this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
34 points (90.5% liked)

Comradeship // Freechat

2164 readers
32 users here now

Talk about whatever, respecting the rules established by Lemmygrad. Failing to comply with the rules will grant you a few warnings, insisting on breaking them will grant you a beautiful shiny banwall.

A community for comrades to chat and talk about whatever doesn't fit other communities

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Any tips for hosting a blog? i recently read this speech by deng about the pen being a major tool for exercising leadership and i want to start writing my thoughts to practice and get better.

top 16 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm kind of interested in WriteFreely at the moment, if I wanted to start something up. Seems like a good tool to write stuff and make it easily accessible on the Fediverse.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

great suggestion i'll look into it, seems perfect for my sbc server

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Interesting project. I would have suggested that @[email protected] join your mastodon instance since you get 2000 characters per "toot" (weird choice of word tbh), which is not bad at all for shorter writings and you can arrange them into a thread.

The problem with having a blog or any platform is getting people to read you, social media is a powerful tool to get eyes on your content.

Substack is also becoming very popular, I think because you manage your blog space however you like.

And on ProleWiki we're looking at opening a sort of blog space too for our editors to replace the legacy essays page (which is just a page with a table in it). But you'll need an editor account and we have no release date at all, we're still playing around with the idea.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I've used it for a long time, great tool! The wordsmith instance iirc.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Easy+free option might be making a static site on github. Basically you write your posts in some easy to write format like markdown and then run a command to generate the HTML from it, then commit the whole thing to a git repository. Look up "static site generator" for various tools to help you do that. The site'll be hosted on your-username.github.io. Unlimited flexibility as you can tweak the styles and how the generation happens as you want and there's virtually no limits as long as you're just posting text and the occasional image. A lot of programmer blogs I've seen are run this way but ofc can write about whatever you want on there :)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Making a website is cool, but don’t forget about the most important thing: content! You can start writing now, and save your work in Word/Writer/Notepad/whatever until you’ve found or built a place online to publish it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Personally, I like going from the ground up. Spin up an nginx instance and write some basic html and css. It will teach you a lot about the web and gives you a lot of creative freedom.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

yea this is what i was thinking, still a bit scary to have a port open to the public internet lol. need to research more.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

If you can rent a cheap VPS. I host a blog myself, if you have more questions about the hosting process, you can DM me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You could also rent a VPS and make a Wireguard tunnel between your homeserver and the VPS, thus not exposing your home network.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My advice is to choose whether you want to focus on writing or on learning how to set up the infrastructure for the website. If it is the former then go for something like writefreely or proprietary platforms like medium, substack, github pages etc.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd personally avoid Medium as they're quite unfriendly from a privacy perspective, though front-ends such as Scribe exist. Something deployable like Hugo would be the best variant imo, or making it by hand if you're into that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There is also codeberg pages instead of github pages that is likely more privacy friendly.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I know about Codeberg. Though I know they removed that anti-Cloudflare project, which is odd. I don't know more about it, though I remember the devs of that project made a lot of drama with Codeberg.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You could also use a VPS

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

My only experience is having a Tumblr, which is in many ways better than the usual big name social medias, but in many ways is just as poisonous in a very subtle and pernicious way.