Comment by wkat4242

Comment by wkat4242 11 hours ago

4 replies

The problem for me is, wordpress is a security disaster especially the plugins. I don't want to constantly worry about updating in time. One day too late and you can be screwed. I've seen it happen with other people.

I'm a huge fan of self hosting but internet facing stuff I don't want to run myself but all the commercial blogging services like medium have scummy tracking and analytics built in, or try to get my readers to subscribe to things.

Then I tried substack but they lean too heavily on the "newsletter" paradigm which I hate. Also they are starting to enshittify now too.

I don't mind paying for a service but they always want to double dip in tracking readers and selling subscriptions to them as well. Yuck.

caseyohara 11 hours ago

This is where static site generators can be a good option. I’m in the same boat. I don’t have any appetite for self hosting and maintaining some internet-facing application with a web server and a database and a million dependencies in between. So for my personal site, I generate it locally and stick the static files on S3. No database, no servers, no headache.

  • SoftTalker 9 hours ago

    Agree, static HTML seems the only thing that is at all future-proof. Any hosted blog or platform will have the risk of shutting down or abandonment but if your source is HTML you can host that anywhere, with little setup. Even so I'd keep my posts in a text-based precursor format such as Markdown or Org-Mode. I don't think HTML is going away soon but it's not inconceivable.

  • simonw 10 hours ago

    Yeah, static site generators solve so many of these problems. There's a lot less that can go wrong if your hosting is entirely static files out of S3 or Cloudflare or nginx or similar.

    • bostik 10 hours ago

      Or as in my case, lighttpd, with all its CGI, user-input processing or dynamic execution modules not even loaded.

      Makes for an attack surface that gets delightfully close to zero.