Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?
It&#x27;s amazing that the web, which was really originally built primarily as a distributed publishing platform, has gotten so damn complicated to publish to.<p>Right now I&#x27;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&#x27;t seem to be a decent way to preview posts on mobile.<p>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.<p>On that note, I&#x27;ve been really impressed with org-mode and pandoc. I&#x27;ve been writing and generating code within a text based environment lately, but it still feels as though the process hasn&#x27;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&#x2F;pdf all in one go.<p>But for the casual user, I think it&#x27;s become more difficult to self publish over the years, not less. The tools we&#x27;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.<p>Cheers to everyone still working on tools like org-mode, pandoc, and latex. It&#x27;s still relevant, and it still does a great job. If you haven&#x27;t checked them out, take a look. I was certainly surprised by how far these projects have been taken.