This article is really weird. The author starts with a false dichotomy, even mentions WordPress at one point which ought to blast through that false dichotomy, but never explains what’s wrong with it. A potential alternative to WP, Ghost, is also dismissed for … being written in the wrong programming language? Notwithstanding hosted solutions for both of these (and more) are available which don’t require you to do the care and feeding of a VPS etc. yourself. If the author is hell bent on sticking with old school shared hosting, I bet Ghost will actually run fine on, say, NearlyFreeSpeech.net, which has Node.js support.
So yes, if you have a bunch of requirements which you don’t really explain, and reject perfectly viable solutions out of hand because of vibes (?), making a website is still hard. But I know or know of plenty of non-technical people who get on perfectly well with one of these, or with some proprietary solution.
Ghost, is also dismissed for … being written in the wrong programming language?
The post says “i literally cannot make this work because all the commands from the ghost documentation just make the interpreter dump a trace and exit with an inscrutable error about not being able to create a thread or some other gibberish like that”
So no, it isn’t about being the “…wrong programming language?” (though I do expect that is a good piece of the problem, little php things feel approachable in a way these big complicated frameworks with lots of dependencies don’t), but more because he tried it and the instructions didn’t work on his server. I also tend to give up on things that don’t work.
but he also says he doesn’t want to host his own vps so,, why is he trying to run it to begin with? honestly my hunch is that he didn’t he’s just angry and making assumptions
Apparently Ghost has “support for popular static site generators”, whatever that may mean. Perhaps you can use Ghost to write pages and have the static site generator emit HTML which you can then upload?
i have a website, and CGI is perfect for that. it allows just enough complexity to make it easy to update your site without any external tools, and to have things like automatic indexes and search. yes, if you overreach you end up with wordpress - so don’t do that, and you’ll be fine.
Seems like he considers Wordpress as too complex. That is vague though. Likewise a comment there says:
wordpress is fine honestly, but it’s super bloated and. you know. gestures broadly at whatever tf the wordpress team is doing this week
A good chunk of this post (and its subsequent follow up) is about customizing little things, and I sympathize with that. If there’s a wordpress plugin that does what you want (and nothing you don’t!), it isn’t so hard to click the install, but it is a lot of effort to find that… learning wordpress’ ecosystem is more daunting than just making a few hacks to an old .php file. And writing your own wordpress theme or plugin is a real pain. (Well, it was when I last tried, but if it has changed much since then, that is its own problem - wordpress must update frequently for security but then you risk breaking your hacks and ugh who wants to deal with that?)
So when you want something that does the job but is something you can hack on with minutes or hours of effort, not days or weeks sunk into learning the ecosystem or studying the docs, and risk it randomly breaking later… I wouldn’t pick wordpress either.
Wordpress is bloated and complex, in spite of being compromised to try to cater to the lowest common denominator. Having hosted a very large Wordpress site, then seeing it run under Drupal, it was clear that Wordpress was trying to do too much, and this was after countless amounts of time spent optimizing everything.
Separately from that, Wordpress has an absolutely horrible security model. Couple this with the fact that there are crap plugins for everything, and many of those plugins never get updated, and people are afraid to update Wordpress because they’re afraid the site will break because the plugins will stop working, and, well, you’ll quickly understand why it’s the number one phishing site hosting platform on the planet: insecure instances get compromised and used to host phishing sites.
(Adapting a comment I left on TFA b/c I’m curious about what ppl here, who may somewhat enjoy touching computers, think about the situation:)
As the author points out there’s a lot of things that led to the situation where there are no more obvious choices for sub-Wordpress, supra-static site gen, easily-adminned, wysiwyg editor blog software, but I think of the desiderata the toughest one to recreate is gonna be “works on shared hosting”. Ever since the $20/month VPS became a thing in like…2005, the hobbyist computer touchers of the world simultaneously stopped thinking about the shared hosting usecase forever. Shared hosting’s reputation was that it was always oversold and shady and they’d cut off your MySQL connections when you had high traffic and so forth, but the alternatives were colocation and managed dedicated hardware that said “call us for a quote” not “credit card go here”. So Slicehost came on the scene (around the same time as Ruby on Rails 1.0) and it became way less necessary for your project to target $4.95 a month shared hosts where you got some version of PHP and some amount of MySQL and a preconfigured cgi-bin folder and some amount of .htaccess support.
I guess the other thing that has happened since 2005 is freemium SaaS operated by small/solo businesses; pika and buttondown have the right featureset but they are hosted services that provide people with a livelihood, not something you can FTP to your public_html or cgi-bin on your shared host.
It’s interesting that the comments here are solidifying this bit:
group #2 bugs me though, because they should be on my side, or at least nod and go “oh yeah, i don’t have time to make that for you, but i get why you’d want it. good luck man.” instead they act like i shit in their soup when i don’t want to use fucking Jekyll, and idk why. i think i’m being pretty reasonable here, wanting a thing i could do when i was 13, which was 50 times faster than any of this hacking-the-mainframe horseshit, to simply continue being possible. but it isn’t, and i’ve given up, so it’s time to compromise.
I personally strongly agree that there’s a big hole in the website creation space left behind by Frontpage and Dreamweaver. There totally should be a desktop GUI WYSIWYG “type up some stuff and export some HTML” website creator program, but I’ve searched and can’t really find anything. I’m firmly in the “oh yeah, i don’t have time to make that for you, but i get why you’d want it. good luck man.” camp, and if I end up learning enough about desktop software development at some point I might just make the time to work on it.
This is probably not something you’re after, but just in case: I’m also building a simple blogging platform (https://exotext.com, example blog) and am seeking any sort of feedback in exchange for a free-of-charge service until some future public release, and a perpetual discount after that. Let me know if you (or anyone else reading this) want to try it.
This article surely is bizarre, but it touches on some thoughts I have on my head and some thoughts I see floating around.
First off, I don’t really get the obsession with WYSIWYG. Two-pane lightweight markup preview should be enough (or even switching to a tab like the GitHub Markdown editor). GitHub also does the whole ctrl+v to paste an image, so this should be doable. WYSiWYG makes everything janky and really I don’t see any upsides to it right now.
Second, to narrow down the discussion, the author mentions blogs explicitly. Making a “pretty site” which is not primarily text-based (like a blog, or a “wiki-like” thing) is likely out of reach nowadays for non-coders… mostly because responsive design is table stakes and I think that kinda cannot be done without a text editor. (Or with a selection of customizable templates, which I don’t think gets you very far.)
The problem here then is two fold, then (and I think this is embedded in the article, but some other bits obscure these points a bit):
We “nerds” have more or less adopted SSGs wholesale. It’s the default for 95% of us, and it’s where all the effort is being spent. WordPress is going through a crisis and not a lot of people are working on freely available alternatives. Mindshare is very important, and only SSGs have this right now. And this sucks because SSGs are NOT viable for people starting out. They kinda require Git or dealing with a ton of complexity.
We “nerds” have also adopted VPS (or more complex solutions) and managing Linux wholesale too. It’s true that shared hosting was in many ways a disaster, but it was also quite manageable for regular folk. Getting a VPS running is doable with a good guide… but long-term maintenance IMHO is not. This is why I currently think that YunoHost and similar projects are one of the most important projects today. With those, regular people or groups of people can set up apps such as Ghost and keep them updated. Keeping YunoHost and similar projects well-maintained (and that includes their “packages”) should be a priority… and probably providing decent hosting of those (e.g. put in your credit card, choose a domain, log in to YunoHost at this URL). I have seen nothing else really that I would recommend to people who don’t want to have the skills that would let them get a job in systems administration.
I think if there were more things like Ghost that could be deployed and updated easily with something like YunoHost, the author would be a bit happier.
I don’t actually think shared hosting was manageable for regular folk. They ended up outsourcing to their local nerdy teenager, or maybe relying on tools their shared host provides like cPanel. And the reality is the people who would make the next cPanel integration for XYZ have realised there’s fewer headaches and more profit to be made running their own SaaS rather than being a middle man for installing wordpress (or successors).
Likewise the shared hosting functionality is not something “web hosts” really focus on nowadays as they’re more interested in becoming “cloud providers” and going after the XXXXX+/yr contracts than the 25/mo solo trader or hobbyist business.
Oh, experiences vary, but I saw quite a lot of that. Coupled with apps that could update themselves (WordPress and Nextcloud at least, I think), I think this was quite accessible to regular folk. I see similar people nowadays struggling with the more complex landscape we have today.
Of course, it was probably a mixture of social networks razing the earth and stuff becoming more complex that killed “regular folk making websites”, together with “us the nerds” not caring about regular folk making websites.
There’s no lack of shared hosting today- even if it’s inertia. The problem is that… well, it’s inflexible (PHP + MySQL, everything else is rare). This is why I think YunoHost and similar stuff is key.
There’s plenty of those, but they’re all getting overly bloated and complicated, just like Wordpress. Something like CMS Made Simple could be what they’re looking for. When I last looked at it a decade ago it really was simple, but perhaps that’s no longer true either. Wordpress used to be simple too….
I like Cathode Ray Dude’s youtube content, but I’m honestly not super impressed with this rant. There’s actually quite a few ways to publish content on the web, all with different sets of tradeoffs.
Personally I’d go the static site generator route, since there are dozens of them (as the post itself states). I think markdown is a perfectly reasonable way to write a blogpost and I’m not sure why CRD dislikes it, but I’m sure there are alternatives to that if you look (or you could just write raw HTML I suppose). Indeed, I host a couple of websites myself where my dev process is basically “spin up a localhost webserver pointed at my html files, edit them, refresh until I’m happy with them, then copy everything to a server”. Actually because I am a professional software enthusiast these sites are now nix flakes, but before that I ran one shell command that just copied everything locally to a webserver. If you were using Dreamweaver or some other WYSIWYG editor in the 2000s, you still needed to run one command that would copy the files you were editing locally to a webserver once you were happy with how it looked.
Did Dreamweaver not support FTP? I’ve heard of it, and I know people who used to use it, but never having used it myself, I thought it did.
In one way, it’s too bad that TBL’s original idea for editing HTML pages within the web browser hasn’t taken off. It’s (I feel) doable these days, especially with all the HTTP methods we have, like PUT [1] and DELETE. Of course, such support might require a bit of configuration of the webserver, but if it were popular enough, it might not be that much of an issue.
[1] I recently added PUT support to my own blogging engine and I have a script I use to upload entries and any supplemental files like images.
There’s some strange/dissonant ideas here & I could care less about WYSIWYG editors, but the higher idea of much of the tooling being overly-complicated & Markdown not being ergonomic or suitable for bloggin are true. There are a lot of simpler tools out there, but I think this boils down to SEO being awful & someone that isn’t a professional programmer cannot separate the wheat from the chaff when all the high-ranked links advertise complexity like NextJS, Hugo, Zola, & the likes that also end up breaking every major change with feature creep (often in response to Markdown deficiencies).
It’s not self-hosting but I found bearblog to be a pretty good place to host a blog. It’s minimal, cheap, and supports drag-and-drop uploads. It does exactly what I want and nothing more.
Shared hosting hasn’t been a target developers have cared about supporting for more than a decade unfortunately. The struggles in the blog post are a perfect illustration why: shared hosting often locks down (breaks) fundamental operations like creating threads or keeping long-running processes alive. A VPS is, quite literally, the solution. Maybe check out something like Caddy for an easier experience compared to setting up Apache. Perhaps we’ll see a return to CGI-style with server side wasm + wasm components for databases and such; Spin is the closest to this I’ve seen so far and I use it when I can get away with it (still feels like very early technology though).
I definitely emphasize with the author, I’ve attempted to go through the same frustrating process of running not-PHP on shared hosting and failed. I remember an IRC server shared hosting company getting mad at me for using “too many threads” because my custom (Java) services used a separate thread for nickserv and chanserv.
I see reflected in this rant (which is fine, it owns that) a familiar juxtaposition of ideas from my own experience consulting on web-authoring workflows for friends and family; I’m picky about the software, and the host (shared hosting is cool, in a community, “know who you’re rely on and who you support” way), and they need (expect, even) a WYSIWYG workflow behind online auth.
Stack-wise, I’m into nix-likes and/but that does not make npm a non-issue. I could live with Ghost, but have forked it for my own needs and do not expect anyone else to be patching the auto-updater so they can override the “settings per theme” limit, style certain elements that otherwise have their own dom roots, or create custom functions for their themes (which then needs added to a whitelist in a seperate package that validates themes). I’d like to see the editor lifted into a more flexible project, like a SQLPages template-repo with basic auth and the editor js vendored in – just enough components and SQL to make a single-user ghost-like come to life when one runs the single-binary rust server (reminds me of Hugo, all-in-one, but with the prod runtime – great for shared hosting).
I don’t have time to elaborate or edit this down, but yeah; I get it. This resonates with me and the people around me. That might not be the case for everyone, but I think we can all agree that the needs (and wants) are real, friction failure and struggle are (and may always be) real, and the means to scratch your own itches aren’t (and maybe shouldn’t be) widely distributed. We want better, we deserve better, and we could do better.
Hearing these thoughts reflected by others inspires me to believe that the future will be better (and there will be more to do).
edit: if anyone want to sponser that stack into being hmu :p
Sometimes one needs to vent, which is fine. But as a Hugo user I can’t relate to this. I was frustrated with Hugo before I understood how it works. After I got over that hurdle, all I need to do to write a blog post is to write some Markdown and then push to my Git host of choice. That workflow suits me very well. YMMV.
Interesting pain-points about the static site generator
Complaint: You don’t want to type out weird names for your images to link to them.
Solution: Don’t give them weird names!
Complaint: you want to edit from multiple computers.
Solution: keep your source markdown next to your generated HTML so you can access it from anywhere
Complaint: you don’t want to manually put images in your server.
Solution: I don’t get this one, every static site generator copies the image and puts it in the output folder, so that if you move the output folder to your web folded the images will get moved to the correct place
Complaint: You don’t want to type out weird names for your images to link to them.
I interpret that (and the whole post) as wanting a WYSIWYG editor on the website; you place the cursor and select the “Insert Picture Here” element, select the picture and it gets uploaded and placed where you want it. No file names required to be typed.
This article is really weird. The author starts with a false dichotomy, even mentions WordPress at one point which ought to blast through that false dichotomy, but never explains what’s wrong with it. A potential alternative to WP, Ghost, is also dismissed for … being written in the wrong programming language? Notwithstanding hosted solutions for both of these (and more) are available which don’t require you to do the care and feeding of a VPS etc. yourself. If the author is hell bent on sticking with old school shared hosting, I bet Ghost will actually run fine on, say, NearlyFreeSpeech.net, which has Node.js support.
So yes, if you have a bunch of requirements which you don’t really explain, and reject perfectly viable solutions out of hand because of vibes (?), making a website is still hard. But I know or know of plenty of non-technical people who get on perfectly well with one of these, or with some proprietary solution.
The post says “i literally cannot make this work because all the commands from the ghost documentation just make the interpreter dump a trace and exit with an inscrutable error about not being able to create a thread or some other gibberish like that”
So no, it isn’t about being the “…wrong programming language?” (though I do expect that is a good piece of the problem, little php things feel approachable in a way these big complicated frameworks with lots of dependencies don’t), but more because he tried it and the instructions didn’t work on his server. I also tend to give up on things that don’t work.
but he also says he doesn’t want to host his own vps so,, why is he trying to run it to begin with? honestly my hunch is that he didn’t he’s just angry and making assumptions
he’s trying to run it because he just wants to run a blog with a wysiwyg editor and there aren’t many options other than wordpress and ghost
Apparently Ghost has “support for popular static site generators”, whatever that may mean. Perhaps you can use Ghost to write pages and have the static site generator emit HTML which you can then upload?
Wow, I missed the memo that NearlyFreeSpeech.net now supports non-CGI Node.js (i.e. persistent processes). Thanks for mentioning that!
Seems like he considers Wordpress as too complex. That is vague though. Likewise a comment there says:
A good chunk of this post (and its subsequent follow up) is about customizing little things, and I sympathize with that. If there’s a wordpress plugin that does what you want (and nothing you don’t!), it isn’t so hard to click the install, but it is a lot of effort to find that… learning wordpress’ ecosystem is more daunting than just making a few hacks to an old .php file. And writing your own wordpress theme or plugin is a real pain. (Well, it was when I last tried, but if it has changed much since then, that is its own problem - wordpress must update frequently for security but then you risk breaking your hacks and ugh who wants to deal with that?)
So when you want something that does the job but is something you can hack on with minutes or hours of effort, not days or weeks sunk into learning the ecosystem or studying the docs, and risk it randomly breaking later… I wouldn’t pick wordpress either.
Wordpress is bloated and complex, in spite of being compromised to try to cater to the lowest common denominator. Having hosted a very large Wordpress site, then seeing it run under Drupal, it was clear that Wordpress was trying to do too much, and this was after countless amounts of time spent optimizing everything.
Separately from that, Wordpress has an absolutely horrible security model. Couple this with the fact that there are crap plugins for everything, and many of those plugins never get updated, and people are afraid to update Wordpress because they’re afraid the site will break because the plugins will stop working, and, well, you’ll quickly understand why it’s the number one phishing site hosting platform on the planet: insecure instances get compromised and used to host phishing sites.
(Adapting a comment I left on TFA b/c I’m curious about what ppl here, who may somewhat enjoy touching computers, think about the situation:)
As the author points out there’s a lot of things that led to the situation where there are no more obvious choices for sub-Wordpress, supra-static site gen, easily-adminned, wysiwyg editor blog software, but I think of the desiderata the toughest one to recreate is gonna be “works on shared hosting”. Ever since the $20/month VPS became a thing in like…2005, the hobbyist computer touchers of the world simultaneously stopped thinking about the shared hosting usecase forever. Shared hosting’s reputation was that it was always oversold and shady and they’d cut off your MySQL connections when you had high traffic and so forth, but the alternatives were colocation and managed dedicated hardware that said “call us for a quote” not “credit card go here”. So Slicehost came on the scene (around the same time as Ruby on Rails 1.0) and it became way less necessary for your project to target $4.95 a month shared hosts where you got some version of PHP and some amount of MySQL and a preconfigured cgi-bin folder and some amount of
.htaccesssupport.I guess the other thing that has happened since 2005 is freemium SaaS operated by small/solo businesses; pika and buttondown have the right featureset but they are hosted services that provide people with a livelihood, not something you can FTP to your
public_htmlorcgi-binon your shared host.It’s interesting that the comments here are solidifying this bit:
I personally strongly agree that there’s a big hole in the website creation space left behind by Frontpage and Dreamweaver. There totally should be a desktop GUI WYSIWYG “type up some stuff and export some HTML” website creator program, but I’ve searched and can’t really find anything. I’m firmly in the “oh yeah, i don’t have time to make that for you, but i get why you’d want it. good luck man.” camp, and if I end up learning enough about desktop software development at some point I might just make the time to work on it.
Here is one: https://getpublii.com/
Wow! Thanks for the pointer — Publii looks fantastic. I might actually get the blog going again.
This is probably not something you’re after, but just in case: I’m also building a simple blogging platform (https://exotext.com, example blog) and am seeking any sort of feedback in exchange for a free-of-charge service until some future public release, and a perpetual discount after that. Let me know if you (or anyone else reading this) want to try it.
This article surely is bizarre, but it touches on some thoughts I have on my head and some thoughts I see floating around.
First off, I don’t really get the obsession with WYSIWYG. Two-pane lightweight markup preview should be enough (or even switching to a tab like the GitHub Markdown editor). GitHub also does the whole ctrl+v to paste an image, so this should be doable. WYSiWYG makes everything janky and really I don’t see any upsides to it right now.
Second, to narrow down the discussion, the author mentions blogs explicitly. Making a “pretty site” which is not primarily text-based (like a blog, or a “wiki-like” thing) is likely out of reach nowadays for non-coders… mostly because responsive design is table stakes and I think that kinda cannot be done without a text editor. (Or with a selection of customizable templates, which I don’t think gets you very far.)
The problem here then is two fold, then (and I think this is embedded in the article, but some other bits obscure these points a bit):
We “nerds” have more or less adopted SSGs wholesale. It’s the default for 95% of us, and it’s where all the effort is being spent. WordPress is going through a crisis and not a lot of people are working on freely available alternatives. Mindshare is very important, and only SSGs have this right now. And this sucks because SSGs are NOT viable for people starting out. They kinda require Git or dealing with a ton of complexity.
We “nerds” have also adopted VPS (or more complex solutions) and managing Linux wholesale too. It’s true that shared hosting was in many ways a disaster, but it was also quite manageable for regular folk. Getting a VPS running is doable with a good guide… but long-term maintenance IMHO is not. This is why I currently think that YunoHost and similar projects are one of the most important projects today. With those, regular people or groups of people can set up apps such as Ghost and keep them updated. Keeping YunoHost and similar projects well-maintained (and that includes their “packages”) should be a priority… and probably providing decent hosting of those (e.g. put in your credit card, choose a domain, log in to YunoHost at this URL). I have seen nothing else really that I would recommend to people who don’t want to have the skills that would let them get a job in systems administration.
I think if there were more things like Ghost that could be deployed and updated easily with something like YunoHost, the author would be a bit happier.
I don’t actually think shared hosting was manageable for regular folk. They ended up outsourcing to their local nerdy teenager, or maybe relying on tools their shared host provides like cPanel. And the reality is the people who would make the next cPanel integration for XYZ have realised there’s fewer headaches and more profit to be made running their own SaaS rather than being a middle man for installing wordpress (or successors).
Likewise the shared hosting functionality is not something “web hosts” really focus on nowadays as they’re more interested in becoming “cloud providers” and going after the XXXXX+/yr contracts than the 25/mo solo trader or hobbyist business.
Oh, experiences vary, but I saw quite a lot of that. Coupled with apps that could update themselves (WordPress and Nextcloud at least, I think), I think this was quite accessible to regular folk. I see similar people nowadays struggling with the more complex landscape we have today.
Of course, it was probably a mixture of social networks razing the earth and stuff becoming more complex that killed “regular folk making websites”, together with “us the nerds” not caring about regular folk making websites.
There’s no lack of shared hosting today- even if it’s inertia. The problem is that… well, it’s inflexible (PHP + MySQL, everything else is rare). This is why I think YunoHost and similar stuff is key.
Sounds like he wants a CMS, don’t they exist anymore?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems
By the way, funny how the low-level, technical alternative is suddenly Markdown/SSG, and he never even mentions good ol’ plain HTML.
There’s plenty of those, but they’re all getting overly bloated and complicated, just like Wordpress. Something like CMS Made Simple could be what they’re looking for. When I last looked at it a decade ago it really was simple, but perhaps that’s no longer true either. Wordpress used to be simple too….
I like Cathode Ray Dude’s youtube content, but I’m honestly not super impressed with this rant. There’s actually quite a few ways to publish content on the web, all with different sets of tradeoffs.
Personally I’d go the static site generator route, since there are dozens of them (as the post itself states). I think markdown is a perfectly reasonable way to write a blogpost and I’m not sure why CRD dislikes it, but I’m sure there are alternatives to that if you look (or you could just write raw HTML I suppose). Indeed, I host a couple of websites myself where my dev process is basically “spin up a localhost webserver pointed at my html files, edit them, refresh until I’m happy with them, then copy everything to a server”. Actually because I am a professional software enthusiast these sites are now nix flakes, but before that I ran one shell command that just copied everything locally to a webserver. If you were using Dreamweaver or some other WYSIWYG editor in the 2000s, you still needed to run one command that would copy the files you were editing locally to a webserver once you were happy with how it looked.
Did Dreamweaver not support FTP? I’ve heard of it, and I know people who used to use it, but never having used it myself, I thought it did.
In one way, it’s too bad that TBL’s original idea for editing HTML pages within the web browser hasn’t taken off. It’s (I feel) doable these days, especially with all the HTTP methods we have, like
PUT[1] andDELETE. Of course, such support might require a bit of configuration of the webserver, but if it were popular enough, it might not be that much of an issue.[1] I recently added
PUTsupport to my own blogging engine and I have a script I use to upload entries and any supplemental files like images.There’s some strange/dissonant ideas here & I could care less about WYSIWYG editors, but the higher idea of much of the tooling being overly-complicated & Markdown not being ergonomic or suitable for bloggin are true. There are a lot of simpler tools out there, but I think this boils down to SEO being awful & someone that isn’t a professional programmer cannot separate the wheat from the chaff when all the high-ranked links advertise complexity like NextJS, Hugo, Zola, & the likes that also end up breaking every major change with feature creep (often in response to Markdown deficiencies).
It’s not self-hosting but I found bearblog to be a pretty good place to host a blog. It’s minimal, cheap, and supports drag-and-drop uploads. It does exactly what I want and nothing more.
Shared hosting hasn’t been a target developers have cared about supporting for more than a decade unfortunately. The struggles in the blog post are a perfect illustration why: shared hosting often locks down (breaks) fundamental operations like creating threads or keeping long-running processes alive. A VPS is, quite literally, the solution. Maybe check out something like Caddy for an easier experience compared to setting up Apache. Perhaps we’ll see a return to CGI-style with server side wasm + wasm components for databases and such; Spin is the closest to this I’ve seen so far and I use it when I can get away with it (still feels like very early technology though).
I definitely emphasize with the author, I’ve attempted to go through the same frustrating process of running not-PHP on shared hosting and failed. I remember an IRC server shared hosting company getting mad at me for using “too many threads” because my custom (Java) services used a separate thread for nickserv and chanserv.
Ooh bearblog is lovely. Thanks for showing us that.
[Comment removed by author]
I see reflected in this rant (which is fine, it owns that) a familiar juxtaposition of ideas from my own experience consulting on web-authoring workflows for friends and family; I’m picky about the software, and the host (shared hosting is cool, in a community, “know who you’re rely on and who you support” way), and they need (expect, even) a WYSIWYG workflow behind online auth.
Stack-wise, I’m into nix-likes and/but that does not make npm a non-issue. I could live with Ghost, but have forked it for my own needs and do not expect anyone else to be patching the auto-updater so they can override the “settings per theme” limit, style certain elements that otherwise have their own dom roots, or create custom functions for their themes (which then needs added to a whitelist in a seperate package that validates themes). I’d like to see the editor lifted into a more flexible project, like a SQLPages template-repo with basic auth and the editor js vendored in – just enough components and SQL to make a single-user ghost-like come to life when one runs the single-binary rust server (reminds me of Hugo, all-in-one, but with the prod runtime – great for shared hosting).
I don’t have time to elaborate or edit this down, but yeah; I get it. This resonates with me and the people around me. That might not be the case for everyone, but I think we can all agree that the needs (and wants) are real, friction failure and struggle are (and may always be) real, and the means to scratch your own itches aren’t (and maybe shouldn’t be) widely distributed. We want better, we deserve better, and we could do better.
Hearing these thoughts reflected by others inspires me to believe that the future will be better (and there will be more to do).
edit: if anyone want to sponser that stack into being hmu :p
I just use the grav CMS. It’s a little tricky to setup but very wyswiggy and blazingly fast.
Sometimes one needs to vent, which is fine. But as a Hugo user I can’t relate to this. I was frustrated with Hugo before I understood how it works. After I got over that hurdle, all I need to do to write a blog post is to write some Markdown and then push to my Git host of choice. That workflow suits me very well. YMMV.
Interesting pain-points about the static site generator
Complaint: You don’t want to type out weird names for your images to link to them.
Solution: Don’t give them weird names!
Complaint: you want to edit from multiple computers.
Solution: keep your source markdown next to your generated HTML so you can access it from anywhere
Complaint: you don’t want to manually put images in your server. Solution: I don’t get this one, every static site generator copies the image and puts it in the output folder, so that if you move the output folder to your web folded the images will get moved to the correct place
I interpret that (and the whole post) as wanting a WYSIWYG editor on the website; you place the cursor and select the “Insert Picture Here” element, select the picture and it gets uploaded and placed where you want it. No file names required to be typed.