Comment by hsn915 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hsn915 | Hacker News Reader

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I find it so strange that blogging is such a simple problem to solve but there's really no service that does it nicely.

There was a while when everyone was basing their company's official blog on Tumblr! The space is so bad people were using Tumblr for their official company blog!!

Then came Medium and for a while people rejoiced but then it turned into an annoying website.

Yea there are "many" blogging services but each one lacks some important things that make them "meh".

- You need to have a commenting system. A blog that is just a set of static pages is not so interesting. I suppose the hard part here is fighting spam?

- You must support non-latin languages. Sometimes I blog in Arabic and I want RTL support on my blog.

- You need an RSS feed and email subscriptions. Let people build up their audience.

- You need to support multimedia (images, movies, audio ..)

- You need to support input by several languages (markdown, html, wysiwyg)

- You need a set of decent looking themes and have them be somewhat customizable

- You need to be easy to setup! If you're a hosted service, this is often a non-issue, but if you're a "you host your own blog" you need to provide something better than "here's the source, now install these twenty different development tools and run all these commands here and there and edit these fifteen config files so you can build and configure your blog".

- You need to provide the user with a way to easily get all their content so they can switch away from your platform. If the data is in a special format you should provide them the tools necessary to export to various other formats (html, pdf, etc..)

Tumblr gets a bad rap because it’s connected to politics, but for a considerable time it was the best blogging platform: the themes were simple and clean, it supported code fragments, had different post types (picture, video, etc). I still can’t find a Wordpress theme that mirrors the clean look of basic Tumblr (if anyone has any suggestions, even paid options, I’m all ears)

Yea, exactly.

My point is not about its reputation ..

Tumblr was not designed for traditional blogging. It has no commenting system for example, just a "retweet"-like feature; I forgot what they called it.

It was aimed more towards teenagers and young people - as far I can tell.

It just happened to have these very important features:

- Post in markdown

- Good looking themes with customization

As far as I can tell, that's really it! If you make a platform that just provides these two things all the YC startups will probably use your new service instead of Medium or whatever else they are using.

The P2 theme was pretty good when I worked at WordPress (see older version here https://kodedansk.wordpress.com/). They seem to have added some bells and whistles since then, but it looks like the intention is the same - content first, and make the presentation get out of the way.

https://wordpress.com/p2/

Looks pretty solid!

Unrelated side note: that template looks so much better by removing this silly css style: .site { max-width: 1200px}

Still responsive, still looks great on all widths. Why is it that all the websites out there have this?

Can't speak to this theme, but in general: Some users don't like unmaximizing and resizing their browser windows, and also don't like reading full-width text on a widescreen monitor. Rather than browsers providing a workable solution for all users regardless of window size, sites have to accommodate this.

Still waiting for them to open source P2. It’s been ‘on their roadmap’ for years.

That is true. It was a great mix of being able to write longer posts, and occasionally just share a pic or video.

WordPress has all of those things. It's fairly easy to set-up and it's secure if you update it every once in a while.

WordPress probably has the highest barrier to entry when setting it up on a server, but it, for all it's misgivings, does off all of the features in the best ways. If only it was easier to customize.

"WordPress is the worst blogging platform, except for all the others." - Winston Churchill

> has the highest barrier to entry when setting it up on a server

Most people looking for self hosting plus no-code will just install it from a cpanel, which works well enough.

I just don’t see the argument here.

Does it let you post content in markdown?

This is important because to me a blog is just a place to publish my writings. I must be able to write somewhere else in my preferred format and just use the blog to publish it.

As far as I can tell, wordpress only lets you write in their own wysiwyg editor, or plain html. Nothing else.

So if I want to publish to it in markdown, I have to first export markdown to html separately.

Yes it does: https://wordpress.com/support/wordpress-editor/blocks/markdo...

Wordpress.com is good for most people, in the west at least, considering I don't know about their RTL support.

However, my problems with them is that sometimes, embedding something will not work, and if they don't have their own embed for that link, you can't do anything, as any embed will need javascript, and you don't have it unless you are on an expensive business plan (expensive for a personal blog).

That's actually the only true reason why I use Hugo + Cloudflare Pages instead of wordpress.com.

Windows Live Writer and Blogger were an incredible combination for a long time

>You need to have a commenting system.

Why? Lots of successful blogs don't have comments and there is a good argument to be made that comments make a blog worse, not better.

I pay a subscription to Brand New[1], which is a blog about branding and design. Sometimes the best content is in the comments.

It also creates a sense of community. That blog is definitely niche, but you see people with your type of interests and ideas commenting there.

[1] https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/

I’ve been reading it for 10+ years now. Highly recommend subscribing. It’s also depressing because I’m seeing how we are collectively regressing in graphic design and especially logo design.

Comments was this religious topic when blogging was getting popular along with other things associated with "real" blogs. Generally I think they're positive but if a given blog tends to attract a lot of low quality drive by comments, it's absolutely reasonable to turn them off.

Anyone still remember trackback?

I think If you didn't care about commenting you wouldn't have an account on HN?

I guess if you don't want comments on your blog then a static site would make sense. I tried that route but the lack of engagement kills all motivation to post anything.

Imagine a website that was just people posting links and comments

I see what you did there ;)

Comments on an entirely unrelated site are very different from comments adjacent to the content.

This will be fixed when consumers understand that paying for good software is the solution for bad software

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