Mataroa blog – Naked blogging platform for minimalists

One nice thing I recognized is that the generated RSS feed contains full html text. I wish more blogging platforms are like this; save a lot of effort for feed readers.<p>I&#x27;d also recommend to add open graph meta for the blog posts. Presumably people will want to share the posts somewhere; a nice set of open graph metas goes a long way.

&gt;Content in mataroa blogs is unfiltered and unmonitored. Users are free to publish any combination of words and pixels. However, content of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, colour, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation will be taken down immediately.<p>&gt;If one notices something along those lines in a mataroa blog please let us know at admin@mataroa.blog.<p>There should probably be something explicit in there about what kinds of pornography is allowed on the site. Also, the first part of the paragraph seems contradicted by the second: I would say users <i>aren&#x27;t really</i> free to publish any combination of words given the sentence that follows.<p>P.S. it looks like a great service

I was using and loved mataroa. It was the fairest, most painless option I had found for blogging (as of 2020.) I eventually switched away from it because the default font was small and I couldn’t change it. I wonder if this has been updated since. (At the moment, I’m hosting my blog as a static site with NFS. I go back and forth about wanting comments&#x2F;email sign-up.)<p>The developers were nice though, and I used their source code to learn Django. Really grateful.

Nice. Almost what I want: simplicity, images (for plots), and no adds or tracking. However, I want to author pages on optics, and I want to use MathJax (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mathjax.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mathjax.org&#x2F;</a>) for equations. Please let me know how I might use MathJax with Mataroa if I&#x27;ve misunderstood. Or, please suggest something similar that supports MathJax. Rolling my own static site (as many NH postings describe) is enticing but beyond my ability. I am not a Web programmer, and Mataroa&#x27;s simplicity is perfect for me.

Edit: leaving up as an embarrassing reminder to myself fully rtfm before opening my mouth. I thought this did NOT have comments and sub by email but it does. Glad y’all provided me with some feedback to realize I was wrong.<p>—-<p>Original comment:<p>I don’t get it. If you want to write and don’t care how much you’re read, write privately (Google Docs, a journal, text file, etc.)<p>If you’re writing publicly presumably it’s for public consumption. The way you know if your writing is read is through feedback - comments, shares, email subs, etc.<p>Feedback on your writing both helps you understand where you need to think more deeply about what you wrote AND provides valuable positive reinforcement: somebody is reading what you put into the world.<p>Not providing hooks for these seems to defeat the purpose of writing in public.

I moved my personal blog to mataroa, and then wrote a love letter to the service on how <i>much</i> it gets right — <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pratul.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;mataroa-just-works-for-me&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pratul.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;mataroa-just-works-for-me&#x2F;</a>

Great service, and an inspiration for <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smol.pub" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smol.pub</a>

Does mataroa, or a similar platform, offer syntax highlighting?<p>I&#x27;m on month 80 avoiding setting up a blog to capture my occasional thoughts and frequent side project adventures – mostly because I&#x27;d rather fiddle with the side projects than set aside time spinning up some blog platform (which often begins with promising I&#x27;ll use asciidoc, and ends in frustration trying to render asciidoc _juuuuust_ right). I would love to have a dead-simple interface (for writing and reading) to collect words. But since most of those words will be about code, a lack of syntax highlighting will take residence in my mind.<p>(Tangentially related: I _love_ reader mode, because I like to read an article or two while rocking my baby to sleep, and reader mode offers dark mode, even on websites in stunning retina-burn white. The only downside of reader mode is how it kills syntax highlighting.)

I would like to try writing a post before signing up, or at least see what the import&#x2F;export looks like<p>I want to see if source code snippets, SVG, LaTeX, etc. works<p>Same issue with bearblog.dev. They show you example rendered posts but not the example source

I like modern web minimalism and modest design wave. Laconic and elegant.

Is there a reason reader mode doesn’t work on mobile Safari? (Pinch zooming and horizontal scrolling is painful.)

If anyone is looking for a free and privacy respecting feedback gathering option for blogs, I have one here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;roastidio.us" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;roastidio.us</a><p>It is designed to complement SSG style blogs, but should work with blogging platforms as well.

Seems very similar to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bearblog.dev" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bearblog.dev</a> — another cool project

No one mentions it so there you go: mataroa means &quot;hope&quot; in Maohi

I consider write.as another good minimalist blogging option. It provides some features above its free tier

See also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;posthaven.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;posthaven.com</a> by those who made Posterous:<p><i>“Garry Tan and Brett Gibson were two of the co-founders of Posterous in 2008. Posterous was acquired by Twitter in 2012, and while we were happy that it was a meaningful acquisition for the team and investors, we were bummed to see something gets shuttered that we believed should last forever.”</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firstsiteguide.com&#x2F;posterous-is-gone&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firstsiteguide.com&#x2F;posterous-is-gone&#x2F;</a><p>Posthaven is pretty minimalist and still there.<p>PS. As many comments here are about fonts, the most recent (rare changes, as in, back in 2016, which is a &quot;good thing&quot;) feature update to Posthaven was customizable html&#x2F;css: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.posthaven.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.posthaven.com</a>. Also does post by email, custom domains, and rss feeds.

I had more or less this exact idea a few months ago, but wasn&#x27;t able to block out time to develop it.<p>Happy to see it exists in the world!

How does this compare to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blot.im&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blot.im&#x2F;</a> ?

This looks great. Everthing (at least) I want for a very reasonable price.

I&#x27;ve recently published an overview of the best platforms and architectures for blogging, given different technical expertise levels and budgets. Mataroa is the top choice for the category &quot;Free and easy, without much control&#x2F;ownership of the platform&quot;. Here&#x27;s the link if you are interested: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lanfranco.me&#x2F;posts&#x2F;resilient-lean-low-cost-blogging&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lanfranco.me&#x2F;posts&#x2F;resilient-lean-low-cost-blogging&#x2F;</a>

This is fantastic, was thinking about doing something similar as a side project but given that this exists, I’ll probably simply go with this. Thanks for implementing and posting on HN

I think this is great and easy for most people, but if you are a developer, you ought to host it on your own. There is no excuse.

Checkout <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.polyblog.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.polyblog.io</a><p>It&#x27;s a choose your own adventure blog platform where you can go headless and customize everything or choose battery included and get a yourblog.polyblog.io out of the box<p>[disclaimer, I&#x27;m the founder of Polyblog.io]

This is everything I need except analytics. I need basic analytics like page views and visitor locations. Does anyone know of a naked blog that also includes some analytics? I this there is space between simple analytics and privacy invading tracking analytics.

Looks great! I will try it out. Thank you for sharing.<p>The pricing seems to be very fair and something that i would pay to support the project.<p>addition: i wonder how non mainstream opinions are moderated there, e.g. conspiracy theories, pro Russian content, pro Chinese content, etc.

Looks really polished and I love the minimalist design.<p>One thing I&#x27;ve been wondering that a lot of web platforms offer: how do you allow users to bring their custom domain with TLS? What&#x27;s the tech behind that and how does the process work?

How do you plan on making the business sustainable?<p>Pretty much anyone can make this using Hugo, no?

Is there an API? Can I prepare a blog offline and run a script to publish it?

Thanks, exactly what I was looking for! Just created my first blog in a long time: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reliwa.mataroa.blog&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reliwa.mataroa.blog&#x2F;</a>

Is self hosting an option?

I like it. Looks great in reader mode, too. Not that you really need it. I think posts should have a link to the previous&#x2F;next post in the blog. And I wonder if there is custom CSS.

I do a minimal thing too. A css, a bit of php, a markdown-to-html converter. Content in markdown files. Directories for structure.<p>Pig-ignorant and unbreakable.

I want something like this that lets me password protect certain pages&#x2F;posts. Does anyone know of something besides for Wordpress?

like it! Very simple yet very good at doing its job. Is there a feature for anonymous upload?

I love this mostly but often need some customization, can I attach image or bikes to post ?

Curious if willing to share the market size:revenue for the premium service?

Like it. The main page has a rss &lt;link&gt; but blog posts can have too.

False advertising, no nudes anywhere to be found!! &#x2F;s

Looks great. Please increase the font size to 16px or at least 15px. It is very difficult to read smaller texts which has become the norm these days.

It looks nice. I will give it a shot.

Love text and white space =)

Not gonna lie, the appeal of these things is entirely lost on me. Who is sitting around thinking, &quot;I wish I could find somewhere that would let me write plain html with basic CSS to make it legible?&quot; Literally anywhere that will host a page can be a minimal blogging platform if you just don&#x27;t use django or whatever to host your blog.

OneDrive.

The truly naked blogging setup would be:<p>- a git repo containing a Hugo (or similar) SSG site.<p>– push this git repo to a couple of free private repo hosting services (GitHub, GitLab, GCP CloudCode, AWS CodeCommit etc)<p>– and optionally use their free CI integration to generate the static site (or do it locally on your laptop).<p>- and push to a free cloud storage (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle etc all give storage in their free tier).<p>- Use Cloudflare CDN or AWS CloudFront (or both) to serve this static website from the storage origin.<p>– Use Cloudflare DNS for hosting your custom personal domain name and point it to the CDNs.<p>All this is free, with a bit of effort of initial setup in an afternoon. And it is super resilient with multiple independent CDN, Storage and Git hosting.

&gt; Data centers in the EU, operated by a German company<p>so?

How did Markdown, originally created for writing documentation got so popular that we are using it to create web pages? Wouldn&#x27;t Rich Text be a better choice here?

I see nothing here that is minimalistic or different.<p>First of all, having a dark mode by default is not minimalistic.<p>Edit: wow, downvotes without any explanation. You guys must be having a lot.