Recently I started the foundational work for something I have been meaning to for the longest time.
Basically I want a way to style and share a hive blog without "hosting" my own website in particular. Right now as it stands the only way someone can share their blog on Hive is by sending people to one of the interfaces.
Maybe they have a Wordpress site running with I think the old plugin for that use to be Steempress. However even that is a bit of a hassle really.
The Wordpress route is not bad but I think Engrave would be the closest to what I want to make. If only the bare minimum display of blog posts.
Gitlab Pages / Github Pages
The simple fact remains that a person still needs some sort of central system. Whether that is your own host or someone that manages it for you like Engrave does with their system. Even using just HiveBlog or Ecency is a central system for the purpose of having people manage their Hive accounts.
The bare minimum required however to display a Hive blog is as simple as a HTML page and if you enjoy your sanity then using a library built to communicate with the Hive Nodes will do wonders.
So, that leads me to possibly the simplest way to host any Static website and that is Github Pages. With Github pages although maybe a bit technical if you know nothing of Github and version control, I think there is more than enough info for most to publish their content without too much of a learning curve.
With Github pages anyone can upload some HTML and have a site of their own.
Personally I chose for my initial setup Gitlab and by extention Gitlab pages which frankly in contrast is an absolutely horrible system for something that is supposed to be easy enough for a braindead possum to accomplish.
Zero host
Above I mainly give an example of the bare minimum host requirements I want. Beyond having a simple static type of site that should be able to run on any barebones host, there are other things that makes a site look like a site and not just some word document.
You need styling. Specifically, sites have a "theme" to them and Hive does not exactly provide a way for us to just go ahead and store files such as these.
To recap the things that can't be stored on Hive itself and will mainly need a central host to provide to the user is:
- The initial page to show a visitor
- The theming of the content fetched
With that consideration a person cannot have a zero-host Hive blog.
I guess that is something obvious to most. So that is that.
If I do want to get as close to a zero-host config for a Hive blog as possible then the second point - "Theming" - can technically be integrated to Hive.
Since Hive has a 8KB custom JSON limit and technically an almost 64KB post limit. For style data that is actually a ton of space.
For simplicities sake, hosting the theming alongside the initial page that shows is just better though.
Sum it up already
I guess I have said way too many words for something that is probably stupid simple.
The main todo for an almost zero-host Hive blog config would be:
- Store users theme options on their Hive profile which is stored on chain.
- Make different themes a person can activate to display their content as they like.
- Use custom_json to store further settings such as menu structure etc and store a direct link of that on the users profile.
Essentially it does not need to be a plain show and tell type site. Because a lot of settings etc can be stored on the chain also, the hosted pages will only provide the logic required to use these settings.
Since theming can technically be stored on-chain also, users can always publish their setups and make them available to others without the need to rely on a thirdparty.