[Freedombox-discuss] blogging in the FB (was Re: Roadmap Brainstorming)

[Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson]

Just to follow up to myself...

I'd like to clarify that I fully support the idea of generating static files
as much as possible.  It's good for performance, but it's also very good for
security in that it reduces the attack surface significantly - for simple
sites, it can be eliminated entirely by putting all the dynamic processing
behind very strict access controls.

Hacking a static web-site is pretty darn near impossible, these days. If you
want a zero-admin system, secure by default should be one of the goals.

I just don't think that we need to worry about performance or bandwidth
much, when it comes to blogs. :-)


2011/3/18 Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson <bre at pagekite.net>

> I may be old fashioned, but I tend to think that blogging is a pretty
> important application, especially if it can be done with fine grained access
> control - in many respects blogging + access controls + simple RSS
> subscription would cover 90% of what people are using walled gardens like
> Facebook for.  Add easy photo albums to the mix, and you're 95% of the way
> there, feature-wise (network effects and usability do imply feature parity
> isn't enough though).
>
> I think that the idea of pushing static files to a remote server, although
> a neat idea, is probably unnecessary.
>
> I ran a friends-and-family hosting service for years, hosting a few dozen
> blogs, some on Movable Type, some using static files, some using Wordpress,
> some home grown... all using inefficient setups without caching or
> pre-loading or really any best practices (I was using cgiwrap to run each
> person's blog under a separate UID, valuing security over performance), over
> a 512Kbit upstream DSL line, using a 1GHz AMD Athlon XP and 512MB of RAM.
>
> And it worked just fine, nobody complained about performance, ever.
>
> Of course, none of us got slashdotted, but let's face it, most personal
> sites never, ever see that kind of traffic.  A 512K up-stream DSL line can
> serve one 64Kbyte page every single second - 3600 hits per hour.  That's
> *lots* of traffic for a blog.  I'd venture that none of us have that many
> friends. :-)
>
> Pro bloggers who expect large volumes of traffic from random strangers will
> want to rent infrastructure in the cloud anyway.  Their communication is
> also by nature impersonal and non-private, so the FreedomBox has little to
> offer them.
>
> The FreedomBox has quite a lot to offer people who are blogging for friends
> or family about daily life, family, health, children, relationships... all
> the little private things we would like to keep close to home, but still
> want to talk to our loved ones about.
>
> --
> Bjarni R. Einarsson
> The Beanstalks Project ehf.
>
> Making personal web-pages fly: http://pagekite.net/
>



-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson
The Beanstalks Project ehf.

Making personal web-pages fly: http://pagekite.net/
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