LWN: Comments on "Federated blogging with WriteFreely"

Jekyll as a static site generator for blogging

michaelkjohnson — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 22:37:32 +0000

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.

Jekyll as a static site generator for blogging

arnout — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 12:11:27 +0000

> 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.

webfinger

thebaer — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 23:31:43 +0000

Yep, just followed 👍 (should show up on your stats page), and I can find your existing posts when searching for their URLs in Mastodon.

By the way, would love to know more about what caused the misconfiguration if you don't mind sharing, either in our fledgling documentation repo or our forum. That would help others potentially fix similar issues in the future.

webfinger

corbet — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 22:49:53 +0000

FWIW I believe I have fixed this; I'd be curious to hear if things work for people now.

Static site generators

smitty_one_each — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 20:26:53 +0000

Excellent.

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

Static site generators

downey — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 14:41:17 +0000

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...

Federated blogging with WriteFreely

thebaer — Sun, 24 Mar 2019 22:06:53 +0000

(WriteFreely developer here) It looks like a configuration issue -- the /.well-known/ path isn't accessible to the world. Particularly, Mastodon needs the webfinger route in order to discover the blog -- it's going to hit this URL when looking up the blog: https://kernelpage.com/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acc...

Static site generators

spwhitton — Sat, 23 Mar 2019 20:08:03 +0000

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

Static site generators

smitty_one_each — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 23:08:16 +0000

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.

Federated blogging with WriteFreely

alex — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 09:37:50 +0000

I suspect there is something else that needs setting up for it. It seems to be a feature of the hosted accounts but I assume there is a knob somewhere you can tweak.

Federated blogging with WriteFreely

cdarroch — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 20:47:54 +0000

Indeed, and there's at least one reference in the Linux kernel source to a lengthy Google+ comment thread on one of Linus's posts there, regarding the magic behind the implementation of the 32-bit and 64-bit variants of the count_masked_bytes() function used in the little-endian implementation of find_zero(), which is called, I believe, when hashing and comparing dentry names while walking file paths.

One hopes this and similar historical conversations on Google+ can be preserved somewhere for posterity, with the comments intact. My quick glance through the Internet Archive snapshot of the thread mentioned above suggests the archive copy lacks most of the 124 comments, where the meat of the discussion took place, but I may be mistaken (and I certainly hope so!)

Federated blogging with WriteFreely

elboulangero — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 08:05:47 +0000

If you're interested in having a web user interface that allows you to write your posts in a web browser (which is apparently what WriteFreely offers), then there is also Ghost to consider. I used it for a while for a small personal blog, I found it quite good. Maybe this article can give you a quick insight in the project: https://blog.ghost.org/5/

In the end, I found it overkill for my needs, and I prefer the workflow offered by static sites generator (ie. terminal+editor+git). So I switched to Pelican and I'm super happy with it, I give it a 5 stars.

Federated blogging with WriteFreely

Yorhel — Sun, 17 Mar 2019 12:32:05 +0000

So I'm trying to follow @corbet@kernelpage.com from Mastodon, but I'm not sure how to go about doing that. Normally pasting an address into the search field does the trick, but it's not showing any results now. Has anyone succeeded at it yet?

Federated blogging with WriteFreely

madscientist — Sun, 17 Mar 2019 12:28:33 +0000

Me too. Maybe worth a LWN article (once things settle down).

Federated blogging with WriteFreely

songmaster — Sun, 17 Mar 2019 05:06:52 +0000

Jon, as a long-time follower of your posts on G+ I hope you will continue to post such ramblings. I just subscribed to the RSS feed you posted above, the output from WriteFreely looks good in Feedly.

I have been following several other kernel dev’s on G+ too, it would be nice to know where they’re going if anywhere — Linus, Alan Cox, etc.

Federated blogging with WriteFreely

karim — Sun, 17 Mar 2019 04:32:02 +0000

I have to admit that I stopped reading at "Affero".

Static site generators

gdiscry — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 20:18:35 +0000

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

edgewood — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 17:24:49 +0000

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.

Downloading packages

ms — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 14:25:44 +0000

No problem. Glad I could help!

Downloading packages

corbet — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 14:23:27 +0000

OK, clearly I'm pretty ignorant about how Go packaging works, and it's not as bad as I had feared. Thanks for enlightening me.

Downloading packages

ms — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 14:12:58 +0000

"go get" inspects the go.mod and go.sum files in the root of the project.

https://github.com/writeas/writefreely/blob/master/go.mod
https://github.com/writeas/writefreely/blob/master/go.sum

There's been an awful lot of thinking that has gone into this mechanism, and whilst it's not quite finished in Go 1.12, it's pretty close these days. There's a lot of writing about it all at https://research.swtch.com/vgo

Downloading packages

corbet — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 13:56:06 +0000

From my reading, it's using a bunch of "go get" commands, with no version pinning in sight anywhere. Are those version strings hidden somewhere that I'm unaware of?

Static site generators

smurf — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 11:05:14 +0000

So is Nikola.

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

Federated blogging with WriteFreely

ms — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 10:32:10 +0000

Re building and "downloading several dozen packages". The project is at least using go.mod and so the downloads are fully pinned to git commits/tags and checksummed. So it's not quite the wild west of "let's just download the latest version of foo and hope for the best". Personally, I much prefer pointers to vendoring all your deps, but I know opinions differ on that.

They're using the built-in Go webserver which as far as I know has an excellent security record - I would have no worries about exposing it directly to the internet; I have used it a lot commercially/professionally.

The template language *is* documented. It's the standard Go templating system. https://golang.org/pkg/text/template/ https://golang.org/pkg/html/template/
That said, I agree about documenting which resources/methods/vars are available to the templates. The template entry point is Execute or ExecuteTemplate, and the last arg to that is always the "receiver" for the template, but eg https://github.com/writeas/writefreely/blob/cb1bd37f64abc... is unhelpful given it comes in as the empty interface. Generally I consider use of the empty interface in Go as a code smell... https://github.com/writeas/writefreely/blob/32e99d00415c6... is somewhat more discoverable. OTOH, depends on the intended audience - I've been working professionally in Go for over 5 years now so I have no qualms digging through this.

Just FTR, I've no association with WriteFreely and have never heard of it or looked at the code base before this morning.

Federated blogging with WriteFreely

xanni — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 09:17:18 +0000

I tried to subscribe to either your RSS feed or your ActivityPub feed with Hubzilla, but unfortunately neither worked.

Static site generators

pbonzini — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 08:37:09 +0000

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

zlynx — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 02:38:38 +0000

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.

Jekyll as a static site generator for blogging

michaelkjohnson — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 01:01:36 +0000

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. ☺

Static site generators

ay — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 00:31:24 +0000

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

me@jasonclinton.com — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 22:43:21 +0000

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

Static site generators

andrewsh — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 22:42:21 +0000

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

rahulsundaram — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 22:35:30 +0000

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

corbet — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 22:29:16 +0000

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!

Federated blogging with WriteFreely

me@jasonclinton.com — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 22:20:29 +0000

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.

Federated blogging with WriteFreely

unixbhaskar — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 21:26:08 +0000

Looks interesting Jon!