Jama

Jama

@Jama

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Tabletop, video games, sports and maybe someday some other things if I get the ambition to learn.

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Jama
@Jama
Clouder
@Clouder
Clouder
@Clouder

Help with finding a website or blog

Looking into longer-form posting options, I probably need to go the route of either making a blog or making a website. I'm behind on everything on top of being incredibly busy, so any guidance on sites to avoid is desperately welcome. A quick perusal of blogs I read and posts I've seen in my feed suggest starter options are:

  • NeoCities
  • BlogSpot
  • WordPress
  • Dreamwidth

Are there any red flags with these? I know WordPress is owned by the same company as Tumblr, and that has a lot of issues with its current leadership and possible AI scraping. Do these sites:

  • Require registration or subscription fees
  • Require you to provide your own URL/domain
  • Require you to provide hosting
  • Claim any sort of ownership over your content beyond normal "you provide us a license to host this" allowances

I'm going to do my own research as I can, but given the compressed time frame, losing time to health issues the past week, and needing to tackle a bunch of chores and errands before a friend arrives in a week, I figure asking for help is the smart thing to do. If folks have good guides, those are also welcome.

EDIT 1: Apparently BlogSpot is now Blogger and is owned by Google. I really, truly have not paid attention to this space since I made a LiveJournal on a lark 19 years ago, updated it twice, and promptly forgot about it. Knowing that answers probably all my questions about the risks and costs of Blogger.

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in reply to @Clouder's post:

Jama
@Jama

Neocities provides you with storage and a domain (a .neocities.org domain, but still) once you have an account. On a free account, you can only upload like, text files and images. You can code the HTML by hand, but something like Publii can be used to make a web page almost like a word document, then you just upload the files to the Neocities page and you're good.

Blogspot and wordpress are traditional blogging platforms. You create an account, you get a domain within theirs (.wordpress.com or .blogspot.com), but you can manage everything from within your browser. I think Dreamwidth is the same way. You can change the theme, mess with colors and stuff like that. Since it's a blogging platform you only need to post there, don't know their custom HTML support for adding your own widgets though, beyond Wordpress having some HTML stuff as premium add ons.

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Jama
@Jama

Neocities you'd have to make your own RSS file and upload it manually or use some generator to update it, I believe the other 3 do it natively as part of their blogging software ecosystem.

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Clouder
@Clouder

Thank you!!

I'll add Publii to the list of stuff to check out. I haven't touched HTML is two decades, so that's been the biggest scare for me looking into Neocities.

I know you tinker with this stuff a lot, has it been tricky to spin something up on Neocities?

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Jama
@Jama

I'm away from my computer right now, but I started with a really nice template and then tinkered from there. Having a framework to work from was great for jogging my memory.

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Jama
@Jama

What really helped me was A: getting my css stylesheet in order from the template and B: once I got my index page made. I duplicated it and named to "template" so I could just change the content while the framework of the page remained intact.

Actually I have two lmao. One for new posts about Questnoir, and one for every other post type on the main site

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deafhobbit
@deafhobbit

rahaeli, one of the main people behind dreamwidth, has at times been extremely anti-cohost. i believe she was one of the main people who argued the teams meant it was unsafe for artists, and she's also generally shit talked the place in the past.

not gonna dig up all of that stuff, since most of it was 1-2 years ago, but here's her prominently Not Commenting on the closure news - https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3l3r6m56e2g24

i have no reason to think she's a bad person fwiw.

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