Comment by ebiester | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ebiester | Hacker News Reader

Sure... but I want to spend less than 15 minutes a month administering said online presence.

That means not looking to see if there's a 0 day exploit.

That means not even thinking about upgrades.

That means not having to be the one to figure stuff out after an upgrade goes wrong.

That means someone else worrying about if it's being overloaded. (The DDOS of love...)

That means being able to quickly send off an email (a la posterous) or similar to post. Markdown is preferable.

That means, unlike static generators, I don't have to think about re-deploying when I do anything.

I have too much to do with programming and administrations for pay -- a blog is not where I want to have to think after hours. Administration isn't fun anymore. I want to own my service, but I don't want to have to babysit it.

I don't even mind paying for the privilege, though the amount needed to justify it might be more than I'm willing to pay.

What is everyone else doing that fits the above? This seems like dumb duplicated effort.

This is why I use GitHub pages. Jekyll is good enough, and with GH pages it's super simple. If GitHub were to ever do something weird with it, I can get any static hosting and do the jekyll stuff myself and still control it.

And a static site is much simpler than, say, a Rails-based site (the other thing I was considering when setting it up). Any hosting will do, and I only have to worry about exploits in the web server, not the framework.

That's the route I think of going, but I still don't think that's controlling your presence on the web -- you're losing all your google juice if you ever have to move.

What's the difference between that and any other system that allows you to export your data?

You can use your own domain with GitHub Pages, then you don't lose any 'Google juice' if you move to another hosting provider.

You should look into Squarespace. They built their own platform and do all the maintenance and upgrades. I've never heard of a Squarespace exploit or of a Squarespace site going down because it got too much traffic. They did almost go down in the hurricane, but supposedly they're now working on failover plans to ensure something like that doesn't happen again.

I've never heard of a Squarespace anything because I've never heard of Squarespace, why is this a reason to think that it is more reliable than alternatives?

Because they charge for services and are (as far as I know) profitable.

I should prefer something I never heard of because it charges? None of the alternatives charge for services?

Free services get shutdown regularly unless a benefactor with deep pockets can be found, simple as that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squarespace

It's a decade old, has 100+ employees, advertises on TWIT and TWIST. That you've never heard of it implies that you've been busy or uninterested, not that SS is obscure.

Life has no guarantees if that's what you're looking for. ;)

You're a programmer and apparently know systems, why does your service require babysitting?

Rhetorical, but yes, as you imply, convenience is a luxury and has a price. What other people are doing is either babysitting or paying more for the luxury of not babysitting.

Because 15 minutes a month quickly gets eaten up by writing my own monitoring scripts, and because, frankly, I don't want to. I find it boring. I do enough administrative tasks during the day to bring tedium back home. I find it an impediment to actually creating.

That's the appeal of something like posterous, even if I don't "own my presence."

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