Minimum Viable Blog

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

What makes a “minimum viable blog”

  • Several commenters argue a blog minimally needs chronological ordering and visible dates; others see those as “nice to have” but not strictly required.
  • RSS is widely requested: some call it essential for viability, others see it as an optional convenience not required for something to count as a blog.
  • A few suggest an extreme minimal form: either “just an RSS feed” or even a single long page of posts.

RSS, audience, and psychological pressure

  • One view: syndication and being “followed” can create pressure to optimize for readers and avoid low‑effort posts.
  • Counter‑view: RSS is anonymous and freeing; readers can skip posts or unsubscribe, and creators shouldn’t overthink perceived expectations.
  • RSS subscribers are described as low‑maintenance, often helpful (e.g., reporting broken feeds).

Simplicity vs feature creep

  • Many like the article’s approach because it avoids CMS bloat and focuses on writing.
  • Others note that over time you often end up adding: RSS, index pages, tags, non‑blog content, comments, image handling, etc., and the codebase grows.
  • Several people admit to spending more time on their static site generator than on actual writing.

Static vs dynamic and hosting choices

  • Static HTML (possibly generated from Markdown) is praised for speed, robustness under traffic spikes, and low security risk.
  • Some prefer WordPress for its WYSIWYG editing, plugins, and ease for non‑technical users, arguing maintenance can be simple; critics point to security, update burden, and complexity.
  • Alternatives mentioned: Hugo, Zola, 11ty, Astro, Emacs/Org, Common Lisp, PHP scripts, Obsidian-based workflows, flat‑file CMSs, and S3/GitHub Pages/Cloudflare/Oracle VMs.

Implementation details and micro‑optimizations

  • Commenters spot bugs in the sample Python (naive string replacement, lack of template escaping).
  • Suggestions include: using filenames for dates, incremental builds, not inlining large base64 images, stripping EXIF, basic HTML minimization, and leveraging existing Markdown renderers with syntax highlighting.

Discovery, SEO, and philosophy

  • One commenter worries that lack of SEO means post‑HN traffic will vanish; others say they mostly discover blogs via links, not search, and accept or even prefer obscurity.
  • Broader theme: the “best” setup is the one that removes friction and lets you keep writing.