[HN Gopher] Mataroa blog - Naked blogging platform for minimalists
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Mataroa blog - Naked blogging platform for minimalists
Author : notmuffin
Score : 409 points
Date : 2022-04-03 13:15 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mataroa.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (mataroa.blog)
| shaolinspirit wrote:
| I like modern web minimalism and modest design wave. Laconic and
| elegant.
| they4kman wrote:
| Does mataroa, or a similar platform, offer syntax highlighting?
|
| I'm on month 80 avoiding setting up a blog to capture my
| occasional thoughts and frequent side project adventures - mostly
| because I'd rather fiddle with the side projects than set aside
| time spinning up some blog platform (which often begins with
| promising I'll use asciidoc, and ends in frustration trying to
| render asciidoc _juuuuust_ right). I would love to have a dead-
| simple interface (for writing and reading) to collect words. But
| since most of those words will be about code, a lack of syntax
| highlighting will take residence in my mind.
|
| (Tangentially related: I _love_ reader mode, because I like to
| read an article or two while rocking my baby to sleep, and reader
| mode offers dark mode, even on websites in stunning retina-burn
| white. The only downside of reader mode is how it kills syntax
| highlighting.)
| sirodoht wrote:
| Mataroa offers syntax highlighting. Example:
| https://nutcroft.com/blog/building-mataroa-blog/
| they4kman wrote:
| Excellent! Thank you!
| garbagetime wrote:
| >Content in mataroa blogs is unfiltered and unmonitored. Users
| are free to publish any combination of words and pixels. However,
| content of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group
| on account of a group characteristic such as race, colour,
| national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation
| will be taken down immediately.
|
| >If one notices something along those lines in a mataroa blog
| please let us know at admin@mataroa.blog.
|
| There should probably be something explicit in there about what
| kinds of pornography is allowed on the site. Also, the first part
| of the paragraph seems contradicted by the second: I would say
| users _aren 't really_ free to publish any combination of words
| given the sentence that follows.
|
| P.S. it looks like a great service
| xinsight wrote:
| Is there a reason reader mode doesn't work on mobile Safari?
| (Pinch zooming and horizontal scrolling is painful.)
| extra88 wrote:
| Mobile Safari's reader mode works for me on posts. It doesn't
| work on home pages but I don't expect it to; home pages aren't
| wrapped in <article> elements, it's not semantically
| appropriate, but posts are.
| sirodoht wrote:
| Hmm. No idea why. I'll take a look, this should work.
| nabaraz wrote:
| How did Markdown, originally created for writing documentation
| got so popular that we are using it to create web pages? Wouldn't
| Rich Text be a better choice here?
| digitallyfree wrote:
| It has a nice simple syntax that can be easily understood by
| someone unfamilar with the language. Also many forums, Github,
| and Reddit use it.
| tomrod wrote:
| Is self hosting an option?
| kseistrup wrote:
| It's open-source: https://git.sr.ht/~sirodoht/mataroa
| tomrod wrote:
| Nice! $9 for annual services on top of a well constructed
| platform you can also self host is a really aim-for-the-moon
| commitment. I hope mataroa finds phenomenal success with
| their business.
| cpach wrote:
| There's always Hugo, Jekyll, Zola, right?
| tomrod wrote:
| True. Much like Dropbox, the tooling exists beforehand. It's
| nice when a company brings it altogether, maintains the
| expert knowledgebase, and creates the process to be simple
| (including setup).
| lowwave wrote:
| that is first thing popped to mind as well.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I had more or less this exact idea a few months ago, but wasn't
| able to block out time to develop it.
|
| Happy to see it exists in the world!
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| Not gonna lie, the appeal of these things is entirely lost on me.
| Who is sitting around thinking, "I wish I could find somewhere
| that would let me write plain html with basic CSS to make it
| legible?" Literally anywhere that will host a page can be a
| minimal blogging platform if you just don't use django or
| whatever to host your blog.
| [deleted]
| opentokix wrote:
| Love text and white space =)
| alecst wrote:
| I was using and loved mataroa. It was the fairest, most painless
| option I had found for blogging (as of 2020.) I eventually
| switched away from it because the default font was small and I
| couldn't change it. I wonder if this has been updated since. (At
| the moment, I'm hosting my blog as a static site with NFS. I go
| back and forth about wanting comments/email sign-up.)
|
| The developers were nice though, and I used their source code to
| learn Django. Really grateful.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| That sounds easy to fix, just some custom css?
| olah_1 wrote:
| I was wondering about the typography too. Specifically for
| multi-language support, the chances are high that you'd want
| something better than the one default font they provide. Not to
| mention that you may want to edit the language meta code if you
| are writing in a different language.
| sirodoht wrote:
| I built mataroa. Not sure if your comment is referring to
| mataroa, but in case it is:
|
| I care a lot about typography and making a platform in which
| non-latin scripts can be read well. Mataroa does not provide
| any font. Rather, it uses the end user's system fonts. System
| fonts are most probably better than webfonts. They can define
| a large set of characters, including as many languages as
| they can, without caring about how big they get. This is in
| contrast to webfonts, of which all character glyphs need to
| be sent to the client--so size matters.
|
| I've also written this text on the topic:
| https://nutcroft.com/blog/in-defense-of-user-defined-web-
| fon...
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Mataroa does not provide any font. Rather, it uses the
| end user's system fonts.
|
| Thank you _very_ much for this.
| ldjb wrote:
| Thanks for your comments. However, for certain languages it
| is important to specify the language in the HTML with the
| `lang` attribute. Otherwise incorrect glyphs may be
| displayed. More info:
|
| https://heistak.github.io/your-code-displays-japanese-
| wrong/
| sirodoht wrote:
| That's very interesting. Thank you for bringing it to my
| attention! Maybe a new setting to set the `lang`
| attribute is worth it.
| olah_1 wrote:
| That attribute could also let you easily group your users
| into different languages. If you wanted to add more
| discovery features or something and let people search by
| language. Not sure what your goal is around that. Maybe
| opt out of discovery by default or something.
| csande17 wrote:
| Unicode was supposed to save us from language-specific
| codepages, but alas...
| toshk wrote:
| On my phone it's pretty small font and linegeight, and
| found uncomfortable to read. As a web & app dev I have no
| idea how to quickly change this, let alone someone less
| tech savvy. For old people often small text is a big thing.
| Maybe add few font enlarge buttons?
| sirodoht wrote:
| One can change their blog's theme (which is essentially a
| larger serif font at 20px) on the mataroa blog setting
| page.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Ok but using px instead of rem is already getting it
| wrong. See https://every-layout.dev/rudiments/units/
| sirodoht wrote:
| Thanks for the article! I think I'm convinced--will
| probably change up some stuff on font sizes and container
| widths.
| kareemm wrote:
| Edit: leaving up as an embarrassing reminder to myself fully rtfm
| before opening my mouth. I thought this did NOT have comments and
| sub by email but it does. Glad y'all provided me with some
| feedback to realize I was wrong.
|
| ---
|
| Original comment:
|
| I don't get it. If you want to write and don't care how much
| you're read, write privately (Google Docs, a journal, text file,
| etc.)
|
| If you're writing publicly presumably it's for public
| consumption. The way you know if your writing is read is through
| feedback - comments, shares, email subs, etc.
|
| Feedback on your writing both helps you understand where you need
| to think more deeply about what you wrote AND provides valuable
| positive reinforcement: somebody is reading what you put into the
| world.
|
| Not providing hooks for these seems to defeat the purpose of
| writing in public.
| chaps wrote:
| Maybe consider that you're not their target audience.
| kareemm wrote:
| I'm trying to understand who the target audience is.
|
| Phrasing my comment a slightly different way: what's the
| point of writing *in public* if you don't get feedback?
| wepple wrote:
| Too much feedback (especially when it comes to sharing your
| own thoughts) poisons the purity.
|
| It's a cliche that every musicians best work is their early
| stuff. Once you become popular, famous, entangled in
| expectations and opinions, you lose the thing that made you
| great.
| [deleted]
| detaro wrote:
| You are misrepresenting it: Not caring about
| numbers/analytics isn't "no feedback". People can still
| leave comments, email, ...
|
| And the usefulness of writing isn't connected to if people
| can reach the author or not.
| [deleted]
| genmon wrote:
| For me
|
| - Writing publicly is minimum viable pressure to make me
| better formulate my ideas. It doesn't require feedback; 80%
| of the value is in my words being public. When my ideas are
| better formulated, it leads to me new ideas I wouldn't have
| had otherwise
|
| - Over time (I've been blogging since 2000) I've found that
| the most valuable feedback is in email. You don't get good
| signal to noise in comments or Web Mentions. RSS + a public
| email address is all I need
|
| - I can afford for my network to grow slowly. I don't need
| to build big community with flurries of debate in a
| comments section. Writing publicly is an excellent way to
| keep in touch with the broad network I already have
| tjoff wrote:
| Not sure what kind of feedback you want?
|
| They have comments and they have (local) analytics. What more
| do you expect from a blog?
| wepple wrote:
| I see where you're coming from, but I personally love blogging
| with zero concern for who reads it, how many likes it gets, or
| whether or not people want to give feedback.
|
| It prevents me from falling into a trap of crafting posts that
| have a bias toward what I think people might want to read, it
| keeps it pure.
| kaashif wrote:
| Just writing knowing that someone _might_ read it inspires
| better writing. It 's like when you think about a problem
| really hard, come up with nothing, then spend an hour
| formulating a perfect StackExchange question. More often than
| not, the process of writing for other people leads me to the
| answer, even without sending the question.
|
| Same with blogging, except I can publish any old crap on my
| blog without moderation.
| vbrandl wrote:
| Private feedback via email is always possible and you can chose
| to publish specific feedback you deem important. It's the same
| for printed literature. There is no comment section in books.
| As for sharing: you can always share the URL
| iliekcomputers wrote:
| I have a public notes repo [0] in which I only write for
| myself, with no real expectation that anyone will ever read it.
| I have however gotten feedback in the form of cold emails that
| people have found the notes useful or interesting. Writing in
| public without hooks can also be valuable.
|
| [0]: https://notes.param.codes
| lisper wrote:
| > I thought this did NOT have comments and sub by email but it
| does.
|
| Can you please elaborate? Because I was (and still am) under
| the exact same impression. The only appearance of the word
| "comments" on the home page is this:
|
| * Comments (alpha)
|
| and there is no link.
| bnt wrote:
| False advertising, no nudes anywhere to be found!! /s
| code_duck wrote:
| I honestly thought this was about nudism, initially.
| cx201 wrote:
| Looks really polished and I love the minimalist design.
|
| One thing I've been wondering that a lot of web platforms offer:
| how do you allow users to bring their custom domain with TLS?
| What's the tech behind that and how does the process work?
| mypalmike wrote:
| Whatever terminates the connection (e.g. nginx, haproxy,
| apache) needs to be configured for each supported domain. As a
| platform this would mean having code to modify and reload the
| config and put certs in place on behalf of users.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Just letsencrypt, I guess.
| sirodoht wrote:
| That was one of the hard things to figure out how to do in a
| simple way on mataroa. Just using Let's Encrypt directly was
| the first iteration. Now mataroa is using a combination of:
|
| - Let's Encrypt with a wildcard certificate for mataroa.blog
| and all *.mataroa.blog domains
|
| - Caddy's automated certificates for all user custom domains
|
| You can see a few more details about this setup in the server
| playbook doc [1] and the Caddyfile [2]
|
| [1]:
| https://github.com/sirodoht/mataroa/blob/master/docs/server-...
|
| [2]: https://github.com/sirodoht/mataroa/blob/master/Caddyfile
| Alacart wrote:
| You can do this a variety of ways, most of which boil down to
| automating a reverse proxy server and generating acme certs. My
| favorite is Caddy server if you want to build and manage it
| yourself.
|
| Things get trickier if you want to handle this well for
| globally distributed servers, since you'll need to have a
| cluster of reverse proxies near or colocated to your app
| servers. That needs an anycast IP address to handle A records
| for apex domains, and usually you want them coordinating to
| share certs, cache, etc. efficiently. In that situation I'd
| recommend reaching for a paid service, since there can be a lot
| to build and maintain.
|
| Source: I built approximated.app, which is a service that does
| all of that for you.
| alexwennerberg wrote:
| Seems very similar to https://bearblog.dev -- another cool
| project
| r2222 wrote:
| Yeah the "example post" names Bear Blog as a direct source of
| inspiration.
|
| > Created out of authentic admiration of Herman's genius idea
| of Bear Blog, Mataroa.blog is like Bear Blog but also a bit
| different. Namely, it has built-in first-class support to
| export your blog, and it also supports image hosting.
| prxtl wrote:
| I moved my personal blog to mataroa, and then wrote a love letter
| to the service on how _much_ it gets right --
| https://pratul.net/blog/mataroa-just-works-for-me/
| suyash wrote:
| I love this mostly but often need some customization, can I
| attach image or bikes to post ?
| swayvil wrote:
| I do a minimal thing too. A css, a bit of php, a markdown-to-html
| converter. Content in markdown files. Directories for structure.
|
| Pig-ignorant and unbreakable.
| egberts1 wrote:
| Same, except mine is JS-free.
| swayvil wrote:
| My markdown converter is php. Parsedown
| JFKKFJ wrote:
| replwoacause wrote:
| I want something like this that lets me password protect certain
| pages/posts. Does anyone know of something besides for Wordpress?
| siavosh wrote:
| Curious if willing to share the market size:revenue for the
| premium service?
| vodrazka wrote:
| bump, also curious
| sirodoht wrote:
| One can find some stats here:
| https://mataroa.blog/modus/transparency/
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Is there an API? Can I prepare a blog offline and run a script to
| publish it?
| DarkSucker wrote:
| Nice. Almost what I want: simplicity, images (for plots), and no
| adds or tracking. However, I want to author pages on optics, and
| I want to use MathJax (https://www.mathjax.org/) for equations.
| Please let me know how I might use MathJax with Mataroa if I've
| misunderstood. Or, please suggest something similar that supports
| MathJax. Rolling my own static site (as many NH postings
| describe) is enticing but beyond my ability. I am not a Web
| programmer, and Mataroa's simplicity is perfect for me.
| thirdplace_ wrote:
| Like it. The main page has a rss <link> but blog posts can have
| too.
| shila_muhamad22 wrote:
| 88840-8855 wrote:
| Looks great! I will try it out. Thank you for sharing.
|
| The pricing seems to be very fair and something that i would pay
| to support the project.
|
| addition: i wonder how non mainstream opinions are moderated
| there, e.g. conspiracy theories, pro Russian content, pro Chinese
| content, etc.
| tomrod wrote:
| Re: your addition--As an oldie on the internet, this has been
| through a few pendulum swings. I personally think it's fine to
| have non-coercive weird content exist (freedom of speech sans
| CP and similar exploitation) without it being shoved into
| people's faces (newsfeed). This let's people vote with their
| feet.
| jslakro wrote:
| I consider write.as another good minimalist blogging option. It
| provides some features above its free tier
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| This is the first service, which unfortunately just found shut
| down free registrations, that came to my mind when opened the
| link.
| smm11 wrote:
| OneDrive.
| xsace wrote:
| No one mentions it so there you go: mataroa means "hope" in Maohi
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| If anyone is looking for a free and privacy respecting feedback
| gathering option for blogs, I have one here: https://roastidio.us
|
| It is designed to complement SSG style blogs, but should work
| with blogging platforms as well.
| thisistheend123 wrote:
| I see nothing here that is minimalistic or different.
|
| First of all, having a dark mode by default is not minimalistic.
|
| Edit: wow, downvotes without any explanation. You guys must be
| having a lot.
| extra88 wrote:
| It's not dark mode by default. The text color is initially
| undefined and the background-color transparent. If the user's
| device is set to prefer dark mode, color and background color
| are set to be white text on a dark background.
|
| It would be good if it was possible for a reader to choose to
| use the opposite of their device setting but that would would
| less minimal (needs a UI, JavaScript, and client-side storage
| of the setting).
| mariusor wrote:
| Probably because you're commenting without being familiar with
| how your browser sending information to pages to use a dark
| scheme for you. A website that supports "@media (prefers-color-
| scheme: dark)" is not really a maximalist design these days.
| reliwa wrote:
| Thanks, exactly what I was looking for! Just created my first
| blog in a long time: https://reliwa.mataroa.blog/
| chubot wrote:
| I would like to try writing a post before signing up, or at least
| see what the import/export looks like
|
| I want to see if source code snippets, SVG, LaTeX, etc. works
|
| Same issue with bearblog.dev. They show you example rendered
| posts but not the example source
| nqzero wrote:
| > I would like to try writing a post before signing up
|
| "signing up" is completely painless - no cost,
| no email required - choose a subdomain name aka login
| - choose a password - done
|
| they've alredy given you exactly what you're asking for
| throwmeariver1 wrote:
| Yeah, sadly the only demo sites you see anymore are mostly for
| b2b services.
| sirodoht wrote:
| Good points.
|
| For the post source, it's just simple text markdown. SVG and
| LaTeX do not work. Most custom HTML and CSS does not work.
|
| The allowed HTML elements/attributes and CSS rules that work
| are these:
| https://github.com/sirodoht/mataroa/blob/2d1524e1f3ba968efcb...
| cheschire wrote:
| Could you sign up using a mailinator.com account just to kick
| the tires?
| ldjb wrote:
| You can sign up for an account without an email address, so I
| don't think there is a need for Mailinator here.
| giorgioz wrote:
| Checkout https://www.polyblog.io
|
| It's a choose your own adventure blog platform where you can go
| headless and customize everything or choose battery included and
| get a yourblog.polyblog.io out of the box
|
| [disclaimer, I'm the founder of Polyblog.io]
| pictur wrote:
| > Data centers in the EU, operated by a German company
|
| so?
| dustymcp wrote:
| Gdpr etc.
| Jack5500 wrote:
| This looks great. Everthing (at least) I want for a very
| reasonable price.
| chx wrote:
| How does this compare to https://blot.im/ ?
| didip wrote:
| How do you plan on making the business sustainable?
|
| Pretty much anyone can make this using Hugo, no?
| roshansingh wrote:
| Looks great. Please increase the font size to 16px or at least
| 15px. It is very difficult to read smaller texts which has become
| the norm these days.
| gkbrk wrote:
| If this is a common complaint that you have, why not just
| increase the font size and pick fonts you like in the browser
| settings? The settings are there for a reason.
| extra88 wrote:
| This home page doesn't honor the browser's font-size setting,
| it sets it to 14px. It should be changed to 1rem so it uses
| what's set in the browser.
|
| The font-family is sans-serif, so it does honor that browser
| setting, but if you'd prefer to read it in a serif font, too
| bad.
| iviv wrote:
| How do I do that in iOS Safari?
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I think this is great and easy for most people, but if you are a
| developer, you ought to host it on your own. There is no excuse.
| vinay_ys wrote:
| The truly naked blogging setup would be:
|
| - a git repo containing a Hugo (or similar) SSG site.
|
| - push this git repo to a couple of free private repo hosting
| services (GitHub, GitLab, GCP CloudCode, AWS CodeCommit etc)
|
| - and optionally use their free CI integration to generate the
| static site (or do it locally on your laptop).
|
| - and push to a free cloud storage (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle etc
| all give storage in their free tier).
|
| - Use Cloudflare CDN or AWS CloudFront (or both) to serve this
| static website from the storage origin.
|
| - Use Cloudflare DNS for hosting your custom personal domain name
| and point it to the CDNs.
|
| All this is free, with a bit of effort of initial setup in an
| afternoon. And it is super resilient with multiple independent
| CDN, Storage and Git hosting.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Ive used Github and Netlify (there are other alternatives too)
| for a simple and free static hosting.
| olah_1 wrote:
| I don't enjoy the process of having to build the site and push
| the built site to a service like github. It adds a certain kind
| of friction to the process of "saving" my work that just isn't
| life-giving for me.
| ray__ wrote:
| This is a huge factor for me. The best blogging/knowledge
| share/writing tools are the ones that have minimal overhead.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| You could keep the source files in GitHub and use their web
| editor to add or update content, then build and push to the
| publishing server via a GitHub action.
|
| You can find descriptions of such a setup by googling.
| olah_1 wrote:
| > then build and push to the publishing server via a GitHub
| action
|
| I have looked into this before, but it honestly just seemed
| very esoteric and complex. I'm surprised that Github
| doesn't provide pre-made "recipes" for this stuff.
| gurjeet wrote:
| I use mostly this same setup for my personal site and blog [1]
| [2].
|
| Git (versioning) -> Github (Git hosting) -> Github Pages
| (static site generation, and hosting) -> Cloudflare Free Plan
| (DNS and CDN). I have a Gitlab account that has mirrors of my
| Git repos, just in case.
|
| One question, though. How do you use more than one CDN to front
| your website?
|
| [1]: https://gurjeet.singh.im/ [2]:
| https://github.com/gurjeet/gurjeet.singh.im
| vinay_ys wrote:
| Just add DNS records pointing to both those CDNs. Your DNS
| hosting provider can serve them in rotating order to
| different users, there by spreading the load across your CDN
| providers. In case one CDN goes down, the browsers will try
| the next addresses in the DNS response.
|
| You could get redundancy for the authoritative DNS hosting
| provider as well. Add both provider NS server records at your
| domain registrar. Then, your only single point of compromise
| would be your domain registrar.
|
| You could get two different domains (on different tld) via
| different registrars and have both domains point to the same
| site. Of course, unless people know the alternate domain,
| this isn't of much help. But for a mobile app's api endpoint,
| I would recommend a setup like this to make it truly bullet
| proof.
| iliekcomputers wrote:
| I feel like Hugo / Jekyll (or equivalent) + GitHub Pages (or
| equivalent) is much much easier to set up. Is the resiliency
| really needed for your personal blog? Github Pages (which I use
| for my blog [0]) is pretty good at uptime afaik.
|
| [0]: https://param.codes
| devmunchies wrote:
| If you want even more raw, why use git? Do you need version
| control for a blog? Just use S3 as a file system and serve
| directly from there. Can still use cloudflare if you want.
|
| If you want a templating system, it wouldn't be hard to run a
| script that deterministically takes all templates in folder X
| and compiles them into folder Y.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| gmfawcett wrote:
| I think we have different definitions of naked! I think you're
| taking it to mean: use a lot of infra, but maintain none of it.
| I thought it would mean: strip everything down to bare
| essentials. Services like CI are niceties, not essentials.
|
| But I'm not the target audience. I think the idea of naked
| blogging is kind of silly. Blog if you want to blog, your
| clothing choices are your own.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| One nice thing I recognized is that the generated RSS feed
| contains full html text. I wish more blogging platforms are like
| this; save a lot of effort for feed readers.
|
| I'd also recommend to add open graph meta for the blog posts.
| Presumably people will want to share the posts somewhere; a nice
| set of open graph metas goes a long way.
| axiolite wrote:
| That's great, but unfortunately the HTML view only shows the
| TITLE, ala HackerNews, and not even a single summary sentence
| or paragraph there. So we've got a good RSS feed, but a bad
| HTML view.
| lousyd wrote:
| I haven't checked it out yet, but... Wouldn't one _not_ want
| html text in the feed, if one chose to use a blogging platform
| whose focus was text and simplicity? I prefer to read feeds
| with plain text myself.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| Most sane feed readers sanitize the html down to a dumb
| level; just headings, paragraphs, links and some inline
| images. If you only have the text to begin with, hyper-links
| won't work.
| jolmg wrote:
| Images are a feature many articles benefit from.
| gumby wrote:
| _De gustibus_ I suppose, but to me, "Images are a feature
| many or most articles use and which a very small number
| benefit from."
| [deleted]
| jolmg wrote:
| You're right. I shouldn't have said many. I forgot some
| like to put memes in their articles. I still think the
| ability to use images can be important, depending on
| topic. Quite simply a blog about anything graphics-
| related would benefit.
| gumby wrote:
| I've been told Medium _requires_ a huge photo at the top
| of each post, regardless if it makes sense or not for the
| article. Most of the time those articles are simply junk.
| Lammy wrote:
| Agreed, but on a technical level it makes it harder for the
| client software to have to decide what to do with those
| resources. A plain-text post can sit on my drive for months
| until I get around to reading it with barely any impact on
| disk space usage.
|
| With images I either have to eat the storage utilization
| for them or suffer a privacy leak by loading them when the
| post is opened. For the latter, there's always a small risk
| that a post could be deleted or an entire website vanish in
| between the time my feed updates and the time I open a
| post, in which case it would be left with text but broken
| images. I guess they could be inlined (like `<img
| src="data:image/png;base64,etc"/>`) to avoid that risk.
| It's even more obnoxiously complex if we're using the
| modern `picture`/`srcset`/etc to serve multiple resolutions
| and image formats for various screen sizes, connection
| speeds, and platforms.
| jolmg wrote:
| > One nice thing I recognized is that the generated RSS feed
| contains full html text. I wish more blogging platforms are
| like this; save a lot of effort for feed readers.
|
| The reason some blogs don't include the whole thing in the RSS
| is because they want you to visit the site for the ad revenue.
| It's not an oversight.
|
| Blogging is (was?) a job for some people. It wasn't completely
| supported by ads, but ads are part of it. It's like YouTubers
| before YouTube.
| Loic wrote:
| Maybe today, but I personally stopped providing full text in
| the feeds of my now defunct and free from advertising blog,
| because my content was directly vacuumed and inserted into a
| spammy full of advertising website.
|
| This was around 2005 for what I can remember. Time is
| flying...
| axiolite wrote:
| > my content was directly vacuumed
|
| This happens with the HTML contents just as easily. Perhaps
| just include a unique identifier in the text per client,
| and a link back to the source.
| crummy wrote:
| > This happens with the HTML contents just as easily.
|
| On an individual scale, yes. But if you're a spammer and
| want to vaccuum up text from 1000 sites, you'll skip
| writing a scraper for individual sites (which may change
| their formatting later anyway) and just use reliably-
| formatted RSS feeds.
| pests wrote:
| Correct. To the point where most black hat tools that
| spammers use will have rss feed ingestion as the primary
| or only data ingestion method.
| axiolite wrote:
| That was probably true back in 2004, but today there are
| numerous reader view, full text converter, and advanced
| web spider projects that anybody can plug in and get the
| full text from at least 90% of web sites, with no extra
| effort.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| Unethical people is going to do whatever they can. Life is
| much more enjoyable if you just ignore them and whatever
| shit they are going to do with the content you willingly
| shared with the world for free.
| Lammy wrote:
| > my content was directly vacuumed and inserted into a
| spammy full of advertising website
|
| For all its faults, this is something I have no shame
| invoking DMCA for. You still own the copyright on your
| writing even if you publish it for free online.
| f311a wrote:
| There are some downsides: interactive pages won't work and
| automated content stealers. It very easy to copy articles
| from such RSS feeds because you don't need to search for the
| text in HTML.
| morsch wrote:
| I like it. Looks great in reader mode, too. Not that you really
| need it. I think posts should have a link to the previous/next
| post in the blog. And I wonder if there is custom CSS.
| ms123 wrote:
| Great service, and an inspiration for https://smol.pub
| nerdponx wrote:
| Would you say there are significant differences between these
| two services? Or were you just inspired to build your own?
| teitoklien wrote:
| smol.pub is awesomeeeeeee
|
| Been a happy user of it :D
|
| Thanks a lot for building it !
| ms123 wrote:
| thank you teitoklien <3
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