It's amazing that the web, which was really originally built primarily as a distributed publishing platform, has gotten so damn complicated to publish to.
Right now I've got my own self hosted platform, running Wordpress on a Digital Ocean droplet. The constant security updates for Wordpress are a nightmare, and it seems I have to hack both my theme and my post code every time I want to make a slightly interactive post. Never mind that there doesn't seem to be a decent way to preview posts on mobile.
As others have mentioned, it seems the best way to get more people in control of their own platforms would be with easier static tools.
On that note, I've been really impressed with org-mode and pandoc. I've been writing and generating code within a text based environment lately, but it still feels as though the process hasn't really budged or improved much at all in the past 15 years. With org-mode and pandoc, along with babel, I can write and test code, embed images, and generate decent html/pdf all in one go.
But for the casual user, I think it's become more difficult to self publish over the years, not less. The tools we've built have gotten pretty embarrassing if our goal is to get as diverse of a population as possible speaking and sharing their ideas openly on the web.
Cheers to everyone still working on tools like org-mode, pandoc, and latex. It's still relevant, and it still does a great job. If you haven't checked them out, take a look. I was certainly surprised by how far these projects have been taken.
What is complicated about it? I'm not sure what you have in mind - there was never any Edenic period where you could run dynamic web blogs for free on your own server without any configuration or investment of time and dedication. All the old tools still exist, but better and polished by time.
Let's compare modern blogging to how you would have blogged in 1996, or when Berners-Lee launched the first documents at CERN, your workflow looked like 'write .html file, FTP to server, Apache serves static files to anyone who visits'. In 2016, your workflow, if you want to, looks like... 'write .html file, SCP to server, nginx serves static files to anyone who visits'. You can still write HTML5 by hand, it's not harder than original HTML (may be easier). You can write Markdown which compiles to HTML with no more fuss than 'markdown.pl foo.md foo.html' or 'pandoc foo.md -o foo.html'.
You don't want to run a server? That's fine, find a host like S3 and instead of 'scp', 's3cmd'. It'll cost you next to nothing compared to back then.
You want some sort of blog software? There must be a million which are not named 'Wordpress' and do not have endless security nightmares. You want static site generators? Likewise, millions. WSIYWG HTML editors? Likewise. Free hosting? At this point almost any large site offers blog-like functionality because hosting is so cheap.
But what is harder? If you want to run your own server, everything is infinitely easy than in 1996. Apt-get may or may not have existed in 1996, but I'm sure it was far less comprehensive and reliable than it is now. You can let your server run for many years without upgrading if you want, and when you do upgrade, it's a few commands. Why, you don't even need to compile a kernel or buy a server edition of your OS. It has never been easier nor cheaper to run your own website in a myriad of different methods.
So what exactly has gotten 'so damn complicated'?
The reality is that most people, and especially casuals, do not care that much about high-quality publishing or control or reliability, and instead care more about extreme convenience and network effects, and often either have nothing to say or don't want to say it and so no matter how polished your static site generator is, they couldn't care less. As Yogi Berra said, "if people don't want to go to the ballpark, how are you going stop'em?"
I'm not suggesting there ever was and Edenic period where things were easy, but I do think an argument could be made that things have gotten worse for the non-technical beginner looking to host their own site.
First, they've got to make a decision of which publishing platform to install on their site. They'll probably see some online debates, talking about static site generators vs Wordpress, etc. They'll waste a few hours trying to figure out what choice to make. Once that decision is made, it's next time to find and install a better looking theme, because no platform seems capable of looking decent enough out of the box.
Compare this to handwriting and uploading html files, and it seems like we've gone backwards.
> the reality is that most people... do not care about high quality publishing or readability
I'd argue the opposite. Empires of platforms have been built around being high quality and easily readable. Look at medium, and look at instagram. A slightly better publishing experience dominates.
And to further that note, how would you self host a photo site for mobile? Is that even possible? How would you begin?
What if you wanted to make a self hosted snapchat type site for your friends to see your photos?
I've made a few unfair points, but I think the general idea remains, the self publishing tools haven't kept up with the rest of technology, in general.
> Compare this to handwriting and uploading html files, and it seems like we've gone backwards.
But this isn't apple and oranges; a blog with themes and whatnot is much more sophisticated than the HTML CSS rendering defaults. IMO, a HTML page without any CSS is not that bad looking and you don't really need it. Heck, even a text file written with a little bit of care is perfectly readable.)
And the information overload isn't much of a problem: most people know immediately that static site generators aren't for them.
> Look at medium, and look at instagram. A slightly better publishing experience dominates.
Look at all the blogs using Wordpress, and everything written on Twitter and Facebook.
> And to further that note, how would you self host a photo site for mobile? Is that even possible? How would you begin?
I am not entirely sure what a 'photo site for mobile' is, but I am sure that it has no equivalents from before 2006 or so which you could claim it is harder or more complicated than, and I suspect that you could get 95% of the value from a static HTML page sitting on S3 containing a bunch of <img> tags and a 'viewport' <meta> tag that you copy-pasted from a StackOverflow post you found by googling 'how to make a mobile html page'.
> IMO, a HTML page without any CSS is not that bad looking
There's one exception to this: an HTML page without styling has line width equal to the browser window. Narrow text columns are a dramatic increase in readability.
(And I don't even maximize my browser window... a shocking number of people do, despite the fact that they're using ultra-wide 16:9 screens.)
The old school static pages are a pain and they are ugly.
My original site on Geocities in 98. I would put up dated posts occasionally. A new new item meant editing the index.html and my "archive" was just all the old posts cut and pasted to an archive.html page. Adding a new navigation link meant editing every page.
For a while I was using shtml for "header" and "footer" files which could be tacked on to individual entry files vut it was still a pain to use. Blog platforms and other CMS systems with editors that keep the content sepersted from the design are definitely better.
> Right now I've got my own self hosted platform, running Wordpress on a Digital Ocean droplet. The constant security updates for Wordpress are a nightmare, and it seems I have to hack both my theme and my post code every time I want to make a slightly interactive post. Never mind that there doesn't seem to be a decent way to preview posts on mobile.
I came to the conclusion that sometimes hand crafting HTML tags for interesting pages takes less time than fiddling with Wordpress innards and plugins.
The updates and the theme-hacking are what drove me to migrate from wordpress to a static generator a month ago. I still had to do some hacking to get my non-vanilla posts to display right, but generally I found it way easier to hack on the generator templates than to dig into wordpress's crazy innards.
(This might just be due to WP having generations of cruft though - for me the hard part was always figuring out which arcane PHP method I needed to hook, and how WP wanted me to hook it, in order to add something to this or that part of the page.)
I'm going to go out on a little bit of a limb here, but I bet you -- like most HN readers, including me -- are kind of, well, geeky/nerdy. (The fact that you're talking about generating content with org-mode and pandoc is kind of a big hint here, honestly.) Our requirements for hosting can be a little more demanding than the target audience WordPress aims at.
But you know, I'm running WordPress for one of my sites now, and at least in my experience, the "constant security updates" are about as much of a nightmare as they are for iPhone applications at this point. It updates itself! Every so often I log into the admin panel and make sure the plugins I'm using are updated, too -- which is generally a few clicks. From a user standpoint, rather than a nerdy hacker standpoint, WP is frankly closer to a maintenance-free, turnkey CMS than I really thought possible. The majority of WP users never need to hack their theme and post code, and I'd say of the ones who do, the vast majority need to do it very, very rarely.
I get that when you do look at it from a nerdy hacker standpoint, WP can be mildly to profoundly annoying. I am writing a new theme for my site to do a few specific things and I'm finding it kind of infuriating work. But as far as full-featured, self-hostable tools go, WP is just about impossible to beat. (And on many hosts the installation is pretty close to one-click; even if you have to do it manually, there are fewer steps with WP than with almost any other major web software package out there. Anyone wondering how PHP can possibly be still so popular when its fractal wrongness is so well documented just has to look at how easy installing WP is compared to installing roughly any other non-PHP web app ever written.)
At any rate, the web isn't intrinsically any more difficult than it ever was: if you want to build a static web site, you still can, and you don't need any tools in 2016 that you wouldn't have had in 1996. The reason that hosted publishing solutions are so popular goes back to the difference between "nerd" and "non-nerd," I suspect: whatever else one can say about Medium, getting an article published through it and having it look good by modern design standards is really, really easy. I'd like to see more self-hosting blogging myself, but "just write your articles in your favorite plain text editor in Markdown, process them with Jekyll and push 'em up to your server of choice with rsync" is, for most of humanity, simply not an attractive alternative to "type into this WYSIWYG box and click Publish."
> But for the casual user, I think it's become more difficult to self publish over the years, not less.
No. The exact opposite, in fact. Micro-publishing services like Twitter & Tumbler have enabled millions of casual users to publish and distribute their own content with a few keystrokes and a couple clicks.
In the context of this discussion, 'self-publish' means you control your content and its distribution. In that sense, Twitter and Tumbler are not self-publishing, since they own the software and can do pretty much whatever they like with your content. Also, you can't just pick up your Tweets and move them all to Facebook while retaining the same URL, whereas you can do this moving from self-hosted WordPress to self-hosted Jekyll.
That said, I don't think it's become harder to self-publish, but it hasn't matched the progress made by services like Twitter.
To add to this, it wasn't too long ago that the technical and financial cost of setting up and running a server were too prohibitive for the casual user.
Nowadays, I can set up a public-facing server with a few clicks for $5 a month. We have it too easy.
Another problem is why we at all need to rely on any third-party hosting services while we have our own computers connected to the Internet. In this regard, I have high hopes for content-addressable distributed systems.
Currently, IPFS [1] looks most promising to me. It's easy to publish a static website to it [2], and public gateways are available to make the site accessible to readers who do not run their own nodes. While IPNS (the naming system) does not seem to work reliably yet, hash of the current version of the web site can be published in a special DNS TXT record, and if that same domain points to IP address of a public gateway, the web site will be simply accessible via that domain.
Been feeling this way about hosting for a while now... I'm actually anticipating (wishing?) that "p2p web" (decentralized LAN applications) is going to start taking off soon. I think it's a matter of people building software that makes LANs easier to use for ordinary people. BT Sync is an excellent example of something like this. So is WebTorrent.
I had fantasies when Web Audio and Web Midi first were announced of browser based digital audio tools that people would use in one anothers physical presence, over a small local network. There is no reason that every network application needs to depend on centralized services! I was lucky enough to attend Music Hack Day in Berlin and created this Web Midi/WebRTC chat room as an example. I have no idea if it still works or not: https://github.com/timbresmith/pandemonium
My computer is not always up, or connected to an open (even moderately) network. What's more, I sometimes have to delay for 2 days an update because it requires an update at the wrong time, if I didn't missed it... And that's without even speaking about the reliability of my internet connection - I don't want to try to reach even 3 9 on it.
So yes I have a computer at home, but it's not a properly managed server, and I don't want it to become one !
In a content-addressable network your computer seeds the content rather than serves it. You do not need a properly managed server for that. It does not matter whether the original node is accessible, information can be retrieved as long as it is available somewhere in the network.
In IPFS, if you need to immediately ensure availability of your content, you can request it via a public gateway to force it into the gateways cache. Then the gateway will continue to seed your data even if your node goes offline.
The security updates are automatic (unless you opt-out) and previewing on mobile is as easy as logging in to the site from your mobile device. (The administration panel is fully responsive.)
Right now I've got my own self hosted platform, running Wordpress on a Digital Ocean droplet. The constant security updates for Wordpress are a nightmare, and it seems I have to hack both my theme and my post code every time I want to make a slightly interactive post. Never mind that there doesn't seem to be a decent way to preview posts on mobile.
As others have mentioned, it seems the best way to get more people in control of their own platforms would be with easier static tools.
On that note, I've been really impressed with org-mode and pandoc. I've been writing and generating code within a text based environment lately, but it still feels as though the process hasn't really budged or improved much at all in the past 15 years. With org-mode and pandoc, along with babel, I can write and test code, embed images, and generate decent html/pdf all in one go.
But for the casual user, I think it's become more difficult to self publish over the years, not less. The tools we've built have gotten pretty embarrassing if our goal is to get as diverse of a population as possible speaking and sharing their ideas openly on the web.
Cheers to everyone still working on tools like org-mode, pandoc, and latex. It's still relevant, and it still does a great job. If you haven't checked them out, take a look. I was certainly surprised by how far these projects have been taken.