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DeVliegendeHollander comments on Open Thread, Jul. 6 - Jul. 12, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I don't want to start a blog yet I would like to put articles online. I don't want to worry about things like a blogs name, layout or colors. But I would like to put an article somewhere and then share it on Reddit, LW, Facebook... and the site should preferably look reasonably professional (say, black on white, magazine like fonts etc.) so if you would write someone serious, say, Bryan Caplan, a comment saying "I disagree with some points in your article, here is my article to explain" the would not feel shamed linking to it in their own answer by the look of the site. Is there such a site that provides this?
EDIT: I would also like to know why so many people here seem to have blogs, personal websites, hosted under personal domains. What is the point? You want to keep the articles you write forever? I think if I write about something today 5 years later I will either be interested in something totally different or be embarrassed how ignorant I was.
Unless you're planning to put your articles in a new place each time, it sounds like you want a professional-looking blog. Maybe look into Medium?
Not necessarily, not all of them. But the ones I put on my public blog I would like to stick around, with my name attached, unless I deliberately delete or disown them. As it happens, the oldest post there is just shy of five years old. I'm not bored or embarrassed by it.
Thanks for the link. I think I have a different idea of professional than this. Medium as a community gives me the SJW vibe somehow, while the platform may be good. I guess if the target audience would not so much "story writers" but people who want to publish technical articles, howtos, more "dry" and objective stuff without all this we-are-all-awesome-let's-all-hug vibe.
Interestingly, I looked at your public blog and if I don't find anything and have to go down the blog/names/themes/colors path which I don't want to, I might go with GitHub pages as I think the community there may just that kind dry, objective, technical that I am looking for. Is GH P less insane to set up as Wordpress or Blogger.com?
If you actually want "professional", you can just store your articles on arXiv or SSRN.
Okay. In-between? :) Think of something like Bryan Caplan on Econlog.
What is the problem with getting a WordPress or a Blogger account, picking a pre-built theme that you like, and... done?
I cannot think of things like a blog name. I just want to write my ideas and share things I know a bit about. And all Wordpress themes I found so far look extremely unprofessional. Overly decorated, not magazine look, few of them are black text on white background like a proper magazine, fixed width so not scaling well for various devices, and generally looking very "personal". The funny part is, bog standard default HTML without any goddam css does look just about the most professional, because it is the simplest and looks like a paper - HTML was originally meant for the publication of scientific papers and I think browser developers respect this so the default is black text on white, Arial font, and so on.
If -- as it seems -- you actually care that much about the presentation of your blog/article repository, then either find a minimalistic theme or make it yourself.
You can, of course, go completely old-style: get web space somewhere and write HTML by hand.
This sounds like a valid approach actually. I like the oldschoolness of writing HTML. Any recommendations of free hosting providers?
I don't recommend entirely free hosting providers because they tend to come with too many strings, inconveniences, and ads for sexual-financial enhancement, but finding a cheap provider should not present any difficulties.
It looks the most something, but I don't think it's professional. Professional things have careful typesetting, and limited line lengths, and inline math that doesn't completely jar with the rest of the document. I think that a long document written in pure HTML might give off a vibe of "I know what I'm talking about", but I also wouldn't expect people to actually read it.
(Also my default font isn't Arial. It's some kind of serif.)
I haven't set up wordpress or blogger, and I haven't set up GHP in like two years. But I think it was... not exactly difficult, but frustrating at times. Like, everything almost just worked out of the box, and then making it actually work involved fighting with a bunch of different components that didn't always give good feedback and couldn't always be customized quite like I wanted.
Currently I don't actually have it set up quite like I'd want. I want pagination and an archive and tagging. And I think math rendering on the front page is broken for some posts. But to fix those, I'd have to fix them myself, or at least go searching for fixes that other people have created.
I think the friction involved with editing is also bad for my writing productivity. My most recent post, I mostly drafted on tumblr before copying over to GHP. That may or may not be a problem for you. (It's not a fair comparison, because I also hold myself to lower standards on tumblr. But I've written a few things there that would have been suitable for my main blog, and I enjoyed being able to just write them and edit in real time and then just click 'post'.)
(Not linking my tumblr because I don't want it easy to find by people searching for me.)
Having a local dev copy where I could make changes without pushing them to github all the time would improve matters, but I expect that setting it up and keeping versions in sync and so on would be a PITA.
Pastebin?
I go over my old articles all the time and find interesting concepts. Sometimes I read them specifically to get back into the mindset that I was at the time.
That said, I mostly have a personal and professional blog for marketing purposes.
How about Tumblr?
I think trying to reply to a serious article on Tumblr would not be taken too seriously, given how Tumblr tends to be seen as a narcissistic community.