7 ms·

Ask HN: What's your favorite blogging software? (as of Feb. 2017)

28 points by whitepoplar 10y ago

Hi HN! I want to start a blog and I'm trying to figure out what blogging software to use. Here's what I want out of it: 1) Custom domain 2) Free or cheap (I don't mind hosting on a VPS if needed) 3) Can handle a lot of traffic in keeping with #2. 4) Looks great and is pleasurable to use. Any suggestions for your favorite blogging software? I'm leaning toward self-hosted Ghost, but would appreciate any recommendations. :)

karimdag 10y ago
WordPress. It's like the iPhone of the blogging software.
- nkristoffersen 10y ago
  Wordpress is more like the 'old outdated android' of blogging software. Medium is more like the iPhone of blogging.
kejaed 10y ago
I've self-hosted wordpress and it's fine, does the job, and there are a million and one free resources as well as paid ones out there. Can be a pain to maintain and there's always a risk of things going sideways with a bad plugin install or upgrade. If you are OK with self hosting then you are probably going to be OK with Jekyll & hosting on GitHub Pages. That's free, you can use a custom domain, and it's fast. There are a lot of Jekyll themes out there to make it look good too.
returnbuyer 10y ago
Static blogging software called bashblog using free hosting on Github
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mod 10y ago
I self-hosted ghost, as you mentioned. I'm happy with it. I'm tired of WP and it getting hacked a couple of times per year--even on my barebones blog--and I wanted markdown posts. My girlfriend does a lot of the editing and it's gone smoothly. Site is snappy & simple. I spent 5 or 6 hours coding the template for a new blog and it wasn't very difficult to get it working well in ghost. Bashblog mentioned in another comment looks cool. https://github.com/cfenollosa/bashblog https://github.com/cfenollosa/bashblog
- alexgaribay 10y ago
  I also use self-hosted Ghost. Digital Ocean has a preconfigured droplet that you can use and everything will be setup for you without any extra work on your part. Ghost's interface for writing is really nice. It get's out of the way so you can worry about writing content. Writing your own custom theme is pretty simple as well. I end up redesigning my own website every year or so.
atmosx 10y ago
A static website generator (octopress, middleman, jekyl, hugo... anything goes) + S3 + CloudFront for LetsEncrypt support. Then you need 1 extra step to automate the publishing/sync to s3 of the generate static pages...
- philtr 10y ago
  This is the setup I use. The "1 extra step" for me is a tool called s3_website: https://github.com/laurilehmijoki/s3_website https://github.com/laurilehmijoki/s3_website It makes publishing to S3/CloudFront extremely painless, and supports advanced thing like page redirects and Cache-Control settings per file type.
brennen 10y ago
While echoing the "pick a static site generator" advice in the rest of the thread, my actual personal favorite is still: Write your own! That's what I did somewhere around 2000 or 2001, some years before I could program my way out of a wet paper bag or had a technical career. I'll probably still be using a variant of the same system[0] long after I have fully obsolesced and retired to the proverbial van down by the river to wait quietly for death. A simple toolchain that you understand and can maintain in its entirety turns out to be very useful for a long-term writing project, and blogging occupies a sweet spot where you can leverage common tools and libraries (for tasks like templating, lightweight markup, and publishing) without sacrificing much of your understanding of the system as a whole. You may not need much more than some blobs of Markdown and a Makefile. [0]: https://github.com/brennen/wrt https://github.com/brennen/wrt
- pleasecalllater 10y ago
  quite nice
- bananicorn 10y ago
  I can only second that - you'll learn so much on the way, though it's easy to get lost in the details, if you're doing most of the work yourself. Just start with something dead simple and then build from that - you might make horrible design mistakes, but hey, it's just for fun after all, and it's one hell of a learning process.
pleasecalllater 10y ago
I have written a script in Python. This generates all html/css/images from a bunch of markdown files, and I host them on Heroku (which gives quite nice deployment procedure with minimal effort, and costs almost nothing - $7 per month). And due to my strange requirements, I couldn't use the widely used static page generators. I have a blog about programming, and sometimes I have some source files, data files, some programs - all used in a blog post, which is stored in a markdown file. I wanted to keep them in the same directory as the text file. I also wanted to publish only part of those files. To get there I implemented a couple of things like custom markdown tags, which are converted to proper links to the image files etc. The result is quite nice, I can shuffle the old blog posts to other directories, and the generated output is still the same. I can keep the images, data files next to the blog post, and they don't interfere with each other. Previously I had all my blogs on Wordpress. That was terrible. Endless upgrades which sometimes destroyed my blog design. Security holes. Endless tries of hacking the page, or guessing the password. Now I have no password, no hacking attempts (there is nothing to hack, and if someone does - I will redeploy the files from my computer). All posts are in git versioned files. I can edit them locally in Vim. Deployment is as simple as `git push heroku master`.
- returnbuyer 10y ago
  Can we see? Sounds awesome
  - pleasecalllater 10y ago
    Well, that's quite a private project, the code is tangled a little bit, and needs refactoring, which will be a problem due to time shortage.
- stevekemp 10y ago
  That does sound like a fun project! Though it has to be said that most of the popular static-site creators will allow custom things to be done with plugins. I wrote my own static-blog compiler, which reads a tree of markdown files, then spits out posts, archives, tags, etc. As an intermediary form it inserts all the posts into a local SQLite database (which can be trashed and rebuilt when required), which means I can efficiently output tags, etc. Realistically my generator isn't so different from others, but it does integrate well for my personal use and supports comments - something a lot of static blogs miss. (I literally have a CGI script which writes out comments to flat-files, then these are picked up in the build-process, being fetched via rsync first). Source: https://github.com/skx/chronicle2/ https://github.com/skx/chronicle2/ Demo: https://blog.steve.fi/ https://blog.steve.fi/
wazanator 10y ago
Gitlab+Jekyll+LetsEncrypt+domain name has been working out great for me. Every part is free except for the domain name. It's easy to use but requires some HTML and CSS learning if you want to stand out.
BorisMelnik 10y ago
WordPress is my choice, and it is probably the most popular blogging software in the world. That said, it isn't blazing fast (although you can get it really fast) and tends to have some security holes. Easy workarounds: cache the hell out of it, daily incremental backups, update all plugins and framework updates, keep a secure server in general, reduce footprints (wp-admin, rename db prefixes, etc) and simple stuff like not using bloated themes and plugins. I love WordPress, I've been using it for 11 years now on my main money making website and as per my website speed checker it is faster than 90% of the websites out there. I've only been hacked once, and that was when that huge XML-RPC attack came out, and that basically got everyone. I was "down" (I took myself down) for about 1 hour, and didn't lose any data. This fits your exact needs: custom domain, free, can handle a lot of traffic, and is pleasurable to use. If you want to learn programming sure, write a CMS. If you want to start a blog, install WordPress.
- fiftyacorn 10y ago
  Im wordpress too on wordpress.com I keep looking at the options - static, self-hosted - and while id like to host my own domain I dont want to support it. The one time i did host my WP own blog I got hacked - so gave up as I dont need the hassle of learning how to support WP
  - BorisMelnik 10y ago
    all valid points - I won't say but, so I'll just say: if you really want to be hands off you could consider a "WP hosting company"
lnalx 10y ago
I switched from Ghost to Hugo[0], I love versioning. I host the overall on Github static pages. [0] https://gohugo.io/ https://gohugo.io/
rwieruch 10y ago
I can recommend to use Hugo [0] as static website generator. They have plenty of themes [1] to choose from. You can still adjust it with basic knowledge in HTML/CSS. Afterwards you can chose where to host it. You can use Github Pages [2] for free or pay for a service like DigitalOcean [3]. I wrote a technical cheatsheet [4] on how to setup your own website with these ingredients. - [0] https://gohugo.io/ https://gohugo.io/ - [1] http://themes.gohugo.io/ http://themes.gohugo.io/ - [2] https://pages.github.com/ https://pages.github.com/ - [3] https://www.digitalocean.com/ https://www.digitalocean.com/ - [4] http://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five-days/ http://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five-days/
DrNuke 10y ago
Less is smart nowadays, the main hassle being the database with users & comments, it can really escalate quickly from a security point of view. That said, a minimal, self-hosted, firewalled, closed to users & comments wordpress would do the trick, even using a default theme with almost to none widgets. How do you funnel traffic then? Leverage and redirect to your blog from main and relevant socials / forums, let the giants bear the burden ehehe.
hanniabu 10y ago
I am currently creating a static CMS with free hosting, custom domain, nice GUI, has backups, and is open to plugin development. If you're interested in being notified when it's ready, send me a message(hanniabu at gmail). I'd also like to hear your feedback to improve.
thenomad 10y ago
Right now? Hugo. It fits all the boxes you're looking for except "Looks great". For that, you'll need a theme - but fortunately Hugo themes are pretty easy to implement given a base HTML theme, or you can use one of the Bootstrap 4-based Hugo themes, which work pretty well and look pretty decent. IIRC this one works pretty well: http://themes.gohugo.io/bootstrap/ http://themes.gohugo.io/bootstrap/ You'll not need a VPS - S3 or Google Cloud Storage will work fine. Having said that, a $5 nginx VPS will also happily handle a Hugo blog even if it's being hit with a Reddit front-page hug of death. You WILL need to figure out your deployment process, which is a bit more irksome on Hugo than something like Wordpress. But it's not a huge deal.
diegoperini 10y ago
Github Pages with Jekyll Bootstrap would be a good start, it supports custom domains (http only) after all. It will be quite easy to migrate to some CDN when you have moderate traffic.
desiredpersona 10y ago
Jekyll + Forestry https://forestry.io https://forestry.io if you need a CMS
oblib 10y ago
I also wrote my own last year. It was fun and a great way to learn some APIs I'd wanted to work with. I used CouchDB/PouchDB, Mustache.js, JQuery, TinyMCE, and a few other open source tools. I wouldn't say it was necessarily "cheap" since I built it on a $20 a month DigitalOcean server but when considered as an investment in learning it was a huge bargain. Personally, I like mine a lot better than WordPress. I think it's a lot easier to learn how to use and as far as "Looks Great", well, that's also something that I had to make happen so I went with using a Bootstrap template and while I didn't create anything award winning design wise with it I think it's at least pleasant to look at and usable, and it's easy to customize. I took mine a step further and set it up to let users create accounts and publish their own stuff there, so you could actually use it to blog if you wanted to. It's written almost entirely in Javascript so almost all the code is accessible. Check it out. If you want to set up your own I'll zip the code and give it to you with a GPL: http://ibloc.com http://ibloc.com
edwinnathaniel 10y ago
Blogspot (Blogger.com). 1) Supports custom domain 2) Free 3) Can handle traffic (I know a few companies are using blogger.com for their companies News/Blog 4) Any software would require you to figure out how their theme works :) UI is a bit clunky but it fills my requirements => your #1 + #2 + no maintenance for me
cdnsteve 10y ago
Github pages - jekyll built in - markdown supported - custom domains - no hosting fees or servers to manage or security updates to patch - very fast and reliable hosting - best for last, it's git, works from command line or within github's site GUI
simplehuman 10y ago
I use 3 Ghost blogs on a single VPS and love it. If you want to skip the hassle of setting things up (lets encrypt, backup, restore etc), you should check out cloudron.io. They have a self-hosted option that runs on pretty much any VPS provider out there. Edit: also wanted to point out that Ghost is non-profit
animesh 10y ago
Currently I am using Lektor. My plan is to move to my own a custom static generator in the next two years.

28 points by whitepoplar 10y ago

karimdag 10y ago

WordPress. It's like the iPhone of the blogging software.

nkristoffersen 10y ago
Wordpress is more like the 'old outdated android' of blogging software. Medium is more like the iPhone of blogging.

kejaed 10y ago

I've self-hosted wordpress and it's fine, does the job, and there are a million and one free resources as well as paid ones out there. Can be a pain to maintain and there's always a risk of things going sideways with a bad plugin install or upgrade. If you are OK with self hosting then you are probably going to be OK with Jekyll & hosting on GitHub Pages. That's free, you can use a custom domain, and it's fast. There are a lot of Jekyll themes out there to make it look good too.

returnbuyer 10y ago

Static blogging software called bashblog using free hosting on Github

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

mod 10y ago

I self-hosted ghost, as you mentioned. I'm happy with it. I'm tired of WP and it getting hacked a couple of times per year--even on my barebones blog--and I wanted markdown posts. My girlfriend does a lot of the editing and it's gone smoothly. Site is snappy & simple. I spent 5 or 6 hours coding the template for a new blog and it wasn't very difficult to get it working well in ghost. Bashblog mentioned in another comment looks cool. https://github.com/cfenollosa/bashblog https://github.com/cfenollosa/bashblog

alexgaribay 10y ago
I also use self-hosted Ghost. Digital Ocean has a preconfigured droplet that you can use and everything will be setup for you without any extra work on your part. Ghost's interface for writing is really nice. It get's out of the way so you can worry about writing content. Writing your own custom theme is pretty simple as well. I end up redesigning my own website every year or so.

atmosx 10y ago

A static website generator (octopress, middleman, jekyl, hugo... anything goes) + S3 + CloudFront for LetsEncrypt support. Then you need 1 extra step to automate the publishing/sync to s3 of the generate static pages...

philtr 10y ago
This is the setup I use. The "1 extra step" for me is a tool called s3_website: https://github.com/laurilehmijoki/s3_website https://github.com/laurilehmijoki/s3_website It makes publishing to S3/CloudFront extremely painless, and supports advanced thing like page redirects and Cache-Control settings per file type.

brennen 10y ago

While echoing the "pick a static site generator" advice in the rest of the thread, my actual personal favorite is still: Write your own! That's what I did somewhere around 2000 or 2001, some years before I could program my way out of a wet paper bag or had a technical career. I'll probably still be using a variant of the same system[0] long after I have fully obsolesced and retired to the proverbial van down by the river to wait quietly for death. A simple toolchain that you understand and can maintain in its entirety turns out to be very useful for a long-term writing project, and blogging occupies a sweet spot where you can leverage common tools and libraries (for tasks like templating, lightweight markup, and publishing) without sacrificing much of your understanding of the system as a whole. You may not need much more than some blobs of Markdown and a Makefile. [0]: https://github.com/brennen/wrt https://github.com/brennen/wrt

pleasecalllater 10y ago
quite nice
bananicorn 10y ago
I can only second that - you'll learn so much on the way, though it's easy to get lost in the details, if you're doing most of the work yourself. Just start with something dead simple and then build from that - you might make horrible design mistakes, but hey, it's just for fun after all, and it's one hell of a learning process.

pleasecalllater 10y ago

I have written a script in Python. This generates all html/css/images from a bunch of markdown files, and I host them on Heroku (which gives quite nice deployment procedure with minimal effort, and costs almost nothing - $7 per month). And due to my strange requirements, I couldn't use the widely used static page generators. I have a blog about programming, and sometimes I have some source files, data files, some programs - all used in a blog post, which is stored in a markdown file. I wanted to keep them in the same directory as the text file. I also wanted to publish only part of those files. To get there I implemented a couple of things like custom markdown tags, which are converted to proper links to the image files etc. The result is quite nice, I can shuffle the old blog posts to other directories, and the generated output is still the same. I can keep the images, data files next to the blog post, and they don't interfere with each other. Previously I had all my blogs on Wordpress. That was terrible. Endless upgrades which sometimes destroyed my blog design. Security holes. Endless tries of hacking the page, or guessing the password. Now I have no password, no hacking attempts (there is nothing to hack, and if someone does - I will redeploy the files from my computer). All posts are in git versioned files. I can edit them locally in Vim. Deployment is as simple as `git push heroku master`.

returnbuyer 10y ago
Can we see? Sounds awesome
- pleasecalllater 10y ago
  Well, that's quite a private project, the code is tangled a little bit, and needs refactoring, which will be a problem due to time shortage.
stevekemp 10y ago
That does sound like a fun project! Though it has to be said that most of the popular static-site creators will allow custom things to be done with plugins. I wrote my own static-blog compiler, which reads a tree of markdown files, then spits out posts, archives, tags, etc. As an intermediary form it inserts all the posts into a local SQLite database (which can be trashed and rebuilt when required), which means I can efficiently output tags, etc. Realistically my generator isn't so different from others, but it does integrate well for my personal use and supports comments - something a lot of static blogs miss. (I literally have a CGI script which writes out comments to flat-files, then these are picked up in the build-process, being fetched via rsync first). Source: https://github.com/skx/chronicle2/ https://github.com/skx/chronicle2/ Demo: https://blog.steve.fi/ https://blog.steve.fi/

wazanator 10y ago

Gitlab+Jekyll+LetsEncrypt+domain name has been working out great for me. Every part is free except for the domain name. It's easy to use but requires some HTML and CSS learning if you want to stand out.

BorisMelnik 10y ago

WordPress is my choice, and it is probably the most popular blogging software in the world. That said, it isn't blazing fast (although you can get it really fast) and tends to have some security holes. Easy workarounds: cache the hell out of it, daily incremental backups, update all plugins and framework updates, keep a secure server in general, reduce footprints (wp-admin, rename db prefixes, etc) and simple stuff like not using bloated themes and plugins. I love WordPress, I've been using it for 11 years now on my main money making website and as per my website speed checker it is faster than 90% of the websites out there. I've only been hacked once, and that was when that huge XML-RPC attack came out, and that basically got everyone. I was "down" (I took myself down) for about 1 hour, and didn't lose any data. This fits your exact needs: custom domain, free, can handle a lot of traffic, and is pleasurable to use. If you want to learn programming sure, write a CMS. If you want to start a blog, install WordPress.

fiftyacorn 10y ago
Im wordpress too on wordpress.com I keep looking at the options - static, self-hosted - and while id like to host my own domain I dont want to support it. The one time i did host my WP own blog I got hacked - so gave up as I dont need the hassle of learning how to support WP
- BorisMelnik 10y ago
  all valid points - I won't say but, so I'll just say: if you really want to be hands off you could consider a "WP hosting company"

lnalx 10y ago

I switched from Ghost to Hugo[0], I love versioning. I host the overall on Github static pages. [0] https://gohugo.io/ https://gohugo.io/

rwieruch 10y ago

I can recommend to use Hugo [0] as static website generator. They have plenty of themes [1] to choose from. You can still adjust it with basic knowledge in HTML/CSS. Afterwards you can chose where to host it. You can use Github Pages [2] for free or pay for a service like DigitalOcean [3]. I wrote a technical cheatsheet [4] on how to setup your own website with these ingredients. - [0] https://gohugo.io/ https://gohugo.io/ - [1] http://themes.gohugo.io/ http://themes.gohugo.io/ - [2] https://pages.github.com/ https://pages.github.com/ - [3] https://www.digitalocean.com/ https://www.digitalocean.com/ - [4] http://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five-days/ http://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five-days/

DrNuke 10y ago

Less is smart nowadays, the main hassle being the database with users & comments, it can really escalate quickly from a security point of view. That said, a minimal, self-hosted, firewalled, closed to users & comments wordpress would do the trick, even using a default theme with almost to none widgets. How do you funnel traffic then? Leverage and redirect to your blog from main and relevant socials / forums, let the giants bear the burden ehehe.

hanniabu 10y ago

I am currently creating a static CMS with free hosting, custom domain, nice GUI, has backups, and is open to plugin development. If you're interested in being notified when it's ready, send me a message(hanniabu at gmail). I'd also like to hear your feedback to improve.

thenomad 10y ago

Right now? Hugo. It fits all the boxes you're looking for except "Looks great". For that, you'll need a theme - but fortunately Hugo themes are pretty easy to implement given a base HTML theme, or you can use one of the Bootstrap 4-based Hugo themes, which work pretty well and look pretty decent. IIRC this one works pretty well: http://themes.gohugo.io/bootstrap/ http://themes.gohugo.io/bootstrap/ You'll not need a VPS - S3 or Google Cloud Storage will work fine. Having said that, a $5 nginx VPS will also happily handle a Hugo blog even if it's being hit with a Reddit front-page hug of death. You WILL need to figure out your deployment process, which is a bit more irksome on Hugo than something like Wordpress. But it's not a huge deal.

diegoperini 10y ago

Github Pages with Jekyll Bootstrap would be a good start, it supports custom domains (http only) after all. It will be quite easy to migrate to some CDN when you have moderate traffic.

desiredpersona 10y ago

Jekyll + Forestry https://forestry.io https://forestry.io if you need a CMS

oblib 10y ago

I also wrote my own last year. It was fun and a great way to learn some APIs I'd wanted to work with. I used CouchDB/PouchDB, Mustache.js, JQuery, TinyMCE, and a few other open source tools. I wouldn't say it was necessarily "cheap" since I built it on a $20 a month DigitalOcean server but when considered as an investment in learning it was a huge bargain. Personally, I like mine a lot better than WordPress. I think it's a lot easier to learn how to use and as far as "Looks Great", well, that's also something that I had to make happen so I went with using a Bootstrap template and while I didn't create anything award winning design wise with it I think it's at least pleasant to look at and usable, and it's easy to customize. I took mine a step further and set it up to let users create accounts and publish their own stuff there, so you could actually use it to blog if you wanted to. It's written almost entirely in Javascript so almost all the code is accessible. Check it out. If you want to set up your own I'll zip the code and give it to you with a GPL: http://ibloc.com http://ibloc.com

edwinnathaniel 10y ago

Blogspot (Blogger.com). 1) Supports custom domain 2) Free 3) Can handle traffic (I know a few companies are using blogger.com for their companies News/Blog 4) Any software would require you to figure out how their theme works :) UI is a bit clunky but it fills my requirements => your #1 + #2 + no maintenance for me

cdnsteve 10y ago

Github pages - jekyll built in - markdown supported - custom domains - no hosting fees or servers to manage or security updates to patch - very fast and reliable hosting - best for last, it's git, works from command line or within github's site GUI

simplehuman 10y ago

I use 3 Ghost blogs on a single VPS and love it. If you want to skip the hassle of setting things up (lets encrypt, backup, restore etc), you should check out cloudron.io. They have a self-hosted option that runs on pretty much any VPS provider out there. Edit: also wanted to point out that Ghost is non-profit

animesh 10y ago

Currently I am using Lektor. My plan is to move to my own a custom static generator in the next two years.