Re: Introducing Octopress Exporter

[Neil Smithline <emacs-orgmode@neilsmithline.com>]

> Aurélien Aptel <mailto:aurelien.aptel@gmail.com>
> Aug 2, 2012 05:45
> I've never heard of octopress, interesting. The only thing I don't
> like is how comments are handled. Since it's all static you relying on
> an external service like Disqus. I'm not so fond of losing control
> over user contribution like that. Besides, the actual service (disqus)
> is pretty terrible anyway. I'm always pissed when the comment I sent
> gets processed in weird ways yet doesn't do verbatim/code blocks.
>
Org Mode and Octopress are both about owning your own data. They are a 
perfect fit.

You can get email notifications of your comments or RSS (see 
http://www.accmanpro.com/2011/01/27/subscribe-to-all-comments-using-disqus-in-7-easy-steps/) 
feeds of all your comments. A simple mail filter and you own your 
comments. You can even save them to individual, HTML files.

I'm wondering what blogging system you use and if you really own your 
comments as much as you think. I would argue that individual HTML files 
on my hard drive is a greater degree of ownership than who-knows-what in 
some database....

I think that the decision about the use of external service for comments 
(or anything else) is a very important question. Assuming that you can 
own your data, an absolute requirement for me, I think that combining a 
static blog with external, dynamic services is the perfect solution. 
I've discussed this at 
http://www.neilsmithline.com/blog/2012/07/22/blurring-static-and-dynamic-blogs/.

My __static__ Octopress blog is hosted by Github, displays dynamic 
recent tweets care of Twitter, recent Github activity via Github, has a 
per-article "Buzz" section thanks to SocialMention, and even 
automatically tweets whenever I add a new post via Feedburner and Gmail 
filters.

I should add that my blog is 100% free with the exception of the 
computer I compose the posts on.

For me, static content combined with dynamic interaction is the best 
solution I've found and I've used many blogging services or self-hosted 
blogs.

Octopress is actually my second static blogging system. I used 
Nanoblogger before (I highly don't recommend it). I imported my posts 
from Nanoblogger to Octopress with relative really ease because they 
were both plain-text static blogs. I discuss it at 
http://www.neilsmithline.com/blog/2012/05/14/new-blog-tech/. Importing 
posts from other blogging systems that squirreled everything into a DB 
seemed to painful to me.

Neil

PS: I saw a mention of comment spam. I think that Disqus does a pretty 
good job of managing that. It also helps that my blog is not an 
attractive target as it probably has no more than two or three viewers.