Creating my own space on the web (How I setup my current blogs)
Feb. 20, 2025 10:43 AM
![[personal profile]](../user.png)
naivetteI've been interested in blogging and journaling for a long time, and I've locked down many of my early efforts, as they were a reflection of my childhood.
Now that I've used modern social media, I wanted a space of my own to post thoughts and musings. Whether it's on a specific topic (like my Ranobe blog), or a catch-all place like what I currently use this Dreamwidth blog for. There's no way to currently link my domain to this dreamwidth (right now, the url https://blog.pomnavi.net is setup to forward to this blog), so I think I may have found another solution, of creating a backup of the DW blog and posting it elsewhere.
Here is a brief explanation for how I setup these two blogs:
The Light Novel (Ranobe) blog
I struggled a lot of with the use of Static Site Generators(SSG), as they are not very user friendly. Even when I managed to get something setup with Hugo or Eleventy, it was annoying to have to type/think totally in Markdown, and to format the post data that way as well. I researched headless CMS for ages, and even managed to get Decap CMS to work briefly. But one post nuked the entire site (I don't know how that happened), so I was almost ready to give up and go ahead with managed hosting from somewhere like micro.one, Bear blog, or mataroa. Of course, these options don't have either the theme options or tag features that I needed, so I kept looking.
After doing some more research, I eventually found Publii, a user friendly static site generator and website builder.
Publii has an in-depth guide that I used: How to build a static website with Netlify
Following this guide, I use Netlify for hosting, and then setup the credentials for my Netlify site. Once I finished copying my old light novel posts into the blog posts on Publii, I made a simple About and Blogroll/Friends page. Once I was done making changes to the pages and/or the posts, I then I hit the "Sync Your Website" button. Publii uploaded the entire site to Netlify. From then on, any new updates or changes can easily be made on the desktop application, and synced to the live website using the "sync" button. You can also setup the Netlify site to use your own domain or subdomain in the site settings.
Writing posts or making new pages is really simple, and it even has pre-selected options. There is almost no coding involved if you just want to use what's available by default. I really like the fact that there's no barrier when it comes to writing blog posts, you can use an editor that works just like Word (WYSIWYG).
Since Publii is an SSG, it doesn't have an in-built comments system. I really wanted some type of comments, and eventually decided to use this javascript code: Mastodon-Comments. I used guides written by Bech and Enikofox in order to set it up. It's basically a javascript file that you upload to hosting, and then you enter some basic code into the header section of your website that references where it is. Then, for each post or page that you need comments for, you reference the mastodon post's server url, username, and post ID in the bottom of the post/page. This will then load any mastodon replies, and even display the number of likes.
I setup a draft blog template with some of this html code pre-filled in. You also have to make sure that you put this code (mastodon-comments[*]) into the exceptions for the advanced editor settings in order to stop it from wiping that particular HTML code from your post.
Since I use mastodon nowadays for my microblogging needs, this works just fine for me. And this feature will work with any federated app that uses or bridges with ActivityPub. That means replies from Bluesky, Pixelfed, etc, will also show up, as long as the main post is from mastodon.
I'm quite satisfied with how everything works now.
The Dreamwidth backup
Above works well for my light novel blog, but what about my current dreamwidth blog? I really like the nested tags for Dreamwidth, and some of my posts even use the comments feature to log mini reviews, like the Storygraph and HowLongToBeat posts.
This would all be solved if I could just register my domain to this blog, but that's not a feature that Dreamwidth offers, even with the paid services.
In the end, I found this free software: the LJ/DW Dump utility. It allows you to dump all the posts and comments from a Dreamwidth or Livejournal blog, and formats them as static HTML pages. All I had to do was setup the "ljdump.config" file with my login settings.
The output isn't as pretty or nice as Dreamwidth, but it does preserve the comments, which was important for me. I uploaded the entire backup to another Netlify site, which you can see here: https://dwlog.pomnavi.net
I don't consider the DWlog backup to be a replacement for this blog, but I think someone who's more inclined with HTML could probably use the posts output from the dump on their own website. There are already some Neocities users who use the Dreamwidth blog feed to display on their own website, and I think this is a better alternative. It maintains some of the tag functionality of the posts as well, so it's really cool.
It also links to the original post, but the one downside of this software is that my masterlist posts would have to be manually updated since the original post obviously uses DW post links. For right now, I'm not going to bother since it's just a backup of this blog.
2025.02.25 Edit: I am nowusing suffering with Astro
Now that I've used modern social media, I wanted a space of my own to post thoughts and musings. Whether it's on a specific topic (like my Ranobe blog), or a catch-all place like what I currently use this Dreamwidth blog for. There's no way to currently link my domain to this dreamwidth (right now, the url https://blog.pomnavi.net is setup to forward to this blog), so I think I may have found another solution, of creating a backup of the DW blog and posting it elsewhere.
Here is a brief explanation for how I setup these two blogs:
The Light Novel (Ranobe) blog
I struggled a lot of with the use of Static Site Generators(SSG), as they are not very user friendly. Even when I managed to get something setup with Hugo or Eleventy, it was annoying to have to type/think totally in Markdown, and to format the post data that way as well. I researched headless CMS for ages, and even managed to get Decap CMS to work briefly. But one post nuked the entire site (I don't know how that happened), so I was almost ready to give up and go ahead with managed hosting from somewhere like micro.one, Bear blog, or mataroa. Of course, these options don't have either the theme options or tag features that I needed, so I kept looking.
After doing some more research, I eventually found Publii, a user friendly static site generator and website builder.
Publii has an in-depth guide that I used: How to build a static website with Netlify
Following this guide, I use Netlify for hosting, and then setup the credentials for my Netlify site. Once I finished copying my old light novel posts into the blog posts on Publii, I made a simple About and Blogroll/Friends page. Once I was done making changes to the pages and/or the posts, I then I hit the "Sync Your Website" button. Publii uploaded the entire site to Netlify. From then on, any new updates or changes can easily be made on the desktop application, and synced to the live website using the "sync" button. You can also setup the Netlify site to use your own domain or subdomain in the site settings.
Writing posts or making new pages is really simple, and it even has pre-selected options. There is almost no coding involved if you just want to use what's available by default. I really like the fact that there's no barrier when it comes to writing blog posts, you can use an editor that works just like Word (WYSIWYG).
Since Publii is an SSG, it doesn't have an in-built comments system. I really wanted some type of comments, and eventually decided to use this javascript code: Mastodon-Comments. I used guides written by Bech and Enikofox in order to set it up. It's basically a javascript file that you upload to hosting, and then you enter some basic code into the header section of your website that references where it is. Then, for each post or page that you need comments for, you reference the mastodon post's server url, username, and post ID in the bottom of the post/page. This will then load any mastodon replies, and even display the number of likes.
I setup a draft blog template with some of this html code pre-filled in. You also have to make sure that you put this code (mastodon-comments[*]) into the exceptions for the advanced editor settings in order to stop it from wiping that particular HTML code from your post.
Since I use mastodon nowadays for my microblogging needs, this works just fine for me. And this feature will work with any federated app that uses or bridges with ActivityPub. That means replies from Bluesky, Pixelfed, etc, will also show up, as long as the main post is from mastodon.
I'm quite satisfied with how everything works now.
The Dreamwidth backup
Above works well for my light novel blog, but what about my current dreamwidth blog? I really like the nested tags for Dreamwidth, and some of my posts even use the comments feature to log mini reviews, like the Storygraph and HowLongToBeat posts.
This would all be solved if I could just register my domain to this blog, but that's not a feature that Dreamwidth offers, even with the paid services.
In the end, I found this free software: the LJ/DW Dump utility. It allows you to dump all the posts and comments from a Dreamwidth or Livejournal blog, and formats them as static HTML pages. All I had to do was setup the "ljdump.config" file with my login settings.
The output isn't as pretty or nice as Dreamwidth, but it does preserve the comments, which was important for me. I uploaded the entire backup to another Netlify site, which you can see here: https://dwlog.pomnavi.net
I don't consider the DWlog backup to be a replacement for this blog, but I think someone who's more inclined with HTML could probably use the posts output from the dump on their own website. There are already some Neocities users who use the Dreamwidth blog feed to display on their own website, and I think this is a better alternative. It maintains some of the tag functionality of the posts as well, so it's really cool.
It also links to the original post, but the one downside of this software is that my masterlist posts would have to be manually updated since the original post obviously uses DW post links. For right now, I'm not going to bother since it's just a backup of this blog.
2025.02.25 Edit: I am now