I find it so strange that blogging is such a simple problem to solve but there's really no service that does it nicely.<p>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!!<p>Then came Medium and for a while people rejoiced but then it turned into an annoying website.<p>Yea there are "many" blogging services but each one lacks some important things that make them "meh".<p>- 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?<p>- You must support non-latin languages. Sometimes I blog in Arabic and I want RTL support on my blog.<p>- You need an RSS feed and email subscriptions. Let people build up their audience.<p>- You need to support multimedia (images, movies, audio ..)<p>- You need to support input by several languages (markdown, html, wysiwyg)<p>- You need a set of decent looking themes and have them be somewhat customizable<p>- 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".<p>- You need to provide the user with a way to easily get all their content so they can switch <i>away</i> 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..)
> Trying to be helpful by automatically doing stuff I don't necessarily want.<p>Wholeheartedly agree. My #1 personal pet peeve that fits this description is links that automatically open in new windows/tabs.<p>You might (correctly) assume that most people want to open certain links (e.g. document previews) in a new tab, but that doesn't mean you need to force it upon them. Let them decide if they want to click with the left or the middle button.<p>Do you really think there are people out there who read your website, click on a regular link and then go "Damn, it opened in the same window. I guess that thing I was reading is gone ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"?
People who think it's ok to overload multitouch gestures should be shot.<p>On iOS you have:<p>1) One finger swipe (scroll)<p>2) One finger swipe (forward/backward history navigation)<p>3) One finger swipe (forward/backward post navigation)<p>Desktop Firefox on Xorg has better UX on a touchscreen than this <i>bullshit.</i>
There's an obvious solution to this: don't treat websites like programs, and never trust sites.<p>I learned this lesson over a decade ago. After being burned over and over because some shitty browser or site bug ate my post I now use One Weird Trick on every post I write:<p>1. Write it.<p>2. Select it and Ctrl+C it.<p>3. Post it.<p>If the post gets eaten, the text is safe in the clipboard, waiting for another go. This is for shorter posts. For longer ones, multi-paragraph stuff considered over hours or days, it lives in Notepad until it's ready to post. NEVER compose anything in a webpage form. They just can't be trusted.
If you're looking for a modern/minimal blogging alternative, you can check out what I built:<p><a href="https://www.wndr.xyz/posts/9fjM1tOJO7MWX4fYw3AU2Q==/what-s-art-and-what-s-not" rel="nofollow">https://www.wndr.xyz/posts/9fjM1tOJO7MWX4fYw3AU2Q==/what-s-a...</a>