What is the blogging platform of your dreams?
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.
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What bothers you in the current blogging platforms, like Blogger, Tumblr, or Wordpress?
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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?
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Does it have tags? Categories? A tree structure?
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Does it provide file storage (images, audio, video)? How much?
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How extensible is your blog page? Can you control all of the CSS? Can you add scripting?
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Does it allow adult content? Political content? Hateful content? Who decides?
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Does the country of origin matter? Does it block content based on your country's laws (e.g. copyright, political stuff, etc.)?
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What are the privacy features? Does it require an email address? A card number (if commercial)?
A self-hosted web-based frontend for a static-site generator. Focused primarily on blogging, it should provide default themes and plugins for common tasks, and offer multiple user support.
Essentially, I'd like Wordpress without the database. Hugo or Jekyll are close, but don't offer a great experience for non-technical bloggers.
I tried something called Grav recently and installing their "skeleton" package was basically just dropping it in the root directory and then installing the webadmin tools via their package manager thing. From then on you can do most things from the front end.
Although, I didn't play with it too much. I just wanted to set up a proof of concept modernized thing for a shop i was working at, so I didn't wind up playing with anything fancy. Could be worth a look for you though, esp since its databaseless
It sounds interesting. Thanks for the recommendation! I'll take a look.
I was trying to develop something like that, integrated with github pages, so that you could write a post in your machine, and it'd commit and push automatically.
I suck at data structures and model-view-controller architectures (which afaik is the best way to develop a blog or CMS) though
A static blog does not really need a MVC. It needs to
collect data from the source tree
figure out if there's a blog, tags, categories, &c
spit out HTML, RSS, ATOM, etc. into an output directory
copy over static files into the output directory
I have made my own called makas, it's very simple (and very alpha, so beware, but I eat my own dogfood), which covers all of those basic needs (except tags, which can be emulated by multiple blogs and symlinks (which is clumsy I admit, but I don't really use them, so I delayed adding them). I wrote this because
I needed a pet project
I did not like the file hierarchies other engines imposed on me
I hate .ini, .yaml, .toml, &c, just let me write some code (the entire config is a Ruby hash)
If you compare this and other smaller SSGs, you can get an idea for writing your own.
There is Publii, a GUI based SSG. I haven't tested it yet, but you can try it out here. It's open source.
I like Netlify. There's also Github Pages. A third option.
Gwern.net is an example of a blog format I'm fond of in that it neatly divides posts by subject material. This is an ideal format for a writer with varied interests, in my opinion.
I want something really easy to use, and secure, that allows me to set simple CSS styles, but doesn't use huge amounts of JS for the display of the content.
Something like NeoCities with a minimal blogging editor added on.
I'm happy to pay a small amount for this, or to have ads and skimlinks run against my content.
I was fond of Tumblr up until their recent self destruction. I only followed and posted SFW content but even so my dashboard has gone 100% dead since the 17th. Besides that, I didn't really like some of the more "modern" features Tumblr had picked up. Ads injected into your dashboard made to look like posts, "infinite" scrolling, a non-chronological dashboard, random posts that Tumblr thinks you'll be interested in injected into the dashboard, that kinda stuff.
And tags, tags behaved so weirdly. Sometimes if you created a new tag or posted something, it just wouldn't show up in the tag searches. It wasn't chronological and it didn't show every post. Too much incomprehensible "uhh algorithms!" nonsense driving it all.
I did like that there was custom CSS for blogs. I saw some seriously crazy stuff people did with their blogs, some weren't even recognizable in the slightest as Tumblr anymore. I'm not sure it was all CSS, I think there must have had to have been a dose of Javascript in there.
I loved how it had players for all different kinds of media. Whatever you wanted to share with the world, Tumblr would host it.
I'd really be interested by an ActivityPub federated Tumblr where the rules are laid out by whatever particular instance and you can still yell at each other from across the gaps.
Write freely/.as looks really nice, and it seems to have a similar ethos to Tildes. Thanks for making me aware of it. I've tossed around the idea of having a public journal of sorts for a while now, and that just might be the right platform for it.
write.as seems like the perfect platform for me thanks for bringing that to my attention. It's relatively cheap ($1/month), no need to set anything up, and has a small community.
Early Medium, but authors can pay a reasonable subscription for an ad-free fully branded version. Basically, wtf is this monetization?
I won’t share what my ideal blogging software would be, but at least my 15-years of experience of running a personal blog. Most of the time I was hosting it myself, or at least had some administrative oversight over the CMS.
So far I’ve ran:
What I expect blog software to do is to let you write, and preferably support you with that, and make it easy to publish (and edit). Everything else is of secondary (or tertiary) importance. We’re not talking about a full-fledged CMS or more. Keep it simple.
Currently I use Pelican, because maintaining static HTML is super-easy and writing posts in MarkDown is intuitive enough. What I mean with maintenance here is:
I wrote a bit more about on my blog in the post that discusses the technical history of my blog and how the final migration to a static HTML generator came to be. As for other migration gripes, there is also the one I wrote during my migration from Drupal to Habari.
In the end, self-hosting might sound scary, but as long as you use a static HTML generator, it’s really not. And if you really need (hint: you probably don’t) comments, you can either include the comments from an already existing platform (e.g. Tildes, StatusNet, Mastodon, HN, Reddit, …), or host your own commenting platform such as Isso. The up-side of hosting a separate comment system to the content system, is that you can run it separately, so it does not affect your actual blog/content directly.
You also asked about the structure, so here’s my take:
As for content and privacy questions: I self-host, so I can put on it whatever I want, no limits. And the same goes for privacy :)
Honestly… Ghost.
https://ghost.org/
It's FOSS, self-hostable. Their pro plan is a bit ridiculously expensive but Digital Ocean has a zeroconfig $5/month droplet which can get it set up in minutes (I did exactly that!)
It's all Markdown. They have an excellent WYSIWYG editor. Fantastic for a multi-person blog -- solo blogging I end up doing on Github pages or something, but that stuff doesn't scale up when you need authors who only know a git to be a rude person.
I really recommend people try it out. And if someone wants some Digital Ocean credits to try it with, let me know and I'll give you a referral link.
One thing that is really tempting me is graph databases/data triples. That is, instead of writing just posts, you'd have all sorts of different data snippets that you can weave together and visualize from any facet.
One of the possible facets would be the post, but the text would be enriched with semantic data - a bit like the early idea of the Internet, hyperlinks on every third word, but on steroids as a word can link to multiple "pages" and the links themselves can be tagged.
As a result, there'd be no real need to limit yourself to categories, tags (I never understood just why those two things are different, in any case), or a tree structure. A graph can encompass that and more.
Comments would also be trivial to add - they are simply another triple, referencing the URL of the post/page/entity and a piece of text, or a node with text and metadata. They could be fed to the triplestore, or to a central repository, or maybe even somehow reside on the users' computers. Magic might be involved for the latter, but I haven't really looked much into this - seeing most comments sections makes me think they are just not worth it, and/or that they should just be e-mailed to the author and added at their leisure.
It's of course a pipe dream, and probably just of interest to people like myself - that is, never ever satisfied with a solution that works, as we need to dig and try to find The Bestest Way To Go About Things.
My recent research on this was prompted by my not knowing just where to put a mention of an article in my org-mode wiki (an abomination that is part Org, part org-wiki, part my own elisp code and part shell scripts) - why can't I just have the article exist as its own entity, referenced by other entities?
Solutions to this exist (e.g. put every article in its own file, put every article in a single file and include the headline, drag a database in), but they are cumbersome. I can put metadata under a org headline, but properties can't be nested, and translating them into something that can actually be read requires ad-hoc code.
As for blogging platforms, and not just generators, Neocities is actually one I like. As much as I dislike the modern web - my fans spin a bit too much for my tastes without NoScript installed - I dislike the blog model (chronological sequence of posts, maybe tagged or put into categories) a bit more. It feels too... limited, each post/article too self-contained.
Link them to each other! Link to other stuff! Link to stuff that is not stuff, but a concept! Update those pages! Be a good spider and spin a whole web, don't stop at a single thread!
Naturally, this conflicts with my earlier "I wish things could be stored as a graph" - in a standardized, data-centric way, that can be queried by anyone. And monstrosities like
<MARQUEE>and no-contrast text will come from this.In the end, I'm not sure whether I can conclude anything that is not "I'm not satisfied with how things currently are".
My ideal is anything that is not mass produced, widely used, semi-commercial software.
Wordpress and its ilk is contributing to the death of diverse and vibrant content on the internet—most content these days, no matter the CMS things are actually hosted on, content is meatgrindered to conform to the Wordpress-vision of what the internet should be. While Wordpress did a lot of good for internet accessibility, we have shockingly few people on the internet with both the skill and interest in creating content with the vibrancy of traditional magazine spreads these days.