I find it very odd that in a blog post that includes a Classic MacOS screenshot, there’s no mention of Livejournal or its successor Dreamwidth – still one of the easiest and least-techie ways to start a blog.
Livejournal is now Russian-owned and one is not allowed to criticize the Russian government, so I moved my personal and tech blogs to Dreamwidth. It imported the history, but sadly, not the comments.
Additionally, USEnet is still alive and still works.
I hope you understand that that was not a post hoping for a comprehensive history of blogging. It was a subjective take on my own experience with blogging. The screenshot from a classic mac app is there because I made that app.
I didn’t include Livejournal because I’m actively not engaging with russian companies when I can. I was not aware of Dreamwidth at all and this is the first time I hear about it.
Not saying this to disregard your message, but blogging happens in little bubbles and sometimes solutions that you think are obvious are not so much in other bubbles and with other people. I love blogging software and could easily list a hundred there, but that would serve no purpose. I just wanted to list four or five easy ways to start and there is no wrong way to start. Whatever someone chooses is good enough as long as they are having fun.
Thanks for the link to https://micro.blog/, it looks intriguing. You don’t mention SSGs + static hosting, but I think they’ve gotten pretty accessible and there are lots to choose from, one can mix and match and even move between hosts without too much trouble, if you own a domain. I think that’s sort of the natural way to approach the simple web.
But… people want to be able to leave comments, and there’s the rub. A comment can be (in my mind anyway) even below the “micro-blog post” threshold, but its context is fixed to a post, or perhaps to other comments. A commenting system pretty much requires identity management of some form, and then moderation… it gets complicated pretty quickly, and user expectations for feature sets have risen quite a bit since the early days of forums. There are several comment systems I’m aware of that are reasonable enough to add to a static blog, but then you have a third party. Or perhaps you can self-host on a little VPS, but then it’s no longer static-simple. Either way, real-time commenting exposes you to some risk, and requires constant moderation effort.
I’m fond of the old-fashioned, anonymity preserving, moderate-before-publish paradigm, but it’s too slow and too much effort for all but the smallest conversation. You can encourage people to publish “comments” about your blog on their own blogs, and thus sidestep moderation, but that’s much less accessible and gets disjointed quickly. Or you can just let a “social network” take care of all that, but then you lose discoverability and control. I wish I knew of a better way.
When I’ve dabbled in having comments I’ve been disappointed in the quality. IMO it’s not worth all the downsides you mention. I’d encourage bloggers to provide an easy-to-find email address, and I’d encourage readers of blogs to consider sending an email even if it’s “hey, I really liked this post!” As a long-time small-fish tech blogger these conversations do happen sometimes and they’re quite fun. Not all our discussions need to double as public performance art à la microblogging. :)
That said, when you do want to comment on something publicly the link-and-comment-in-own-post approach you mention is nice too. As a reader I don’t think it’s too bad to follow the backlinks. It’s gently applying a little structure ad-hoc where it’s needed rather than forcing all conversation into a threaded system to begin with.
A put my email address a few different places, plus I send out a newsletter.
A handful of times each year I get a genuine handwritten email from someone. It’s always a delight and I try to respond with as much effort as they put in to their message.
I wish I got a bit more of those random outreaches.
Smallweb tries to make creating dynamic websites as painless as static ones. No build / deploy step, you just create a folder in you internet folder and it instantly available at https://<folder>.<domain>. To switch between hosts, you can just rsync the an app folder between different smallweb instances, or even the whole smallweb folder.
Thanks for the kind words. I been considering starting a little monthly zine just to surface cool blogging stuff. SSGs alone number in the hundreds at this point. I do mention Jekyll in the post though which is a SSG.
You can have “comments” without too much fuss in your blog if you support WebMentions. Then using something like Bridgy, can help posts on microblogs mentioning your stuff appear on your blog. That is what I do with my blog (even though my third-party WebMention endpoint seems to be down atm).
Not sure recommending Microsoft’s GitHub for hosting is the path to breaking away from the corporations. The platform itself is corporate social media & there are quite a few alternatives that still fit free as in beer & freedom (or at least close to).
I agree with you, I recommended many types of setups there and the criteria was around what are the most common ones that people can find a lot of information about if they search. I recommended many alternatives there that I am not onboard with such as Github and Wordpress. My reasoning was around not pushing what is best for me but what can be an easy path for people. Also, it is fairly easy to move away from Github and carry your stuff with you, it is less than a silo than Wordpress which is a redeeming quality.
But I hear you and I agree. Been considering starting a zine to surface cool blogging stuff away from that mainstream stuff. Do you think that is something worthwhile to do? (just gauging if there is interest from people in this thread)
After my first reply to you I stopped to think about it for five minutes and decided to edit the post to remove the GH link. I left Jekyll as a mention of a good SSG. Added Bear Blog too.
Least bad option is post the link to your blog entry on your Fediverse microblog (e.g. Mastodon) account, then update your blog entry with the URL of that post as accepting comments.
I do like receiving email about posts, and on Gemini, it mostly works for people to just respond in their own blogs. But that’s mainly because Gemini is so small that everyone uses the same aggregators and is likely to see responses; it wouldn’t work for the web. Respond-on-blog and send webping/webmention works, but that introduces a non-static component.
It is definitely attractive to have a “user owned web”. I do appreciate the federated services and hope they get big but I am not sure how much hope there is for that.
One other thing I think deserves a look and is only in scope here because of the use of the word “conversation”. This website and forums of similar size generally are pleasant to read. But any significant sized reddit that isn’t heavily moderated and you get a problem with what conversations turn into because of bad actors.
I find it very odd that in a blog post that includes a Classic MacOS screenshot, there’s no mention of Livejournal or its successor Dreamwidth – still one of the easiest and least-techie ways to start a blog.
Livejournal is now Russian-owned and one is not allowed to criticize the Russian government, so I moved my personal and tech blogs to Dreamwidth. It imported the history, but sadly, not the comments.
Additionally, USEnet is still alive and still works.
These seem major omissions to me.
I hope you understand that that was not a post hoping for a comprehensive history of blogging. It was a subjective take on my own experience with blogging. The screenshot from a classic mac app is there because I made that app.
I didn’t include Livejournal because I’m actively not engaging with russian companies when I can. I was not aware of Dreamwidth at all and this is the first time I hear about it.
Not saying this to disregard your message, but blogging happens in little bubbles and sometimes solutions that you think are obvious are not so much in other bubbles and with other people. I love blogging software and could easily list a hundred there, but that would serve no purpose. I just wanted to list four or five easy ways to start and there is no wrong way to start. Whatever someone chooses is good enough as long as they are having fun.
Thanks for the link to https://micro.blog/, it looks intriguing. You don’t mention SSGs + static hosting, but I think they’ve gotten pretty accessible and there are lots to choose from, one can mix and match and even move between hosts without too much trouble, if you own a domain. I think that’s sort of the natural way to approach the simple web.
But… people want to be able to leave comments, and there’s the rub. A comment can be (in my mind anyway) even below the “micro-blog post” threshold, but its context is fixed to a post, or perhaps to other comments. A commenting system pretty much requires identity management of some form, and then moderation… it gets complicated pretty quickly, and user expectations for feature sets have risen quite a bit since the early days of forums. There are several comment systems I’m aware of that are reasonable enough to add to a static blog, but then you have a third party. Or perhaps you can self-host on a little VPS, but then it’s no longer static-simple. Either way, real-time commenting exposes you to some risk, and requires constant moderation effort.
I’m fond of the old-fashioned, anonymity preserving, moderate-before-publish paradigm, but it’s too slow and too much effort for all but the smallest conversation. You can encourage people to publish “comments” about your blog on their own blogs, and thus sidestep moderation, but that’s much less accessible and gets disjointed quickly. Or you can just let a “social network” take care of all that, but then you lose discoverability and control. I wish I knew of a better way.
When I’ve dabbled in having comments I’ve been disappointed in the quality. IMO it’s not worth all the downsides you mention. I’d encourage bloggers to provide an easy-to-find email address, and I’d encourage readers of blogs to consider sending an email even if it’s “hey, I really liked this post!” As a long-time small-fish tech blogger these conversations do happen sometimes and they’re quite fun. Not all our discussions need to double as public performance art à la microblogging. :)
That said, when you do want to comment on something publicly the link-and-comment-in-own-post approach you mention is nice too. As a reader I don’t think it’s too bad to follow the backlinks. It’s gently applying a little structure ad-hoc where it’s needed rather than forcing all conversation into a threaded system to begin with.
A put my email address a few different places, plus I send out a newsletter.
A handful of times each year I get a genuine handwritten email from someone. It’s always a delight and I try to respond with as much effort as they put in to their message.
I wish I got a bit more of those random outreaches.
I feel like you might be interested in smallweb: https://www.smallweb.run/
Smallweb tries to make creating dynamic websites as painless as static ones. No build / deploy step, you just create a folder in you internet folder and it instantly available at
https://<folder>.<domain>. To switch between hosts, you can just rsync the an app folder between different smallweb instances, or even the whole smallweb folder.There is a live demo available at https://demo.smallweb.live
Check out: https://bearblog.dev/ too
Easy enough even on a static site e.g.: https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/static-comments-script-for-hugo-in-php/51924/2
Editted the post to include Bear Blog <3 thanks for reminding me of it.
Thanks for the kind words. I been considering starting a little monthly zine just to surface cool blogging stuff. SSGs alone number in the hundreds at this point. I do mention Jekyll in the post though which is a SSG.
You can have “comments” without too much fuss in your blog if you support WebMentions. Then using something like Bridgy, can help posts on microblogs mentioning your stuff appear on your blog. That is what I do with my blog (even though my third-party WebMention endpoint seems to be down atm).
Not sure recommending Microsoft’s GitHub for hosting is the path to breaking away from the corporations. The platform itself is corporate social media & there are quite a few alternatives that still fit free as in beer & freedom (or at least close to).
I agree with you, I recommended many types of setups there and the criteria was around what are the most common ones that people can find a lot of information about if they search. I recommended many alternatives there that I am not onboard with such as Github and Wordpress. My reasoning was around not pushing what is best for me but what can be an easy path for people. Also, it is fairly easy to move away from Github and carry your stuff with you, it is less than a silo than Wordpress which is a redeeming quality.
But I hear you and I agree. Been considering starting a zine to surface cool blogging stuff away from that mainstream stuff. Do you think that is something worthwhile to do? (just gauging if there is interest from people in this thread)
After my first reply to you I stopped to think about it for five minutes and decided to edit the post to remove the GH link. I left Jekyll as a mention of a good SSG. Added Bear Blog too.
Least bad option is post the link to your blog entry on your Fediverse microblog (e.g. Mastodon) account, then update your blog entry with the URL of that post as accepting comments.
I do like receiving email about posts, and on Gemini, it mostly works for people to just respond in their own blogs. But that’s mainly because Gemini is so small that everyone uses the same aggregators and is likely to see responses; it wouldn’t work for the web. Respond-on-blog and send webping/webmention works, but that introduces a non-static component.
It is definitely attractive to have a “user owned web”. I do appreciate the federated services and hope they get big but I am not sure how much hope there is for that.
One other thing I think deserves a look and is only in scope here because of the use of the word “conversation”. This website and forums of similar size generally are pleasant to read. But any significant sized reddit that isn’t heavily moderated and you get a problem with what conversations turn into because of bad actors.