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Ask HN: How should I create my personal academic blog?
I’m a junior (ish) neuroscientist with some decent quantitative and coding skills. I want to create a personal website to share code, tutorials, opinions, those sorts of things. I would like the site to be quick to load and as small as possible; I’m not afraid to code and pay (a little) for hosting. Would HN readers like to inspire me by describing their blogging workflows?
To date I’ve tried two approaches, neither were ideal. (1) A WordPress site with Bluehost. This came with a domain and was extremely easy to use, the themes looked great, etc. The major downsides were that pages loaded really slowly and I was paying for features I would never use. (2) After a while I attempted to switched to Jekyll hosted at GitHub pages. The new site was quick to load and free, but I was uninspired by the available themes. I attempted to modify several of them but it was annoying as all hell Due to the lag between pushing a commit to GitHub and seeing the results on my webpage.
- adrianN 8y agoAnything other than a static site for a personal blog is madness imho. Personally I found writing markdown and using a Makefile and pandoc to generate the site to be good enough. If the lag of pushing to Github to see your changes is annoying to you, you could just install jekyll and a simple web server locally to generate the site on your machine without having to push and wait for Github's magic to work.
- Artemix 8y agoStatic websites are the way to go, and as for hosting, I personally find Netlify to be awesome, and well fit for static websites (my blog is built with a custom SSG, run by Netlify on every commit). You can simply use git for versioning, FrontMatter for article metadata (like title, published status etc.), reStructuredText or Markdown for writeup, and whichever tool you may see fit. If you don't want to build your own, Hexo, Hugo or Jekyll are well-known, but if you want something a bit more "fit" for you, I'd recommend checking out Metalsmith. As for the website hosting, you have a lot of available options due to the simplicity of hosting some dumb HTML pages and medias. - Git hosts, like Github, Gitlab (my favourite), Bitbucket - Netlify, Surge - Some shared web hosting, like the base offers at OVH: When you buy a domain name, you have, for free, 10MB of space for a shared web hosting, which can easily serve HTML files. Buy a .xyz domain for less than 3€/year and have free hosting.
- sammosummo 8y agoThanks! Could you be specific about where to purchase a domain? Sorry I’m not an expert in web-based stuff.
- dhruvkar 8y agoI find http://domains.google.com http://domains.google.com to be the simplest. It comes with built-in privacy protection* and a free email forwarding service. So all emails to hello@yourdomain.com could be forwarded to your email. * with recent news around Google + privacy, I'd take this with a grain of salt.
- m11a 8y agoCloudflare Domains is soon a thing (meant to be available from later this month in waves to current Cloudflare users, my guess is it should be available for all start of 2019). That might be nice. Cloudflare promises not to charge more than how much it costs them to get the domain, so they are dirt cheap domains, and Cloudflare has a great reputation for tolerance/no censorship - so you don't have to be worried about having your domain terminated/suspended. Currently, namecheap is also quite popular, it's not especially elegant but it's cheap and secure. Tends to be my personal choice. I would immediately point your DNS to Cloudflare, after purchasing a domain, and manage your domain's records from Cloudflare. Also worth checking out: https://www.gandi.net/ https://www.gandi.net/ and https://njal.la/ https://njal.la/ Usually, namecheap is a safe bet. That'd be my recommendation, currently.
- ryanlol 8y ago>Cloudflare has a great reputation for tolerance/no censorship Great but undeserved reputation. Cloudflare will ban your domain if a BigCo asks. Just try adding “doxagram.is” to your CF account.
- cryptography 8y agoI recommend either IWantMyName or Namesilo. They have great support and no B.S. upsells a lot of providers have. I am not affiliated with them, just a customer.
- jppope 8y agoI would definitely go with a SSG (static site generator)... sounds like you might just need to do some custom theming. Personally I enjoy coding that sort of thing for myself... but if you didn't feel like doing the work you could grab a theme from themeforest or similar for $10 and put it into your SSG. please update the URL to this post ... I love reading well built academic blogs :)
- esalogika 8y agoI've started to use http://gohugo.io/ http://gohugo.io/ and like it more than anything I've used earlier, including Jekyll.
- theoctopus 8y agoI wanted to like Hugo (especially with its ridiculous speed compared to Jekyll), but I found that any time I wanted to do something slightly unusual I had to spend far too long finding what template file name I was supposed to use, mostly by trial and error. With Jekyll I just specify the template name in the front matter.
- esalogika 8y agoHave you checked out the series at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtIqKaDlqXo&list=PLLAZ4kZ9dFpOnyRlyS-liKL5ReHDcj4G3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtIqKaDlqXo&list=PLLAZ4kZ9dF... ? It doesn't cover everything exhaustively, but it is a relatively good introduction if you haven't seen it. Hugo's documentation is also helpful. I want to stick with hugo just for it's speed and learning it seems like a worthy investment.
- fundamental 8y agoNeuro is a cool area to be in right now. Are you going into the computational or more of the biological side? I just got out of the computational side a short while ago. I didn't blog about it much since there is a lot of background which you need to explain for most numeric methods (not to mention all the time needed to provide good instructive data visualizations). I've tried a few different iterations of posting content to my site. Initially it was editing raw HTML, then a small custom common lisp app, then there was a short lived rails project which I forked from the original dev, then there was a brief stint using ikiwiki, and now I'm using jekyll on my site for the blog side of things. Per the current workflow I typically get a seed idea when I'm actively working on a topic and have a bunch of loose notes. Then I formulate the core idea of what can be conveyed to readers (and myself when I look at things months/years later) with pencil/paper. Next I typically transcribe things to an AsciiDoc document, build figures with Julia scripts or in a jupyter notebook, and edit a bunch. Once things are looking decent I use jekyll's auto-rebuild feature and built-in server for semi-final tweaks/formatting. Finally I commit it and verify that everything looks fine on my remote server. Some of the better posts I've made are collected at http://fundamental-code.com/ http://fundamental-code.com/ to give you an idea for the results.
- Kagerjay 8y agoMy site runs on WordPress and sitegrounds, it's very fast. But the learning curve is higher than netlify and jekyll due to having to learn WordPress. My site has too much garbage content I wrote on it at the moment (in hindsight I wrote whatever came to mind). Half my pages aren't even exactly done yet. I'm going to focus less on writing opinionated articles, more on useful articles and or tutorials on there or well thought out reflections related to lessons learned. Short term I'm going fix minor things now, write more useful content now. Long term do a 2ndary blog redesign from scratch, writing my own custom functions.php file. I have used jekyll,hexo and hugo, but it's really convenient to just be able to download any plugin you want with wordpress. I'd rather focus on writing than site design ,SEO, analytics, integrations, etc. Also it's nice having a useful skill that always has a market use. My site is on my userhandle if your curious, would like feedback too.
- halzenwick 8y agoYou are right with Jekyll, but quite on the wrong street with GitHub pages. It takes time to get your changes up and running, I would say that'd be around ~15 minutes, and I believe that depends on worker's availability on the GitHub server to "compile" or "render" your Jekyll blog. My experience currently is with Hugo. I have a DigitalOcean (DO) VPS that I use to host my Hugo blog. The workflow is as follows: 1. Commit and push from local to my VPS. 2. My VPS receives the commit, a git hook runs server-side build for my Hugo blog. The script is pretty short. 3. Server finishes build process, new changes are reflected. Feel free to experiment with that others are suggesting here, e.g. Netlify. Jsyk, I pay $5/month for my DO VPS and that is $0.50 cheaper than my everyday coffee.
- shivammishra 8y agoTry Ghost, I use it for my blog, has a markdown editor, a beautiful no BS admin UI, seo friendly out of the box
- dhogan 8y agohttps://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/ You can host it yourself. Made by former Wordpress people that wanted to narrow the focus to be just about blogging (rather than a huge CMS).
- ian0 8y agoI second this. Ive used both the cloud version and self hosted it. The default design is lovely, its lightning quick too. For the self hosted version I use heroku (7$ / month) and this[1] library, remember to hook it up to an AWS bucket though else you'll loose your pics each time the server restarts. [1] https://github.com/cobyism/ghost-on-heroku https://github.com/cobyism/ghost-on-heroku
- soared 8y agoI wanted: cheap, fast, minimalist, and easy to publish. Blot.im does all those very well. I used to use wordpress for everything but wanted to write something in a word doc and have it show up on my website with no fuss. (Fast load times and minimalist design were nice too). Blot.im is like $20/yr and my domain is similar through google domains. Set up takes like 10 mins, and you just drop word docs into dropbox. There is some depth if you want to get into site structure, file hosting, etc. Here is my site: npzero.com. For ~$3/mo its awesome.
- codegeek 8y agoWordPress could be a good fit if you set it up correctly. First, don't use cheap shared hosting. Get a VPS and setup a LEMP stack with PHP-FPM. Use PHP 7.2. Then select a non-bloated blog theme and delete/uninstall unnecessary plugins other than some caching (I highly recommend WP Fastest Cache & Autoptimize). Also, configure nginx to do things like gzip etc. I can assure you it will load fast. I have started my blog on a $5 DigitalOcean VPS with WP and it loads superfast but I only do basic blogging.
- sammosummo 8y agoThanks for the advice, I’ll investigate.
- codegeek 8y agonp. If you need help, I would be more than happy to help for free as I love servers and Linux stuff and this is my bread and butter :)
- atmosx 8y agoJust make sure you properly update and secure wordpress, keep and eye on the plugins, etc. I would not advise ppl not well versed in security to avoid wordpress and PHP apps in general if possible.
- billconan 8y agoright now my blog is on medium.com. I used to be picky about theme too, but now I prefer something simple. Medium.com is ok to me in that sense. I choose it for its content and audience discovery network. It's more social than other blog platforms I have tried. But I'm also building a developer-centric blog platform now. it will support markdown, equations and code embedding.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoI moved from hand coding my sites to Word Press to BlogSpot. I get a lot more done on BlogSpot and it's completely free. I actually set up BlogSpot sites for other people for a few bucks. So if you want help with getting the look you want, I'm for hire.
- zhte415 8y agoBlogs are chronological. I decided that I didn't want to be bounded by that and went with pmwiki. In this format things can be chronological, can be topic based, pages can be a work in progress, no default. Markdown editing. Files are stored as text also, no database. Choice of themes though nothing like Wordpress. I host on personal domain on a $5 DO droplet.
- vfulco2 8y agoCheck out the amazing work Yihui Xie and other R-luminati have done with R's version of markdown and the package "blogdown". Plenty of academic examples around and can get up and running quickly, securely, and for free if you wish. https://bookdown.org/yihui/blogdown/ https://bookdown.org/yihui/blogdown/ All the cool kids are using static sites these days.
- simon_acca 8y agoWhile as a software engineer I'm partial towards static websites, I have to say the best academic site I've come across is a wordpress one that seems to use the "faculty" theme. The site is Kelly Weinersmith's (of SMBC fame): http://www.weinersmith.com/ http://www.weinersmith.com/
- 50 8y agoBlot (https://blot.im https://blot.im) or GatsbyJS (https://gatsbyjs.org https://gatsbyjs.org).
- lawson11 8y agoyou can easily create https://djheadphonereview.com https://djheadphonereview.com this type of blog
- qwerty456127 8y agoI really recommend GitHub pages but you actually have to fork a theme and modify it to suit your needs (it's fun and possibilities are infinite). You don't have to push everything to GitHub wile you debug your theme and prepare your post, just run Jekyll and see everything on the localhost and only update it on GitHub when it seems finished.