Blogless – An articles-only publishing system for web writers

One annoying thing about the way blogs currently work is that the main reverse-chronological 'feed' stream that people subscribe to when they follow "your blog" is composed directly of articles you create, so people rarely post this kind of content—precisely because, when they update it, they'd either have to "pollute" their articles index (which people also rely on being searchable) with a little post saying they updated the original article and linking back to it; or they'd have to repost the updated article as a whole, duplicating it in the articles index and giving people coming from Google two separate pages to land on.

Separating blogging into article-posting and microblogging fixes this, because your microblog basically becomes an 'event feed'—you can have one post saying "Posted http://example.com/foo" and another one later saying "Updated http://example.com/foo". Your articles are no longer in the same namespace as news about your articles, so now you're free to have a one-to-many relationship between the articles and the news-posts about them.

What I was picturing is to throw out the level where you could infer "same editorial staff", so instead you just get the shared hosting service (http://example.com/) and then directly under that, articles (http://example.com/foo). Like a pastebin: there's no source attribution to a given post, even implicitly.

The lack of internal attribution is important, because any internal attribution mechanism—e.g. mentioning the author in a <meta> tag, or putting their name in the URL—can be used to build an index of posts by author (just googling "site:http://example.com/author" gets you half-way there), which people might then treat as canonical instead of relying on the microblog.

So, I'm not against self-hosting a CMS, but my requirement that articles have no article-internal attribution—not even implicitly based on where they're hosted—means that self-hosting is kind of moot, unless I know a bunch of other people I can invite to also post on my self-hosted CMS until it turns into its own pastebin.

(Also, I have other, more fanciful requirements, like the ability of articles to effectively have their own embedded code and databases, turning them into their own little one-page web-app, like NYT's fancier long-form data-science articles are. CMSes don't really go there; they expect code you want to use in an article to be added to the site as a plugin, rather than being treated as part of an article and thus isolated+not-run when on any other article, deleted when the article is deleted, etc. The only thing that could pull this off right now is hosting each article as its own Heroku app; and even then it's not a perfect fit. You could theoretically write a blogging engine that posted articles by creating Heroku apps, though... hmmmm, now there's an idea.)