[HN Gopher] Why My Blog Is Closed-Source
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Why My Blog Is Closed-Source
Author : feross
Score : 30 points
Date : 2021-04-14 18:16 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.joshwcomeau.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.joshwcomeau.com)
| rburhum wrote:
| > this site and its newsletter costs about $130 USD a month to
| run
|
| I have toy site that gets around 100k users a month, with
| background services like a postgres db... and it costs me under
| $20 to run. I do everything in CloudRun (serverless) with a
| managed DB. What in the hell is this person doing?
| nasmorn wrote:
| Especially since on a blog one would expect most traffic to be
| served from a cache of some sorts.
| oconnore wrote:
| Each page load for this article is 485 KB data, but some of the
| other pages are more like 1.5 MB
|
| This blog has seen 14,000 views today, but some of the other
| pages are ~38-40k views
|
| So if you assume ~990KB average page size, 30k views, and he
| were to post once a day, then that is $78/mo in bandwidth costs
| assuming 9c/GB. Maybe people tend to click around to the
| homepage / old articles, or refresh the page a few times?
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| What kind of traffic cost is that? I just checked and I pay
| 1.19 EUR/TB after the first 20TB. The rate you mention is
| almost two orders of magnitude higher.
| sxp wrote:
| 10GB/$ is the approximate price for bandwidth on
| EC2/GCE/Azure. Bandwidth is probably the most expensive
| item on those cloud services compared to other places.
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| I see. I knew bandwidth there was more expensive, but I
| couldn't have fathomed how much more expensive. I am
| surprised that one would be willing to put up with that
| for software as simple as a blog, but obviously a lot of
| people are.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| For under 1TB in monthly bandwith many providers just
| straight up give it for free. And that bandwidth cost is
| crazy high regardless.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Paying other people for their services rather than running
| things in a VM.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| What would be the best way to get a toy site like that running?
| Buy a domain and host with S3? I've never built and run my own
| website, and it's something I'd like to try soon.
| dsr_ wrote:
| My advice: buy a bottom-tier VM. $1-2.50 a month. Install
| apache or nginx, pick a static site generator. Investigate
| LetsEncrypt. Run a local git repo and clone it off to a local
| machine every so often.
|
| When you're feeling comfortable, buy a domain and set up
| LetsEncrypt for SSL. If you've found a limitation in the VM
| provider, consider moving to a different one. Consider
| whether a CDN is the right thing for you.
| aftergibson wrote:
| It only it was open source. Perhaps the community could suggest
| cost effective alternatives.
|
| In all seriousness, running a blog that relies on serverless
| invocations would guarantee I'd do everything I could to avoid
| anything popular in case I had to pay out of pocket for a huge
| traffic surge.
| Spivak wrote:
| Does it really matter when, presumably, your caching layer
| (however you choose to implement it) is handling basically
| all of your traffic for a nearly static site?
| francisofascii wrote:
| Cloud Server + CDN + Email. $130 doesn't sound that high.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| CloudFlare Free Plan: $0
|
| Email: $5-$10 FastMail plan, up to 16k emails a day
|
| VM: If you manage to spend $120 here, you've fucked up
| somehow since you're hosting a static site with a like
| button.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| What I imagine is one factor is owner's monthly time
| involvement, either initial setup and/or monthly average and/or
| peak (when things inevitably break:)
|
| I'm at a point in my life where for non-core
| activities/interests, I'd rather / more easily spend $100 to
| have a turnkey, than $20 but spend 10 hours :-/
|
| (understanding that the author's reasoning is wildly different
| of course)
| rosmax_1337 wrote:
| Very impressed by the looks of a lot of things on his blog.
| Tasteful and never over the top, but still interesting and
| unique. But I did not appreciate the audio being played when
| hovering over things, or pressing things. Audio in a browser
| should really only be used in a session that truly needs it,
| examples include: games, video/radio/media, chatting.
|
| I'm not a web-text-purist, but audio in a document is where I
| draw the line, that annoyed me.
| aarondf wrote:
| This is one of my favorite recently-discovered blogs. His posts
| are so in depth and the whole thing is beautiful and slick.
|
| I too prefer for my blog to be closed-source, for many of the
| same reasons.
|
| Mine is decidedly less sexy, it's just Laravel + Markdown, but I
| did write about it recently:
| https://aaronfrancis.com/2021/blogging-with-markdown-in-lara...
| ssivark wrote:
| It's so closed source, even the URL doesn't work! :-)
| aarondf wrote:
| Ha I think it does now. It was linked to my .wip dev
| environment for a few minutes there! Oops.
| tfehring wrote:
| > _It might surprise you to learn that this site and its
| newsletter costs about $130 USD a month to run_
|
| Yes it does. I know you can never criticize someone else's infra
| nowadays without coming across as "I could clone StackOverflow
| and get it to run on a Raspberry Pi over a weekend," I have no
| idea what or how much stuff his backend is doing, and I know
| serverless is an added and often worthwhile expense....but man,
| that's way more than I'd expect.
| bArray wrote:
| Yeah, I saw that figure and thought "damn, that's high".
|
| I'm not sure how many hits per day that works out as, but
| currently I have a server that is 5 euros per month handling
| 20k hits per day (static and dynamic content on an old
| dedicated C1 Scaleway). Another server I run for a gaming
| community costs $1 per month.
|
| > I have no idea what or how much stuff his backend is doing,
| and I know serverless is an added and often worthwhile expense
|
| I keep looking at 'serverless' (+) - but it just seems like a
| way to sell me less for more. The benefit I get currently from
| a cloud solution is location (spin up an instance close to
| where the traffic is coming from), maintenance (I move around a
| lot) and network (dedicated high speed internet that cannot be
| easily DDoS'd).
|
| (+) When I first heard about serverless, I really hoped it was
| a decentralized content hosting network - a bit like how
| something like PeerTube can benefit from having multiple users
| at a time. A person can dream!
| 1123581321 wrote:
| He uses Convertkit to manage email, which costs him most of
| that figure for the "site and its newsletter" if he has 15k
| subscribers (about half of his Twitter following.)
|
| https://convertkit.com/pricing
| Etheryte wrote:
| I think is a very valid criticism, paying $1500 a year for a
| static site with a like button is odd. Hosting this site on
| something like Netlify would literally be free while also
| satisfying every other requirements save for the heart button.
| Even the Netlify pro tier would only be about $200 a year for a
| small site.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| how would you compare using Netlify to AWS? could you get
| started on Netlify once you just buy a domain name?
| Etheryte wrote:
| Netlify is absurdly easy to get started on, it supports
| many static site generators etc out of the box. For my
| personal site it was a few clicks and no manual config
| required. Since you mentioned domains, you can even buy
| domains through them with auto-renew etc. I haven't used it
| for any large scale projects, but for small things, their
| batteries included approach is great.
| raymondgh wrote:
| $130/month for a website and newsletter considered minimal! Wow!
| FalconSensei wrote:
| newsletters are not cheap if you have thousands of subscribers.
| slenk wrote:
| For $130 he could easily host his own email server that could
| handle that much traffic AND be accepted by major email
| providers.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I can somewhat sympathize, although I don't view these arguments
| as _strong_ since they could mostly be fixed with minimal effort.
| On the other hand, it 's just a personal blog, so if you don't
| feel like sharing then that's cool too.
|
| * The unpublished posts would require a different workflow; you
| could easily keep a private repo and a public repo, and publish
| by pushing from private to public.
|
| * I don't really see a problem with copycats, personally. I
| personally feel like theme/design is just a minor style thing on
| top of the content and not even something that you "take credit
| for". Like, if someone wants to copy everything but the content
| of my blog, more power to them.
|
| * The security angle is basically adding obscurity, which is a
| reasonable additional layer, however thin.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Yeah, what a weak post. My flippant TL;DR: "Because I'm too
| lazy to separate code and content."
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I think that's a touch uncharitable; a lot of it is "because
| I'm not willing to put in the effort to make the code public-
| worthy". The security concerns, for instance, boil down to
| wanting the extra layer of security through obscurity.
| Besides... it's a personal blog. I don't really agree with
| the reasons, but it's their blog, so it's not like they owe
| anyone anything, including source code /shrug
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| The whole premise seems a little weird to me since it's totally
| reasonable not to open source your blog website to the point
| where it's probably not even necessary to justify it.
|
| I do like it, though, even the silly heart feature which I would
| have expected to hate.
| slenk wrote:
| Hmm, having a like button use a Lambda function doesn't seem very
| efficient if it does _nothing_ as he says, even if it is cool.
| approxim8ion wrote:
| For the source control point, I do it this way:
|
| My entire working folder with markdown posts, drafts, templates
| etc is a private git repo. The output (the static HTML, CSS,
| images etc) is a public repo.
|
| I have a tiny shell script to commit, push and publish the site,
| and it works just the way I want it. His other points are
| understandable. I personally don't take my blog that seriously,
| it's just a pet project.
| yur3i__ wrote:
| >It might surprise you to learn that this site and its newsletter
| costs about $130 USD a month to run; I don't make any money off
| the site, so this comes out-of-pocket. I'd really like to keep
| that cost as low as possible
|
| http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
|
| I really don't understand why something like a blog needs to be
| much more than this to be honest.
| OhSoHumble wrote:
| It's a blog that focuses on building rich, interactive, CSS
| heavy websites. I don't think spartan design would really speak
| well for the purpose of the blog.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| I run 20 home build sites on a 20EUR server.
|
| ( As a comparison)
| HaoZeke wrote:
| Yes. People do copy. You'd be lucky to even find attribution.
| This is one of the things which open source contributors need to
| make peace with. The way I look at it, the original grew out of
| my own experiences in my head and that can't be copied. As for
| manifestations... The more pretty / functional code and sites
| there are, the better!
|
| A tip from over ten years of FOSS : never try to track your FOSS
| code, nothing good can possibly come of it
| silicon2401 wrote:
| This is part of the reason I don't publish my creative works. I
| show them privately to friends and family, but I don't publish
| because part of the creative process for me is control: I may
| not be able to control much in the world, but I enjoy
| controlling every aspect of things I create, including who sees
| it and when. It's been very rewarding, and makes me sympathize
| for people like Kafka whose work got published against their
| explicit wishes.
| CodeMage wrote:
| Can someone explain the part about copycats? The way I'm
| reading it is that the "copycats" forked the repo, and then
| retained the presentation while changing the content. In other
| words, it's like writing your own resume using someone else's
| publicly shared Word template. What am I missing? Why is this
| wrong?
| shirleyquirk wrote:
| because the sites are portfolios for web designers, so the
| medium is the message. it's as if a resume for a job as a
| Word template designer was written with someone else's
| template.
| CodeMage wrote:
| Oh, okay. Thank you for clarifying.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| The repo isn't just a presentation template, it is a piece of
| work that proves you know your stuff. If an FE engineer's
| personal site is beautiful and slick, that's an obvious plus.
| Copying someone's handmade design (even worse, lazily) is bad
| manners. People are obviously going to assume you made it.
| remram wrote:
| While I agree with the overall decision, this hurt to read:
|
| > SInce it's closed-source, none of that matters to me. But if it
| was open, folks would want to grab it to use in their own
| projects. I'd feel a certain responsibility to make sure that it
| works well, or at least to make sure that its shortcomings are
| well-documented. And I don't want that responsibility right now.
|
| I see this argument over and over. I see it in academia as an
| excuse not to share code and data. "I haven't cleaned it", "it
| might not work for you". *I* will decide if it fits *my needs*,
| and if it doesn't I don't see how it's your fault. Code is better
| than no code, I always have the option of not using it.
| drenvuk wrote:
| yeah it's a pretty weak argument. The first one - keeping
| people from ripping it off without attribution - is stronger
| regardless of its selfish bent.
| souldeux wrote:
| it's a weak argument until you start getting pull requests,
| emails, passive-aggressive reddit posts, etc. etc. etc
| drenvuk wrote:
| just turn off your internet already if you can't ignore
| people.
| aparks517 wrote:
| That seems like a reasonable attitude to me. You might be
| surprised to learn that not everyone shares it, though.
|
| My personal experience is that my paid customers have been much
| friendlier and less demanding than users of things I've put out
| for free. That's not a problem in and of itself: sometimes
| demanding users is just what I need to sharpen up myself and
| what I'm building. Having noticed this, though, I've tried to
| be more thoughtful about what I put out, in what format, and
| under what terms.
|
| All that to say: I sympathize with both points of view.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I have spent a lot of years getting healthier via diet and
| lifestyle with an incurable and deadly condition. You would
| think people would welcome alternatives, given that it's
| incurable and deadly. You would think diet and lifestyle
| approaches would be the most conservative thing you could do
| because you have to eat and live anyway, so better to be more
| informed about how to do that well in the face of this.
|
| It was an amazing amount of ugly drama to try to talk to others
| with my condition about what I do and what I think about why it
| probably works. And then people would take very conservative
| bits of advice that were the most well established and screw
| them up to an amazing degree.
|
| One example: Coconut oil is a very well established beneficial
| supplement for my condition that is medically recommended and
| this is common knowledge for the CF community. It also tends to
| cause diarrhea.
|
| So "on my advice", someone began giving their toddler like a
| freaking tablespoon of coconut oil per day -- which is insane
| amounts to give -- and the result was very extreme amounts of
| diarrhea that couldn't be contained by a diaper and resulted in
| the floor needing to be mopped (like every single day until she
| finally said something to me and I was like "That's waaaay too
| much coconut oil to give").
|
| So, ultimately, I left all the lists and I still write about
| what I do for my health, but I've worked hard at figuring out
| how to talk about things to a lay audience knowing that some of
| them can manage to do amazingly stupid and harmful things with
| the most conservative suggestions. And I mostly don't have an
| audience for that kind of writing and I'm okay with that. Go
| have your dumpster fire elsewhere and don't try to pin the
| blame on me, thanks.
|
| Code no doubt has some people like that. And there's a crazy
| amount of built in assumptions that the original author will
| know but may not know he "needs" to document and spell out
| explicitly so some random internet stranger doesn't create some
| dumpster fire and claim it's someone else's fault because "no
| one told me...!"
|
| And no amount of "use at your own risk" type language is enough
| to protect you from crazies who want something for free, aren't
| competent enough to effectively deploy it and now think that
| freebie owes them like they paid good money and it came with a
| warranty.
| remram wrote:
| People might do that anyway, see how you use React components
| on your blog and replicate it on their own, doing it wrong
| and making their webpages take minutes to load. See your
| animated sparkles, and replicate the effect over their whole
| pages. They can do that without your code.
|
| If you want to make absolutely sure the "crazies" don't get
| any bad ideas from you, the only way is to not publish
| anything at all.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| And not publishing something is a valid choice that the
| author is currently making with regards to his code for his
| blog and I support his right to be closed source on that
| detail so he can focus on other things.
| remram wrote:
| We are discussing his article called "Why My Blog Is
| Closed Source". I am not randomly criticizing his life
| choices, just engaging in the discussion he started.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Well, arguably, _other people_ started this discussion.
| He blogged about it because people said stuff to him
| about it and he chose to respond more generally, probably
| in part to try to reduce the amount of time spent
| explaining it one on one.
|
| Yes, any time you publish anything at all, you risk
| having someone misuse it. But someone who replicates a
| thing and messes it up where you didn't provide the
| source code is less likely to act like "you did this to
| me, you evil monster, you." More importantly, the rest of
| the world is less likely to hold you responsible.
|
| Publishing A and publishing B don't come with equal
| risks. He is choosing to mitigate risks for reasons that
| make sense to him in areas that matter to him and
| explaining it on his blog.
|
| You can feel however you feel about that, but he has a
| right to make those distinctions and choices whether you
| like it or not.
| nharada wrote:
| You (and many others) might have this viewpoint, but it's the
| loud minority that causes the pain.
|
| Even with the small amount of open source software I've
| maintained I've gotten all kinds of angry emails and completely
| useless "bug reports" with no information. It gets exhausting
| after a while, and I agree that it's hard to just say "I don't
| care at all" when it happens. At minimum it's a bad look for
| you professionally if you never actually help maintain your
| open source software.
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| This is a very reasonable position on your part. Unfortunately
| there are many people who don't share the sentiment. I've
| personally had people bug me again and again via mail, IRC, and
| Twitter DMs over a relatively small project that I had
| abandoned/wasn't able/willing to maintain anymore. Sure, I can
| just go ahead and ignore those people or send them a standard
| response, but I still found it to be mildly exhausting. I can't
| really blame someone for wanting to avoid that.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| It seems like a premature optimization, similar to choosing a
| proprietary source available license from the start because
| you're worried about Amazon stealing your customers.
|
| Having aspirations about your project becoming a victim of its
| own success is good. Overselling your own success before it's
| caused you a single issue is probably not good.
| excerionsforte wrote:
| An acceptable reason for not sharing code is because you don't
| want to at this time, which may very well be never which is
| just fine. There's no need to share your personal code
| especially if you do not feel proud about sharing it.
|
| Other situations like research, typically need the same
| materials to do verification of that work.
| remram wrote:
| I agree that you don't have to release anything, and I won't
| call you out for it. If you write a blog post about it
| though, I might participate in the discussion and examine
| your arguments.
|
| Of course the problem of research is slightly different,
| since you have a claim, are trying to be "peer reviewed", and
| possibly were funded by public money.
| hu3 wrote:
| Unfortunately some people have no respect for open source
| maintainers time and do open issues with little to no context.
|
| Take a look at the issues of any popular Github project to see
| this phenomenon exacerbated.
|
| Coincidentally I stumbled upon an example today while randomly
| browsing Github projects. A project with 9k stars and someone
| opens an issue basically saying: "commands do not work":
| https://github.com/walkor/Workerman/issues/611
|
| I don't mean to do finger pointing at this person. It's a
| common behaviour.
|
| For maintainers it's exhausting to pursue each and every issue,
| asking for context. And if you don't keep a tight leash on them
| or use a bot they just pile up to hundreds of issues.
| remram wrote:
| Note that I am not saying anyone should _maintain_ anything.
| Disable the issue tracker if you want. I don 't demand that
| you respond to any communication about it or do anything
| further.
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