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SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Monday July 29 2019, @10:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-do-YOU-use? dept.

Hello fellow Soylentils, I could use some of your insights and suggestions.

I am looking for a lean, mean, and safe open source solution that implements a small blog where I can rant and rave to my heart's delight to my two followers.

To set the scene, I am not looking for something big and/or unwieldy, which basically rules out the major platforms like Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress. The software is going to be self hosted on my existing web server, which already runs Linux with Apache2, MySQL, PHP, Perl, and PostgreSQL (LAMPPP?) on a Debian platform.

I would like the following features:

  • Open Source
  • Safe (i.e. well tested against hacking)
  • Reuse of my platform components (see above)
  • Small server footprint (the server is, in fact, a Raspberry Pi 3B+)
  • UTF-8 compatible everywhere (not like some systems — cough /. cough — where comments cannot contain UTF-8 directly)
  • Sane use of CSS
  • Displays properly on all platforms (PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, ...)
  • Easy to set up
    • Select features (e.g. whether users can comment on posts or not)
    • Select a design (with a number of templates, preferably)
    • Tweak the design to include my details
    • Add menus (Home page, Archive, Contact, ...?)
    • Add pictures
    • Define how many entries on the home page before the oldest entry gets bumped to the Archive
    • Possible sidebar for non-blog information
    • Possibility of displaying adverts in the future
  • Easy to use
    • Log in (only going to be used by one user, me)
    • Make a blog entry
      • Enter subject
      • Enter and format blog text (font, size, colour, attributes, ...)
      • Upload and embed pictures/illustrations/figures in text with captions
      • Add links to text and pictures
      • Set the time when a post goes active (now or specific time in the future)
      • Publish it
    • Edit a blog entry
      • Change any and all elements of the entry
  • I am a bit ambivalent regarding user comments as I do want to moderate them but will only have time to do that in batches, which means that I may have unwanted comments on the site for some time or, alternatively, people will not see their comments displayed until I have accepted them some time later.

[Ed. addition follows.]

I am not familiar with the minimum resource requirements for running SoylentNews, but if it would not reasonably fit on a single RPi, maybe adding one or two more would suffice?

What suggestions do YOU have for our fellow Soylentil?

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 30 2019, @05:16PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 30 2019, @05:16PM (#873183)

    The point being that what we're describing is dynamic generation + static caching and not really a static site.

    Also, despite 23 years experience, I have no idea what you're talking about with AWS. When you say "consumed by a lambda", are you talking about the lambda function I know or is this another sick perversion where concept is promoted to product name by wretched, overpaid marketing genii?

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by meustrus on Wednesday July 31 2019, @12:21AM

    by meustrus (4961) on Wednesday July 31 2019, @12:21AM (#873340)

    If you just wanted a static site, you would skip the last half and just have HTML files in S3 served through CloudFront. But the OP wants comments, which is decidedly dynamic. Well, unless you implemented the comment section as an empty div that gets filled in by JavaScript. But I will not help you build a JavaScript-only web site.

    S3 = File storage
    CloudFront = distributed CDN, can act as an HTTP server for files in S3
    DynamoDB = NoSQL database, glorified key-value store
    API Gateway = HTTP REST proxy for specific actions in AWS
    Kinesis = distributed sharded stream, glorified distributed ring buffer
    Lambda = execution of terminating programs based on triggers from other AWS services

    The point of all this is to avoid running any daemons yourself by having them all execute in a massive distributed cluster. They call it "serverless", which makes about as much sense as co-opting "lambda" as they have done.

    There are similar concepts in Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and OpenStack.

    --
    If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?