Skip to content

Comment on 20 Years of Blogging on my own website

Comments

A couple random thoughts.

20 years is a long time makes me wonder what the next 20 years of blogging/websites will look like.

As beginner in web development I'm jealous of the simplicity of web development described at the beginning of the post.

Finally I've held off on putting comments/a guestbook on my website for the same reasons. I don't think I have even close to enough traffic for it to be a issue but if it ends up being one I don't want to deal with it.

> I'm jealous of the simplicity of web development described at the beginning of the post.

All the simple old stuff still works. I recently set up a blog [1] that is just:

* Each post is a plain HTML file, served as-is.

* I make new posts by copying a template HTML file which has a small amount of basic structure and includes an external CSS file.

* When I write a new post, I run a script that scans the HTML files and makes an index.

If at some point I want something fancier I can extend it, which I've done over the years for my main blog, but for now it does what I need it to do.

[1] https://data.securebio.org/jefftk-notebook/

As beginner in web development I'm jealous of the simplicity of web development described at the beginning of the post.

I've been blogging for 17 years, and gone through a number of iterations (started with Wordpress, then my own PHP blog, then Posterous, then Jekyll, and now Scroll). The language I use now, Scroll (https://scroll.pub/), is very simple, you might want to check it out. You can start small with something like this:

    header.scroll
     # My Blog
    firstPost.scroll
     import header.scroll
     Hello *world*
     <b>Its fine to use html too</b>
    index.scroll
     import header.scroll
     snippets

That looks very interesting. Thanks for the link! I'll check it out.

I've been back and forth with comments over the years, including a couple posts that went viral enough to get a large volume of comments in a short time window. At the moment I've got some of those eras archived in a ZIP file but not currently visible. Moderation is definitely a responsibility. Spam Moderation is definitely a chore. Data ownership is definitely a trade-off: some of the comment hosting platforms that are better at spam auto-moderation want to own more things about your data or show more ads or trackers to your readers.

It can be a lot to deal with. I added a comment widget again just recently because I missed some of the feelings of conversation, but I probably picked one that won't likely get as much conversation as some of my past tools did because higher barrier to entry on first comment (but that also makes the spam floor higher and gives me a trade-off in data ownership versus tracking JS). We'll see how long I leave it in place this time.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.