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.
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.
This was around 2005 for what I can remember. Time is flying...
Genuine question - what does this enable? I assume the big guys love the additional tagging for engaging similar content, but what else is there?
>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
The developers were nice though, and I used their source code to learn Django. Really grateful.
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...
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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.
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.
Same with blogging, except I can publish any old crap on my blog without moderation.
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.
Phrasing my comment a slightly different way: what’s the point of writing *in public* if you don’t get feedback?
They have comments and they have (local) analytics. What more do you expect from a blog?
Been a happy user of it :D
Thanks a lot for building it !
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.)
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
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...
"signing up" is completely painless
- no cost, no email required
- choose a subdomain name aka login
- choose a password
- done
It is designed to complement SSG style blogs, but should work with blogging platforms as well.
> 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.
“Garry Tan and Brett Gibson were two of the co-founders of Posterous in 2008. Posterous was acquired by Twitter in 2012, and while we were happy that it was a meaningful acquisition for the team and investors, we were bummed to see something gets shuttered that we believed should last forever.”
https://firstsiteguide.com/posterous-is-gone/
Posthaven is pretty minimalist and still there.
PS. As many comments here are about fonts, the most recent (rare changes, as in, back in 2016, which is a "good thing") feature update to Posthaven was customizable html/css: https://blog.posthaven.com. Also does post by email, custom domains, and rss feeds.
Happy to see it exists in the world!
You might as well give up on writing then.
Drew Devault gives out $20 to start your own blog. We need to perpetuate this culture, not oppose.
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]
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.
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?
- 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
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.
Pretty much anyone can make this using Hugo, no?
If I wasn't already self-hosting ghost I would probably use this service.
Pig-ignorant and unbreakable.
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.
- 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.
You can find descriptions of such a setup by googling.
[0]: https://param.codes
Nice theme by the way. :)
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.
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
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.
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.
<body>
<script src="./magic.js"></script>
# Markdown goes here
* etc.
</body>
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.
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).