Hacker News Reader

Comment by Despegar | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated but does anyone at Google still work on Blogger or is it going down the Google Finance path of neglect and eventual shutdown?

View on HN

I've used Blogger on a semi-regular basis, say, once a month for countless years. It still receives occasional updates every now and then, last time last year if I remember correctly. So there's certainly maintenance crew assigned to it, even some new features have been added. I do agree that it's a pretty niche product in their lineup these days.

Personally I hope it goes away. I would like to see Google focus on enabling bloggers and site creators to host their own sites and work to build and automate open source projects into their cloud products. There are so many static site frameworks for bloggers at this point that it would be ideal for them to do something similar to Netlify and work on great themes for Hugo or other static site generators.

>Personally I hope it goes away.

Yeah, let's let millions of words, and thousands of invaluable posts go to bit rot...

There are already a lot of tools for migrating Blogger sites. I'm sure they could setup a migration path to their free cloud tier.

You're assuming every blog is cared about by its owner, what if it's just the readers?

Switching it to read-only/static and offering migration paths would satisfy both parties then.

if you like something or think it's important, and you want the internet to preserve it for posterity, force it to be crawled by the wayback machine:

https://web.archive.org

(usually stuff i want to save has already been crawled, but i always find it satisfying when something i plug in there hasn't been archived yet)

I'm going to guess around 99% of bloggers don't want to think at all about site creation and hosting. They want to buy/pick a theme, modify it a little, and focus on the reason they're there in the first place.

And this could be accomplished. Check here for some solutions:

https://gohugo.io/tools/frontends/

GitLab already integrates with Hugo for one-click site hosting and deployment using Pages:

https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-gitlab/

What percentage of bloggers do you suspect meet the "assumptions" criteria on that page?

I'm fascinated by how tech people perceive the other 99% of web users/content creators.

I'm not saying it is perfect, but it could quickly be made ready to be as simple as Blogger is today.

Short of being hosted for you, no, it simply can't.

Services like GitLab and GitHub already host these sites for you for free.

If you are going to rely on a 3rd party host why switch Blogger (which handles everything for you) with GitLab/GitHub (which requires a bit of extra maintenance from your side)?

AWS already provides hosting for static sites, as does Firebase. GitLab and GitHub both APIs. It really could be as simple as Blogger is today with little effort from Google. Building a community around static sites is nothing new. Jekyll, Hugo and many other static site generators have been doing this with embedded comments using Disqus and other providers. Hugo already provides internal shortcodes for all these features and more, as well as analytics. It is really just a matter of creating some great templates for people to start using and automating the deployment (or migration) portion of the website so that users that don't want to deal with any additional steps can do it from a single interface.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com