When searched within India, Google's Blogspot points to username.blogspot.in as opposed to username.blogspot.com (also in search engines). Most permalinks users use to share are country specific which also reflect on Google Search.
Looks like blogspot.in was picked up by a non Google entity.
Domain Name: blogspot.in
Registry Domain ID: DE2DC9C0E8E694C28ADEF0F444F121B45-IN
Registrar WHOIS Server:
Registrar URL: www.domainming.com
Updated Date: 2020-06-29T20:00:06Z
Creation Date: 2020-06-24T20:00:05Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2021-06-24T20:00:05Z
Domain Status: inactive http://www.icann.org/epp#inactive
https://crt.sh/?q=blogspot.in
The idea is here: http://www.splinter.com.au/2020/06/07/chalkinator/
Anyway if anyone has advice i'm all ears :)
It sounds like a nice idea - a "Live Writer on steroids". Could be neat.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Writer
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Live_Writer
https://openlivewriter.com/
https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter/OpenLiveWriter/issues/911
It looks like the Firefox extension isn't around, and the corresponding Chrome one [1] doesn't actually work any more and was last updated in 2014.
I suppose things were simpler back then when services had slightly more open APIs.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scribefire/elkkomi...
Anyway, here is one i found out recently and seems to be able to do the job:
https://getpublii.com/
And a blog i made with it myself:
http://runtimeterror.com/devlog/
Having said that, the first thing a friend of mine (who has managed a few blogs professionally) asked when i mentioned it to him was "can you make posts from your mobile?". Of course the answer is "no" since this runs as a desktop application, manages everything locally and just generates HTML files that can optionally upload/sync to your server for you. But apparently every single non-technical client he had wanted to use their phone to write blog posts way more often than their computer.
And yes, i know this also explains the "because apparently putting everything in the browser is sexier or something" part i wrote at the top, but, dammit, i do not care about mobiles at all, do not go and kill stuff i (might) like.
(though TBH there are several things i dislike about Publii, e.g. the themes are both ugly and too overcomplicated to work with and modify and the program is written in Electron with for real benefit - it doesn't do real WYSIWYG, just a rich text editor almost with the same capabilities as the one you could find even in Visual Basic 4 and it doesn't even preview the site inside it but launches your browser instead, but there isn't really any other alternative that i know of and at the end it seems to work... though i'm itching to go and write my own :-P)
As for Publii, yes it really does appear to be everything I was thinking of making. Except it's Electron and I was thinking native - which users wouldn't notice likely.
Really interesting to hear that people want to post from mobile. I must be in a developers' bubble - i assumed this kind of thing would be done from a desktop! You've really got me thinking there. I guess you could totally do it from mobile. But then you have to fight the app store's distribution/marketing model. Which isn't appealing - at some point you have to ask yourself 'would I just make an easier living as an electrician than do this?'.
Again, interesting to hear your shortcomings with Publii. I think the killer feature would be doing it all from mobile. Which is fine I guess, but then how do you get your data to desktop, backups, etc etc. Lots to consider!
Thanks again for the food for thought :)
This means that you as the app developer would be out of the loop and couldn't easily sell the user out. You would only be there to provide updates, include more providers etc.
edit: reading the description of you software better, I think this is what you are going for. The thing you haven't added yet is domain management.
Most blogs are as simple as markdown files, with maybe some complexity in referring to other media files like images, and a key/value map in the form of front matter. That's not very difficult to serialize.
Write your articles as plain .txt when you don't need images. Or as handwritten html when you do (use relative links and dump the images into a subfolder) You can simply have pre-made templates for this that you copy and paste manually.
Create an account at archive.org Upload your writings root folder. As suggested here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23650600
your writings can live on in a url like https://archive.org/download/test_blog_2020/test/blog/
You can even add custom metadata so that it is searchable in some future incarnation of archive.org (doubt they will ever break the existing metadata even if at some decades down the line someone decides to redesign the whole thing)
archive.org is becoming such an important "ark" of knowledge that in theory there will be a very high chance a copy is preserved somewhere for decades to come. (barring some large scale digital societal collapse)
The idea would be: it would read the Markdown as I write it, let Hugo render it, and return the HTML to be rendered in the editor window.
Looking at your editor, it really looks like Zettlr (I'm guessing they're both Electron apps).
I guess you have 2 almost separate problems: the editor and the hosting. On the topic of hosting, I guess if a "blogger" can get his own domain name, the actual infrastructure can be swapped under it (and the data republished from the local machine), as long as the reader can load the blog using the known URL, it's fine.
FWIW: my app isn't Electron, it'd be native macOS, that's just my skillset. Maybe i should just use Electron so it could run on windows/linux to be honest.
Yes, the plan would be for the blogger to get their own domain. Bloggers generally already do that when setting up with Wordpress so i don't think that's a problem.
This way I'm able to keep the markdown completely standard which makes it easier to move to a new platform in the future.
Wouldn't know how to price that, and with RSS often containing just a few items you'd need to think about that when setting up the blog. Though maybe blogspot supports range requests for RSS?
I wish there was a service where you could just buy like, a $1000 US 100 year T-Bill and use the payments from that to guarantee your domain remains alive/hosted for at least 100 years.
I agree about the risk of the blog going away in the future which is something that simply cannot be avoided if you're relying on someone else to publish your content. Anyway, we're going to offer an easy way to export your data (maybe markdown files or HTML files or something like that).
If you want full independence and have the skills then yeah a static site is probably the best option. But even for people with technical skills it's a hassle to setup, design/buy a template, figure out the best hosting, no CMS, etc.
I was thinking the same as you: Having an export to some format (i was thinking Hugo or Jekyll) to give people that assurance that there's a plan B if things go bad.
As for the hassle to setup etc, I totally agree! That's a large part of what my idea would solve. And even with technical skills it's a hassle, i agree - which is why i initially thought posing this at devs would be good. But now i think they tend to DIY these things so perhaps not a great target market.
Or is the idea that the tool registers an account to a server provider for the user? So the user has to pay both you (for the tool) and the server provider (for the server).
Maybe I have misunderstood the aim? In any case, due to what you mentioned, I think it's a difficult niche, since technical people can set up their own and I'd guess most non-technical people don't really care enough.
So yes they'd be paying me and the server. However the server fees would be cents a month. I would aim to present this as a strength to the user: you get billed direct by AWS/Azure because you're not at ransom to me - you hold the keys to the kingdom.
I suspect you're right though: Technical people will DIY, and nontechnical won't care, and will simply use Wordpress (it's the IBM of blogging: "nobody got fired for buying Wordpress")
Indeed.
At some point the desktop app will need updates too. If the developer stops updating it it will be as good as dead.
[0] https://www.markmonitor.com
Edit: clarified that I meant the error seems to be on MM's side.
Deleted Comment
It arose around the question "Does a judge in country A have the ability to censor content in country B?". Google has long argued that a judge does not have this authority.
https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/2402711https://www.theverge.com/2012/1/31/2761454/google-blogger-au...
Google, and anyone with a functioning brain stem.
Jurisdictions exist for a reason, and with a number of exceptions somewhere in the low single digits (and maybe zero), all jurisdictions end at the borders of a country.
Far better would be that a domain is yours in perpetuity until you explicitly cancel it. If you don't pay, you get bills, or it goes to collections, or the domain temporarily stops resolving or something... but you shouldn't lose it. (If a person passes away, their estate figures out what to do with it.)
The notion that if you forget to pay, 60 days later it's gone (poof), just seems like a dumb policy in the first place.
And for those wondering how a business forgets to renew, it's pretty easy: the employee (A) in charge of managing renewals is let go, and so is their manager (B) at around the same time, so the manager (B) doesn't transfer responsibility from (A) to a new person, and their manager (C) doesn't realize the original employee two levels down (A) never had their responsibility transferred, because that was B's job.
domains are an asset just like anything else. personally i don't see why if you are a business, you don't register you domain for 10 years or more. just as a test i went to godaddy and looked at how much it costs to register a .com domain for 10 years... it was less than $100. honestly... if you are a business and it costs you $1000 to register you domain for 100 years, why wouldn't you do it.
Second, long-term renewals are precisely the scariest ones. It's actually tremendously difficult for a business to keep a process in place that happens once every 10 years. The employee who registered the domain (and their e-mail address) are probably long gone. The responsibility has been passed along 5 different employees during that time, and the last one got fired and nobody knew they were the one in charge of renewals. And then you find out, suddenly you don't own the domain anymore!
This is the whole problem in a nutshell. Counter-intuitively, if it were a bill sent monthly, it would be much harder for people to forget about (and you could rely on USPS forwarding for changes of address).
Your point about business operations is totally valid, but business is just one sort of human activity and shouldn't be the yardstick for everything else. Most of these blogs on blogspot.in were likely just personal journals. Domain registration seems like the sort of thing a public blockchain would be ideal for in comparison to a centralized registrar.
I'm in the minority of people when I say this, but I'm in favor of making domain ownership enough of a burden to reduce the number of domains registered and never used vs. making them extremely cheap and easy to own.
There are so many great domains that are registered and not in use. When starting a company these days, it's difficult to find a decent .com without paying thousands of dollars to a squatter or compromising with a TLD like .io
Why? Professional domain squatters are the ones that never forget to renew, because it's their main business. And if they stop paying on 1,000's or 100,000's of domains, the registrar will take them to court pretty quick to resolve the contractual debt. And either the company goes bankrupt or pays the bill, same as literally any other professional service. A contract's still a contract.
And if you're squatting on just a few domains personally and stop paying, it goes to collections, shows up on your credit report, and lowers your credit score like any other consumer debt not meeting payments. Which, if you want to open new credit cards or buy a house, is gonna be a big problem.
There are already avenues to address this, the same as any other debt you incur. "Forever" just means until it sends you to bankruptcy and you lose it formally, worst-case scenario. It's not some kind of blank check to register a billion domain names, not pay for them, and face zero consequences...
I'm very unhappy with the impermanence of online resources; some great websites that I used to rely on for information or conversation have just disappeared with time. Some have been archived by the Wayback Machine, some haven't. Obviously, a permanent server is a bigger concern (and a bigger problem) than a permanent domain, but I still think something like this could be a step in the right direction.
If a business screws up, paying a few grand in late fees is much better than losing it to a squatter and that can protect users from someone malicious buying a domain used by an app or something.
That was a fun day. Lots of freaking out, lots of looking balefully at all of our branded swag (domain printed as part of logo).
It turned out alright in the end - we got the domain back by placing a call to the TLD organization.
It's still pretty ridiculous, because businesses have plenty of other periodic filings and fees and renewals to deal with that have nothing to do with computers. There are permits that need renewal. Old fire extinguishers need to be replaced or recharged to avoid fines when the fire inspectors come around. There are all kinds of tax filings due monthly, quarterly, and yearly. There are various trademark and patent maintenance fees they need to pay during the life of a trademark or patent to keep it alive. They might also have long term contracts with janitorial services, landscaping services, copier/fax maintenance services, utilities, payment processors, and many others that they might want to review a couple weeks or months before they expire to research if they want to change providers.
Somewhere they should have a shared unified calendar of all these things, listing when they are due and what manager in in charge of getting them done. The computer stuff, like domain renewals and certificate renewals, should be on there.
This calendar should be regularly checked by someone high up, like the COO. That person just has to check it enough to be aware of any deadlines approaching, and if they do not get marked as "in progress" as they get close this person can poke the head of the appropriate department to get it taken care of.
Sure, a department could still have forgotten in the way you describe, but it gets noticed before the deadline giving them time to figure out how to fix it. But unless you get a chaotic shake up at the top, it should be nearly impossible for a company to actually forget about any of the aforementioned deadlines.
Even failing to renew a corporate franchise with a state "only" has the consequence of that corporate entity being administratively dissolved. While likely catastrophic for that specific corporation, if "Example Widgets Ltd." fails to be renewed, I can't come along and register "Example Widgets Ltd." on the corporate register and then ring up the bank of the former Example Widgets and say "hi there it's me Example Widgets please hand over checking account."
All of that said, I don't know if there's a better way to handle this. If we assume that domain names must expire--which we currently do, and I can make an argument for and against that assumption--then what's next? It's expired but never usable again?
Good thought experiment for the morning to take my mind off of COVID's impacts on transit funding.
(Nobody is going to give up their $5/year just because it's hard to get people to renew the domain. As losing blogspot.in showed, someone was willing to pay when Google couldn't be reached to give them a working credit card.)
Although it must be said: even your own registered domain can be lost. Generally due to you not paying attention, but I believe it has also happened that a registrar fucked up and sold a customer's domain to someone else.
Maybe we need better regulation for this sort of thing. If you get a new phone subscription with a different phone provider, the phone providers are required (in the EU at least) to allow you to keep your phone number, because so many things are tied to it. The same is true for email addresses and websites. Breaking this can cause serious problems to people.
Personally after losing my blog when Posterous shut down i decided i do not want to bother with 3rd party blog services anymore.
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/help/dndr/udrp-en
Folks underestimate how easily this can happen and how very painful the entire process can be: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3597025
I also get evicted if I don’t pay rent on time. Paying recurring fees so services remain available is part of being a functional person.
If 1+ billion internet users had their own domain names, we'd never hear the end of the
Never use your own domain for anything ever
horror stories.
Never
ohh wait https://killedbygoogle.com/
I've also set real-time health checks on my domain to run periodically (via a service similar to Pingdom) and I should receive SMS and email alerts whenever there's something wrong with it, like MX entries not found, or the domain's expiry being in less than two months.
> "If you get a new phone subscription with a different phone provider, the phone providers are required (in the EU at least) to allow you to keep your phone number"
This is true, but if you stop paying for your subscription, or you stop recharging your prepaid SIM card, you will lose that phone number. In essence it isn't any different than paying for your own domain name.
Domain deletion processes vary per TLD. For .in it appears to be a 30 day grace period + 5 day hold period. [1]
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200521111932/http://blogspot.i...
[1] https://www.registry.in/registrants-faq
480,000 results for me. All broken. Wow.
I see 4,540,000 results.
Many old links on Hacker News are also broken:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://i.imgur.com/dxnJi28.png
But that’s a massive mess up by Google. I know blogspot is not any at focus product for them but still it should hurt.