Stuart Croall

General: This is the home page of a channel. It is similar to someone's profile "wall" in a social network context. Posts created by the channel are displayed according to the observer's viewing permissions.
Create a Post: If you have permission to create posts on the channel page, then you will see the post editor at the top.

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 15:28:18 -0800

!Hubzilla Support Forum
I've seen mentioned the possibility of using #Hubzilla for #blogging but I haven't seen any discussion about how to set that up. From the few examples I've seen it seems like one setup might be to get "articles" to appear on the channel homepage?

Is that the best way to create a "blog" channel? If so, how does one make articles appear by default on the channel home?

Thanks! :)

show all 25 comments

Mario Vavti

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 23:10:43 -0800

In admin/site you can set a "Site homepage to show visitors". You could set this to articles/yourchannelname.

El Dorado

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 00:14:44 -0800

I always treated my channel as a blog with a bit more reach than my old WordPress blogs and never understood why some people needed a dedicated blogging application. What killed the popularity of WordPress blogs back in 2005-2008 was that everybody moved to Facebook - because that way their writings had more reach. We've come full circle.

We've always allowed and encouraged long-form media rich posts. If there's something unique about blogs that you feel you aren't getting in Hubzilla - we'd love to know. I created the 'Articles' interface several years back because one person felt that it was important to offer a page that was purpose-built for long-form content. To me it's redundant because we don't discriminate against long-form content. But it does provide a place to publish rather than "share" in a social context. What's important to you that differentiates a social networking homepage from a blog?

Tanja

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 03:50:11 -0800

If you want to keep your blog separate from your regular social media activities, you could always create a second channel dedicated to blogging.

Stefan Holzhauer

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 08:11:37 -0800

I have done it that way. I have one personal channel and one for my blog. In addition to that I have set the blog channel as channel source for my personal channel, so the crossposts also appear in the personal stream. That way people who only want to read the blog post folloow the blog channel, people who also want to read my posts follow the personal channel.

Stuart Croall

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 17:02:39 -0800

Thanks @Mario Vavti . Would setting the site homepage like that apply to the overall site then? So if I navigated to hub.otherwise.social, I would get the "blog" of the articles from whatever channel I chose? Lots to think about here in terms of what I want to accomplish from "blogging"

Stuart Croall

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 19:29:50 -0800 last edited: Tue, 24 Nov 2020 20:47:16 -0800

You raise some good points, @El Dorado and I think the support for long-form, rich content is certainly a draw of both #Hubzilla and #Zap for me. Perhaps the one thing the Articles interface provides that is not present in a standard post, if I'm not mistaken, is the ability to change the privacy setting, to perhaps draft a few posts and work on them privately and then, when they were ready, to change them to public and make them visible.

That being said, I suppose if I was planning to compose a particularly long or complicated post I could draft it as an article, and the copy it over as a post to publish. I'm also not opposed to composing it elsewhere and then copying it into a post.

The other thing that would be nice, that I'm not sure Articles would solve, is to be able to bring some of the content over from my old blog, and pre-date it, to the date of the original post. I feel like I've tested this before and found that that option wasn't available.

At this point I'm still testing things out, and learning the ins and outs of #Hubzilla (and still being curious about #Zap ). I think I'm coming around to your position, though; I'm not sure that there is anything special about blogging that can't be accomplished with standard posts. I'll see how it goes.

Mario Vavti

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 23:38:19 -0800

@Stuart Croall right, that will be the default landing page for the hub. If you need to set a default page for your channel after login, there is an addon for that...

el chava

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 11:37:34 -0800

...if I was planning to compose a particularly long or complicated post I could draft it as an article, and the copy it over as a post to publish.

Another alternative to copying content from Article to Post is to simply Share the published Article in a Post.

Beni Grind

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 12:09:55 -0800

One thing that I like about other blogging platforms and regularly miss on #Hubzilla is a possibility to save a post as a draft and continue editing it later.

lotfi

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 12:22:20 -0800

@Beni Grind You can post it to yourself and then you can edit it as often as you want, and then post it to whoever you want when finished.

Mario Vavti

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 12:24:57 -0800

@Beni Grind you could compose it in a private wiki - that would be draft with version control :wink:

Alimentazione e quello che sta intorno

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 15:06:01 -0800

Perhaps the one thing the Articles interface provides that is not present in a standard post, if I'm not mistaken, is the ability to change the privacy setting, to perhaps draft a few posts and work on them privately and then, when they were ready, to change them to public and make them visible.

An another nice feature in Article is the possibility to create your own easy to remember and short user-friendly URL.
Easy for sharing, something like this:
https://hub.libranet.de/articles/alimentazione/this+is+a+test

Stuart Croall

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 15:18:51 -0800

Sharing an Article as a Post sounds like a promising idea. How does an Article appear when shared as a Post? Does it display with a Title and link, or a linked title, or does it include the summary? I guess I should just start testing some options out...

emanuel @ la bonne heure

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 23:29:07 -0800

Articles in Hubzilla are basicly Hubzilla cards, except that they're additionally automaticly grouped into years and months. Another difference is that when you start to write a new article, the summary environment is automaticly added to your draft (which you can delete if you don't need it).
Posts in the channel are different from Hubzilla cards in the way that the access control settings cannot be changed after you published the post, and that they're forwarded to the connected hubs, while cards are saved only on your own hub.

Thu, 26 Nov 2020 12:21:47 -0800

@Beni Grind
Can you achieve the same function using the 'notes' module?

Beni Grind

Thu, 26 Nov 2020 17:45:37 -0800

@rl @Mario Vavti of course there are workarounds. I often like to start a post on the phone and then finish it on the laptop and would appreciate an easy way to just hit "save as draft". It is not at all necessary as there are a lot of ways around it but none are very comfortable.

El Dorado

Thu, 26 Nov 2020 18:58:29 -0800

That (save as draft) is actually not difficult to implement. I'll take a look at adding it to Zap over the next several days. It shouldn't take more than an hour or two, but I've got a busy weekend. If all goes well it should be trivial to add to Hubzilla.

Mario Vavti

Thu, 26 Nov 2020 22:01:04 -0800

@El Dorado it think it would be nice to allow resending a post with new acl if the post was formerly restricted to self...

tonnerkiller

Fri, 27 Nov 2020 03:18:40 -0800

One thing I would love to see but also think is kinda complex would be to allow users to use their own urls. Like when I have the hub on my-hubzilla.com and now one user creates a page with comanche and another one creates a blog with the articles etc and they all could have their own urls, like nicepage.org and superblog.fr, just as needed, so they would become independent from the hub owner's decision on the url name.
Maybe this could also be applied to the user ids like user@url

El Dorado

Fri, 27 Nov 2020 03:29:33 -0800

True, but we have an item_unpublished flag that was intended for this purpose years ago. I just never got around to implementing the frontend. The backend already supports it. What I'm thinking of is a disk icon with "save" and an activity filter to view/edit any drafts. I also don't have any problem going from a private post to public. Going the other way gets messy.

Altyr on Zap

Fri, 27 Nov 2020 04:27:35 -0800

Same idea but less complex : relatives URLs so that for instance a wiki with link to images in the galery still works on the clones.

Anmol Sharma

Fri, 27 Nov 2020 13:47:47 -0800

I like #zap because it allows #comments from anyone on the Internet.
I find #post has better reach then #articles.

El Dorado

Fri, 27 Nov 2020 17:06:24 -0800

> I like #zap because it allows #comments from anyone on the Internet.

Some day you'll understand the critical role of comment permissions in the epic battle between normal internet users against spam and internet harassment. But I'm guessing that won't be today...

emaxmax

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 02:42:06 -0800

@Altyr on Zap: it seams already available since Hubzilla 5. I don't know how, but I saw a cloned wiki with links to the cloned galery.
Maybe a dev could confirm this new feature?

Sat, 05 Dec 2020 09:56:41 -0800

With the 'articles' module, would it be possible to view articles in a separate channel, in chronological order? Would like to change the view of blog posts.