Federated blogging with WriteFreely

Posted Mar 15, 2019 22:20 UTC (Fri) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701)
Parent article: Federated blogging with WriteFreely

Have you considered a static site generator? They seem to be all the rage and I'm quite happy with the one that I'm using. Most of them allow authorship in Markdown and the images that are embedded in the posts are uploaded with the rest of the static content so there is no image hosting problem, per se. No comment section, of course. But some offer integration with Discuss or other options. Or, since the comment sections on the internet are always difficult to manage, you can avoid tcomment section entirely.

Static site generators

Posted Mar 15, 2019 22:29 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (16 responses)

I've not looked at static site generators, probably should. Can you name the one you're using?

The lack of comments leaves me rather less than upset in general...the last think I need is another comment area to manage!

Static site generators

Posted Mar 15, 2019 22:35 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Nikola, Hugo etc seem to do everything that you appear to care about in WriteFreely. They are also far more healthier projects with a larger set of contributors and users. They are not federated and there is no activitypub support etc but it looks like all you need is a static site anyway.

Static site generators

Posted Mar 15, 2019 22:42 UTC (Fri) by andrewsh (subscriber, #71043) [Link] (3 responses)

I use Pelican, it’s written in Python, which is (for me) a huge benefit over Jekyll and its derivatives, since it’s written in a programming language I can actually understand and write in.

Static site generators

Posted Mar 16, 2019 11:05 UTC (Sat) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (2 responses)

So is Nikola.

Some of the static-site systems even have a Web editor, which sounds strange but happens to be quite convenient.

Static site generators

Posted Mar 16, 2019 17:24 UTC (Sat) by edgewood (subscriber, #1123) [Link] (1 responses)

Any you could recommend? I support the web site of an organization I'm involved with, and they went with WordPress a few years ago to allow it to be updated by nontechnical users. I think I've finally got it locked down mostly satisfactorily, but it would be nice to test a more secure but still friendly alternative.

Static site generators

Posted Mar 16, 2019 20:18 UTC (Sat) by gdiscry (subscriber, #91125) [Link]

Lektor has not been mentioned yet. It provides a web interface to edit the content and there is a clear separation between the structure of a site and its content.

Static site generators

Posted Mar 15, 2019 22:43 UTC (Fri) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]

I use https://github.com/getzola/zola .

Static site generators

Posted Mar 16, 2019 0:31 UTC (Sat) by ay (subscriber, #79347) [Link] (3 responses)

You can still have comments in static site generators by hooking up to Discourse. That's what many people do with GitHub pages or gitlab hosting.

A static site generator makes a lot of sense to me since it's easy to host (even for free) and nothing of value is lost versus a CMS type system.

Static site generators

Posted Mar 22, 2019 23:08 UTC (Fri) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] (2 responses)

I think you may have meant https://disqus.com/
Which is ubiquitous, but you sort of don't know where they're kept and whose getting up to what with them, and that could be irksome.

Static site generators

Posted Mar 25, 2019 14:41 UTC (Mon) by downey (subscriber, #117086) [Link] (1 responses)

Can't say with 100% confidence, but pretty sure the commenter did in fact mean Discourse, the wildly popular GPLv2 forum platform.

Specifically, embedding comments via this method: https://meta.discourse.org/t/embedding-discourse-comments...

Static site generators

Posted Mar 25, 2019 20:26 UTC (Mon) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

Excellent.

Disqus is just a comments-only plug-in => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disqus

Jekyll as a static site generator for blogging

Posted Mar 16, 2019 1:01 UTC (Sat) by michaelkjohnson (subscriber, #41438) [Link] (2 responses)

I recently moved to using jekyll as the static site generator for my blog — I just git commit and push, and shortly thereafter it's updated. I like being able to track my blog history in Git. I've been thinking about running Git on my android phone to push blog entries when I'm away from my computer, but somehow it doesn't seem sufficiently important. ☺

Jekyll as a static site generator for blogging

Posted Mar 26, 2019 12:11 UTC (Tue) by arnout (subscriber, #94240) [Link] (1 responses)

> I've been thinking about running Git on my android phone to push blog entries when I'm away from my computer

You can just use the online editor of gitlab, which also allows you to preview md files.

Jekyll as a static site generator for blogging

Posted Mar 26, 2019 22:37 UTC (Tue) by michaelkjohnson (subscriber, #41438) [Link]

Thank you, I had totally not considered that. It would have been simpler. Very good thought.

In the meantime, I installed Markor and Mgit on my phone and blogged that way after all. Not that musings.danlj.org has that many visitors, so probably the tree fell in the forest and no one cared whether it made a noise.

Static site generators

Posted Mar 16, 2019 2:38 UTC (Sat) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

Static sites can have comments. You just arrange things to generate a new static page which includes the comment after a comment is posted.

That takes the same amount of time as generating a dynamic page and can be reused by every visitor until a new comment is added.

Static site generators

Posted Mar 16, 2019 8:37 UTC (Sat) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]

The QEMU website uses Jekyll, which also powers GitHub pages. One advantage for us was that contributions are done with the usual mailing list workflow.

A couple years ago I wrote a tutorial at https://opensource.com/article/17/4/getting-started-jekyll based on my experience building qemu.org.

Static site generators

Posted Mar 23, 2019 20:08 UTC (Sat) by spwhitton (subscriber, #71678) [Link]

There is also ikiwiki, one of the first static site generators, which has a web editor too.