New blog with new design and ActivityPub support
It was absolutely time for bringing a new blog online.
The previous one was already quite outdated when we brought it online but we decided for it anyway because it was simple and free and we didn't have that big server capacities back then.
In the old situation it was a big advantage that it was centralized and hosted for free on MyBlogs servers so we had no trouble with it.
The downsides were the third party ads which ignore your privacy and couldn't be turned off - And for us that we had to rely on a third party we couldn't control.
We learned our lessons when there were some server outages but due to the software being proprietary,there wasn't a quick and easy solutions so we stayed there a little longer and longer and...
After our big success with the #Mastodon client #Halcyon and a growing number of users which could theoretically visit the blog,it was clear that something better would be needed sooner or later.
It's later now and the new and much better and more modern blog is finally online.
It was clear that the next blogging software must be open source and run on our own infrastructure which grow enough to handle all the traffic - At least we hope so,let's try if it's true.
Another of our requirements was the #ActivityPub support because we're doing much in the ActivityPub network so it wouldn't make sense not to have our blog there.
With this requirement the amount of available software wasn't that big anymore: Only Wordpress,Plume,WriteAs and Microblog.pub were left.
The biggest blogging software is #Wordpress but it's totally bloated and nearly every theme includes some third-party shit and ActivityPub support is only available using addons which are still in alpha stage so this one fell out of the decision quite early.
#WriteAs and #Plume are both very cool softwares which are built for ActivityPub Support from the very beginning and they are free of trackers and not that bloated so good choices but they're made for instances with more users what you can see in the way it's built and we think that's great for the big majority but not for our simple and small blog which should just contain some project updates.
Only #MicroblogPub is left at this point and that has been my personal favourite from the point when I first heard about it but when it also made the best points in the direct comparison,it was clear what software we have to use.
Microblog.pub is a single-user blogging software written in #Python which is open source and has only a few dependencies.
In it's original version you can see that it's meant for short posts even if it doesn't have a hardcoded character limit and should be used more in the way of a lightweight,single-user Mastodon instance.
To make it look more like a normal blog,we've rewritten most of the frontend source code using PureCSS which looks modern and isn't that bloated.
We made our modified source code available in the NikisoftBlog NotABug repository to make it easy for other people to run their own ActivityPub based blog.
We hope that you like what we did here and we're happy about comments,bug reports and feature requests in the comments (you can just reply to this post using a ActivityPub supporting software) or in our #NotABug issues.
But when requesting a feature,please keep in mind that this is a low priority project which we mainly do for our own use and as long as we don't attract hundreds of users,it may take some time until feature requests are implemented because we also have to work on our more popular projects.
Like this post?You can also follow this blog now using every ActivityPub compatible software.
A self-hosted, single-user, ActivityPub powered microblog. - tsileo/microblog.pub
GitHub
microblog.pub fork with new design and some customizations for running the...
