fun/weird datasets.
• Normcore Tech: Vicki Boykis' newsletter about tech and tech-related things. e.g. The Reign of Big Recsys
• Uses This: Brief interviews with all sorts of creators about what tools they use to do what they do.

This is just a slice. I can share my entire list if people are interested. But I'm curious about what feeds others enjoy, on anything from film and furniture to "movie-set" urbanism. What are you reading?

I understand we have ~life but I think something more ~personal would be more beneficial, life could pertain to a lot of different things but personal would be far more effective.

We could also have ~personal.blogs for us to submit our personal blog posts that don't really have a place anywhere else.

Would open and connect the community a lot more, allow for advice, general questions, and more.

I know this has been posted before, but I was going through old posts about blogging and at least half the blogs linked in the comments were offline now, so I thought I'd bring this topic back to light.

Do you run your own personal blog, and if so, could you share some details?

• Is it self-hosted, or do you rent server space?

• Do you use Wordpress or another blog platform like that, publish through other means like a flat-file CMS, or did you build it from scratch?

• What topics do you write about?

• How consistently do you post; or alternatively, why don't you post as often as you would like to?

• Do you keep analytics, or do you write regardless of how many clicks you get?

• Is your site monetized with ads or otherwise?

• How popular is your blog on average?

• How do you keep up with other writers' posts?

I'm bringing this up because it seems like most places around the web centered on blogging are more in it for the money rather than for the content. Places like /r/blogging and the like are all talk about how to maximize views, earn revenue, and find your niche. I'd love to see some discussion more geared towards the content and construction of individual blogs, as opposed to people trying the next "get rich quick" scheme on their lists of passive income opportunities.

Personally, I have multiple blogs for the sole purpose of giving me a platform to voice my opinions or share things that interest me without being constrained to a centralized platform like Twitter or Medium. I'd love to hear what you have all made and/or shared online, as well as the process behind making it happen.

I currently have a personal "portfolio" site that I haven't updated in close to a year. I'm planning now on revamping it, and I am using this opportunity to reconsider the static site generator I am using.

I host my site on Github pages, which means that Jekyll was originally very appealing due to its nice integration with Github. However, I have found it difficult to greatly customize the themes I find, and I'm the type of person that likes to get everything "just right". It seems like Hugo might be more extensible in this regard, but I'm not sure if that alone makes it worth the switch from my current setup. Anecdotally, a lot of the blogs I find whose layouts I really like tend to use Hugo.

Pure HTML/CSS is an option but that seems like a big overhead for what I want. I'm no web developer and I don't plan on becoming one.

Introduction

I hate medium and I think it should die a slow death. I tried to get some information on the subject to substantiate my belief.

What Medium Does Bad

Medium is slow

On Gmetrix, medium.com has a F PageSpeed Score, with a 11.8MB Total Page Size and a Fully Loaded Time of 12.4s . A random article got a little better, with a D score

Pingdom gives Medium a B score, with a page size of Page size 12.4 MB and Load time 2.15s (much better). This is from San Francisco, USA.

Probably because I’m closer, the results for São Paulo, Brazil, are marginally better. The B score remains, but Load time dropped to 1.68s.

Tildes gotta a C on GTmetrix and an A on Pingdom. On Google, Tildes got a 98 and medium.com got a 48.

What is probably more concerning is that builtwith.com’s lists 106 different technologies at use on a single Medium page, ranging from AngularJS to Subversion, Wordpress Grid (aren’t they competitors?), Microsoft Azure and AliExpress. Tildes list only 13 technologies.

Medium is annoying

I’m sick and tired of opening a random Medium article and being bombarded with an immediate call to action for me to subscribe or to sign into a useless mailing-list. No: I do not pardon the interruption.

It’s 2019: I don't wanna sign-in just to read a free fucking article.

Medium weakens your brand

On Medium, you’re not a content maker. Your a Medium contributor. There’s a great difference. There are little customization options, but you’re encouraged to strengthen the Medium brand instead of your own.

Medium does not support Markdown

In 2019, this is utterly ridiculous. I should be able to write my posts in Emacs, Vim, VS Code, whatever. Markdown is a universal format that simply works and not supporting it natively is unacceptable.

The Default Editor Sucks

It forces you to write in a certain (clunky) way and it doesn't work at all.

Too Much White Space

Medium uses space poorly.

Not FOSS

Wanna host your own? No can do amigo.

Your content is not (really) yours

Wanna export your Medium posts? Should be easy, like a single button, right? NOPE. And it can stop working at any time.

Most Content is Shit

I don’t wanna generalize, there are some good things on Medium. But most Medium articles are bellow 300-words, full of unnecessary subtitles with nothing more than obvious statements I could easily get from Google. Most Medium articles are from developers trying to leverage their status by showing knowledge of trivial technologies.

What Medium Does Right

A Social Network With Content Instead of Content With Social Networking

This is something no amount of Wordpress widgets will ever top. Medium is a social network. It gets views, it gets you “applauses”, it gets you validation. It’s the Instagram of text content. Medium makes you feel good about yourself, and give you the shot (illusion?) of exposure. Maybe you can be in a publication, which is just an assortment of posts within Medium itself! See, you’re growing! You’re reaching a larger audience! They might even read your stuff!

The Alternative

It is obvious that Medium does a lot of things right. It is an actual social network that engages people like no other current blogging tool. People that know better use Medium to their advantage. People use Medium to talk trash about Medium. So we need another Medium. One that is just as social, but that is faster, less annoying, less of walled-garden and respects your content. I’m not in a position to do such a thing yet. But I certainly wish it existed.

https://gitlab.com/smoores/pliant

I’ve been a software developer for about three years, and I’ve always been enticed by and passionate about the open source scene. I have an assortment of projects variously available on GitHub and GitLab, but this is the first time I’ve ever created an open source project intended to be used by others.

Pliant is a barebones starter kit for anyone wanting to self host their own blog. It came out of my own efforts to start a blog, and it’s what currently powers https://tfhe.shanemoore.me.

I’d love to hear you’re feedback, or just discuss open source, blogging, web technologies, or whatever else comes up.

I've been thinking for a while about making my own little personal website/blog, and I was wondering what other people here on Tildes might have set up. I feel like having one could be a cool little way to get myself to write more often and hopefully improve my writing, especially when it comes to technical subjects.

I miss music blogs. I mostly used them for piracy in the past but plenty of them (pirate and non-pirate) have been great sources for curated lists of new good music. I'd like to add some more variety to my music discovery methods for this new year, so what blogs do you still follow / respect?

Some previous semi-related threads that might be of interest:

How do you discover music?

How do you keep up with new music?

Music Blogs & Mini Station Rant

Let's fantasise Tilderinoes! You can just write what comes to your mind or answer any of the questions below to get your thoughts flowing.

• What bothers you in the current blogging platforms, like Blogger, Tumblr, or Wordpress?

• Is it “free” and with ads, commercial with no ads, or free and non-commercial and struggling? If it's commercial, how much does it cost?

• Does it have comments? How are they moderated? Who can comment? Are there PMs?

• Does it have tags? Categories? A tree structure?

• Does it provide file storage (images, audio, video)? How much?

• How extensible is your blog page? Can you control all of the CSS? Can you add scripting?

• Does it allow adult content? Political content? Hateful content? Who decides?

• Does the country of origin matter? Does it block content based on your country's laws (e.g. copyright, political stuff, etc.)?

• What are the privacy features? Does it require an email address? A card number (if commercial)?