What are
/r/hnblogs'
favorite Products & Services?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
The most popular Services mentioned in /r/hnblogs:
Pipes
Isso
IPFS
The Old Reader
The most popular reviews in /r/hnblogs:
I think you're on the right track. A key aspect of publishing independently ("freely") is to own the address at which the content is accessible. Whenever you use a third party service and without using your domain, you run the risk of having your content removed or altered.
Domain names are the subject of the whole DNS system, which is rather user-unfriendly. As a result, most people don't own their domains, and don't own the address of their posts.
A service like IPFS changes the equation. Addresses are determined by the content, and therefore nobody can own it. Not you, not whoever is hosting the content. This is complete paradigm shift. The downside is addresses are completely human-unfriendly, which might limit their usefulness.
As far as paying people to use their disk space, I think it's a reasonble thing. Anything that depends solely on the good will of people can be fragile over long periods of time. It's ok if there is a small financial burden for publishing, as long as it's small enough that people of lower means can still make use of it. I suspect a few people mirroring your small web page wouldn't cost more than pennies a year, maybe a couple bucks.
There is a whole world of possibilities in the decentralized web. It's possible the internet of ten years from now looks and works nothing like the net today.
Thanks for adding these, I'll subscribe. However, with most feed readers you can just give it the URL, then they will figure out the feed for you and offer choices if there is more than one feed.
If you add the following snippet to the <head> section of at least your home page, but if you can, to all relevant pages. This will help others to subscribe which ever feed reader they use.
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="John Patrick Bender - Projects" href="https://www.pipes.digital/feed/nqxpnbq8?"> <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="John Patrick Bender - Blog" href="https://www.pipes.digital/feed/l9ve5xq1?">
Thank you so much for making these, it was very generous of you. I forked the two pipelines and added the publishing date using the <time> html tag. Here's the blog feed and here's the project feed.
In case the author does not want to invest the resources, I made you a crawled RSS feed, one for the projects and one for the blogs:
Sadly without a proper date because that's not in the HTML, but your feedreader should be okay with the guid alone.
You could host comments via https://posativ.org/isso/. But if you need a server anyway you could also just use a real blogging engine. Doesn't have to be wordpress - but something with comments, trackbacks and pingbacks should be the basics to have a chance.
Though there is the while indieweb thing with their trackback fork, they do have services where you can embed those in static sites.
Anyway, you mentioned wanting to learn more about web development, you will actually learn more if you extend an existing system. Writing plugins for Serendipity (a PHP blog engine) did help me to get started. Hosts like Hetzner, vultr, linode would be good places to host a blog.
You might know all this of course, hard to judge from the outside.