11 ms·

Ask HN: What stack is your personal blog built on?

• arthev 7y ago
  I went with Wordpress after a blogging guide suggested to minimize time spent messing with the blogging software, because messing with blogging software isn't blogging.
  • veddox 7y ago
    True that, but it's good fun anyway ;-) Plus, I'd rather spend two days setting up a usable, solid stack than be annoyed with WordPress every time I load their web interface...
    • marpstar 7y ago
      It's good fun to do once or twice, but eventually, like the parent poster states, you eventually find yourself having spent more time tinkering with the stack than actually writing. I, too, went with WordPress after years of trying to avoid it. After having launched ~30 WP sites in the past ~5 years, it just made sense.
      • willio58 7y ago
        Once you are forced to use WordPress for a few projects you realize how powerful and easy it is to extend. If you can deal with PHP it will serve you well.
• remyp 7y ago
  Static HTML. The last thing I need is to worry about keeping blog software up to date so it doesn’t get hacked.
  • muzani 7y ago
    I tried this but adding <p> and </p> everywhere really got in the way of my flow.
    • theandrewbailey 7y ago
      Use Markdown.
• heimegutAGS 7y ago
  If you don't use Wordpress, what do you use to write posts on your blogs? Are there any other good solutions for typing up a post with formatting and multimedia? And do you this in an admin page or something else? Been thinking about creating a blog from more or less scratch, so I'm really curious to see how other people are doing it.
  • jacobedawson 7y ago
    I would actually love to be able to publish a blog from Evernote - so my notes and research are on one place while getting the benefit of a WYSIWYG editor. * Just checked and apparently there's a WP integration with Evernote called 'CoSchedule' for publishing posts from notes.
• tugberkk 7y ago
  Flask (python). Just that, runs on it's development server and just use Bootstrap for front-end.
• rahimnathwani 7y ago
  My personal blog: https://www.encona.com/ https://www.encona.com/ Built using: - gatsby (static site generator) - netlify CMS (git-based headless CMS) - GitHub (git remote for netlify) It was dead easy to set this up, as someone had already done the work: https://github.com/alxshelepenok/gatsby-starter-lumen https://github.com/alxshelepenok/gatsby-starter-lumen I tried to set up something similar from scratch myself, using Strapi as the CMS, but I found myself re-inventing too many wheels (e.g. how to allow a blog post to include an arbitrary number of inline images). So when I found this great starter project, I went with it. There's zero maintenance for hosting the site or CMS. But I can still customise whatever I like, and deploy with a simple git push.
  • jacobedawson 7y ago
    That looks cool - I want to avoid reinventing the wheel as you say while kicking the tires on something other than WP!
  • MitchellCash 7y ago
    I have an identical setup to this, painless to deploy updates/blog posts and zero cost. I was previously using Jekyll, but moved over to Gatsby a few months ago and have enjoyed the built-in features of Gatsby and it’s surrounding ecosystem so far. I have also considered integrating a git based CMS like Netlify CMS, but because it’s so easy to make new blog posts with just a git commit and a push I haven’t taken the time to change the workflow. Links: https://mitchellcash.com/ https://mitchellcash.com/ https://github.com/MitchellCash/MitchellCash.com https://github.com/MitchellCash/MitchellCash.com
    • rahimnathwani 7y ago
      I like using the Netlify CMS because: - I don't need to think about filenames - It gives me a nice preview - I can edit markdown as either plain text or rich text, and switch between them with a toggle - (Most important) I don't need to worry about whether I've properly filled in the 'frontmatter' section at the top of the file The format of the frontmatter is indicated to Netlify CMS by the existence of a simple config file in your repo. So it should be easy to give it a try if you want: https://github.com/alxshelepenok/gatsby-starter-lumen/blob/master/static/admin/config.yml https://github.com/alxshelepenok/gatsby-starter-lumen/blob/m...
• probably_wrong 7y ago
  Mine was written using Bash and Unix utils, because I wanted to see if I could. I then migrated most of it to Perl once it became too complicated to keep track of which variable was supposed to be escaped how. What I learned from my experience: I should have stuck to Wordpress. SSH'ing into my server, loading the environment variables, and running the generation script was often friction enough for me to file a post under "finish later", from where it never came back. For all its faults, Wordpress made it super easy for me to share an idea right there and then. Technology was not my problem - friction and writer block were.
  • commandlinefan 7y ago
    > I should have stuck to Wordpress. Ha - I’m exactly the opposite. I put off starting up a blog for years because I didn’t have the patience to learn some blogging “platform” like WordPress. It wasn’t until I “rolled my own” and “invented my own wheel” that it was interesting enough for me to want to focus on it. On the other hand, it’s probably a little more expensive for me to host everything myself (I could blog on Medium for free after all), but it’s interesting to work through all the technical details of things like adding a comment section, adding a captcha to that comment section, standardizing the look and feel, etc.
• mrstefan 7y ago
  I created my blog few years ago and it is written in Spring on backend and AngularJS on frontend. Relational DB is MySQL. If I created it again, all I would change is newer version of Angular. Also I used Docker for containerizing and Jenkins for Continous Integration but it was only in order to practice DevOps skills.
  • qnsi 7y ago
    Is your blog that dynamic that you have to use JS framework?
• trumbitta2 7y ago
  Jekyll + Bootstrap
• BjoernKW 7y ago
  My blog is part of my business website, which runs on WordPress (hosted, not WordPress.com). It's my favourite stack because hosting and running a website / blog is neither my core business nor my core expertise. Last time I checked, WordPress was still easier to use and to maintain than static site generators. The plugin ecosystem is huge and provides ready-to-use solutions for common (and not so common) use cases that I therefore don't have to implement myself.
• ghettolabs 7y ago
  I use cloud run with GitHub and Hugo
• i18ns 7y ago
  hexo it's a static html blog framework.
• rwieruch 7y ago
  Hugo for my blog, but I am redoing everything with Gatsby.js now. My course platform uses Next.js for server-side rendering + Firebase. When I launched it, I have written up a longer article about my choices: https://www.robinwieruch.de/how-to-build-your-own-course-platform/ https://www.robinwieruch.de/how-to-build-your-own-course-pla...
  • alok-g 7y ago
    Why the switch?
  • gcatalfamo 7y ago
    What made you move from Hugo to Gatsby?
• elamje 7y ago
  Editing, testing, free hosting all done on https://repl.it https://repl.it (a YC company) in a HMTL, CSS, JS project
• dyeje 7y ago
  Gulp to build templates and SASS, copy pasted into an S3 bucket.
• iamthelord 7y ago
  Hugo - makes a lot of difference
• rgoulter 7y ago
  I use a static-site generator. It can be fun to tinker around with (it's a personal blog, I don't need to develop to some deadline), the friction of "generate, upload" isn't that high, and it's easy to find free hosting for the static content. I guess the "stack" part of that becomes how easy it is to add on bells and whistles which don't come out of the box. I'd chalk that up to "fun to tinker with".
• alok-g 7y ago
  Including commenting system please. :-) Is there any way comments could be shared across LinkedIn, HN, blog, et al, all visible at the blog itself? And where to find good themes for static site generators. Am willing to pay. Theme for me is just as important as picking up the tech. stack.
• gketuma 7y ago
  The Great Gatsby.
• hexadec 7y ago
  Google sites and I am a huge fan. -Simple -Integrated SSO -RBAC for changes -Easy and quick to make changes -Responsive out of the box -Free and 0 time to manage https://sites.google.com/new https://sites.google.com/new
• davchana 7y ago
  Earlier it was simple Tumblr, but now GitLab Pages + Jekyll
• otras 7y ago
  I use a very simple Hugo and GitHub Pages setup. I wanted to keep it as simple as possible, because for me it's very easy to tinker instead of writing.
• pixelbath 7y ago
  I'm using WordPress, but they've recently changed their UI to be fairly terrible, necessitating another plugin to revert the writing interface. While that's annoying, the platform supports anything I'd want to do functionally with the site, and it helps that most of my freelance development work is WordPress-related. Like arthev suggested, time spent jacking with the software is time not spent blogging (or something else productive).
• honkycat 7y ago
  gatsby + netlify, but I will probably switch to medium. The medium SEO is so much better by default than my gatsby-hosted site with a few hours of work.
• auct 7y ago
  Hugo Netlify Github
• pabc1 7y ago
  I used a static site generator (Perun, written in Clojure) and host it on GitHub pages.
• soulchild37 7y ago
  My personal / iOS dev stuff blog : https://fluffy.es https://fluffy.es I am using Ghost (running on node.js + MySQL on DigitalOcean $5 server), used the 1-click installer and got it done within 15 mins.
• codingdave 7y ago
  Notepad. FTP. And pick your favorite flavor of HTTP server.
• motakuk 7y ago
  Ghost in Docker deployed with Ansible. Default theme: https://mku.life/ https://mku.life/ (Russian)
• amerkhalid 7y ago
  Personal blog: https://www.amerkhalid.com https://www.amerkhalid.com uses Hugo and Netlify. BitBucket for private repo. But also use WordPress for several niche blogs.
• davidscolgan 7y ago
  My site www.lessboring.com is running on Pelican, a Python static site generator. It's great for writing in a text editor and deploying with Git. Fairly easy to hack custom functionality, and no backend to get hacked.
• interfixus 7y ago
  Web2py fronted by a Caddy server.
• kpennell 7y ago
  Gatsby
• mooreds 7y ago
  WordPress. Not light in terms of runtime, but definitely in terms of dev time. (Aka simple to keep running.)
  • godot 7y ago
    Is it light in terms of dev time nowadays? 10+ years ago I had a self-managed Wordpress instance and it was just getting hacked left and right and I had to constantly be applying the latest updates/patches to be safe. 5+ years ago I was in a startup with a self-hosted company blog using Wordpress, this time I remember updates being easier to apply (1 click from the admin UI) but the cheap server we ran it on constantly ran into resource issues. I agree the initial setup is usually easy and fast, but a lot of maintenance overhead to keep running. It's been a long time and maybe things are better since then?
    • mooreds 7y ago
      Auto updates are great and the core has few security issues. I don't run many plugins.
• medhir 7y ago
  Mainly as a learning exercise, I wrote my blog from scratch. The back-end is written in Go, mainly communicates with S3 for storage of photo assets and blog posts and serves static pages using HTML templates. I have a front-end written in React for admin views, including blog post editing and photo uploading.
  • PenguinCoder 7y ago
    I would be interested in seeing some of this project code, and the blog format.
• labarilem 7y ago
  My blog: https://marcolabarile.me/ https://marcolabarile.me/ I'm using GitHub Pages, so Jekyll is the static site generator. As Jekyll theme, I've picked minimal-mistakes: https://github.com/mmistakes/minimal-mistakes https://github.com/mmistakes/minimal-mistakes Then I've customized templates to meet my needs. It was quite easy, considering I've never wrote a line of Ruby.
• martin_a 7y ago
  Have been using WordPress for 13 years but switched to Hugo last year. The WP ecosystem is broken and Automattic rather cares about pushing out _another_ page builder than fixing the ecosystem and core aspects of WP. They will dig their own grave.
• xiaoxiae 7y ago
  Jekyll! Incredibly lightweight and simple to build! Still a WIP though. www.slama.dev/
• shanehoban 7y ago
  Using Grav CMS [0] from my SaaS side projects blog. Pretty much what you've described. Light, clean and simple, easy to manage back end (PHP). So far so good! [0] https://getgrav.org/ https://getgrav.org/
• veddox 7y ago
  I use coleslaw, a Lisp static site generator (see my setup description here: https://terranostra.one/posts/Blogging-with-Lisp.html https://terranostra.one/posts/Blogging-with-Lisp.html). I like the minimalism: I write in a text editor on my own laptop, then push to my server with a single command.
• bkq 7y ago
  Personal blog/site can be found on my profile, runs on: - NGINX - jrnl - (static site generator I made that copies the transformed markdown to the NGINX server)
• na85 7y ago
  I do it old-school with markdown, compiled to php+twig templates.
• corobo 7y ago
  https://cohan.io https://cohan.io If you're not familiar with Markdown it's probably not the stack for you honestly. But it is my favourite blog stack I've had so far. Hugo as the static site gen, GitLab as the repo host, Netlify as the web host. Editing wise I usually just use Sublime Text on my desktop or a combo of Working Copy (iOS git app) + Ulysses (Fancypants writing app) on my iPad.
• codegeek 7y ago
  Wordpress with a very simple theme and hardly any plugins. Put it behind free cloudflare account, setup caching/minification and it works like a charm. I self host so little bit of VPS setup knowledge is useful (Nginx with PHP-FPM). I also like hugo a lot but never got the time to setup my blog on it.
• namelosw 7y ago
  Gatsby + Org-mode plugin.
• Sileni 7y ago
  Running my girlfriend's recipe blog on Python + Django + Wagtail CMS on a Heroku server, wired up to Google cloud storage. It ends up being completely free with the dev tier Heroku server and staying within the free tier of Google's cloud storage. It was mostly as a learning exercise, but it's a pretty flexible stack, and I'm a fan of the Wagtail admin panel; didn't really feel the need to customize anything there.
  • pkalinowski 7y ago
    How does it work with Heroku dynos waking up after inactivity? Whats the loading time?
    • Sileni 7y ago
      Usually 10s or so. Not a great user experience, but she mostly uses it to share recipes with friends or relatives. Once it's awake, it's pretty quick, faster than Google's App Engine free tier in my experience. If she wanted to generate traffic I'd have no problem paying the $5/month to keep the lights on, and Heroku's pricing seems reasonable as you scale up.
• theandrewbailey 7y ago
  Back in college, I started using what I knew for what I wanted to do. I ended up with a blog using Java EE and Postgres. Total overkill (it's FAST!), but it's been fun over the years to toy with not just blog things (like implementing Markdown, full text search, and backup/restore), but HTTP things (like SRI and CSP).
  • forgottenentry 7y ago
    Is the code for that project on GitHub / would you be willing to share the source? I'd be interested in seeing that take on a blog implementation.
    • theandrewbailey 7y ago
      Yes: https://github.com/theandrewbailey/toilet https://github.com/theandrewbailey/toilet I haven't updated it in a while (I haven't integrated git into my small, informal process).
• pkalinowski 7y ago
  Static website generated by Hugo with Bulma CSS and based on Cocoa EH theme. Hosted on Netlify using their forms and redirects. Editing in VS Code Https://patrykkalinowski.com/hn
• potta_coffee 7y ago
  html/ css/ a tiny bit of vanilla js/ gitlab/ netlify.
• AwesomeFaic 7y ago
  Wordpress, I've built enough by hand in the past I just wanted a nice theme I didn't have to fiddle with for days on end. https://chrisgermano.dev https://chrisgermano.dev
• sdan 7y ago
  Initially used Express, Pug, and some Markdown libraries to build an automated blog system. There were several issues with reliability, so I switched to: Handlebars and Ghost. https://blog.suryad.com https://blog.suryad.com
• wyem 7y ago
  Hugo. Hosted on Netlify
• huevosabio 7y ago
  I wanted something that i) is simple to host and edit, ii) did not require me maintaining a server somewhere, and iii) it was easy to go from Jupyter notebooks to a post. So I opted for Pelican (https://blog.getpelican.com/ https://blog.getpelican.com/) which has a plugin for converting Jupyter/IPython notebooks into blog posts. It is hosted in S3. If you are curious, here it is: http://ramondario.com/ http://ramondario.com/
  • gradschool 7y ago
    I'm interested in hosting a static site on s3 but worry that some smartass could rent a botnet and hammer the bucket just for lulz. It might only take a minute for the charges to bankrupt me, and I can't find any failsafe solution in the AWS documentation. I know I could make a billing alarm trigger a lambda function to disable public access, but it might not be instantaneous. Is there any reliable information to be had about the financial risks?
    • amenghra 7y ago
      Host it on github pages?
• rasikjain 7y ago
  My website: https://www.rasikjain.com https://www.rasikjain.com I have built this website with Hugo Static Generator. I found that Hugo has lot more variety of themes to choose and easier to understand the structure. I also like their templating engine. Set up is very easy and building and compiling the site is very fast. I have also tried Gatsby before finalizing to go with Hugo. IMHO, Gatsby is equally good. However Gatsby is well suited for developers with bit of react knowledge and has limited set of theme selection. For performance, I like the pre-fetch functionality of Gatsby. Here is my current setup. 1) Hugo Static Site 2) Code repository on Git 3) Automated build and hosted on Netlify (Simple and easy to use)
• akulbe 7y ago
  On WordPress, on a Digital Ocean droplet. Easy peasy.
• joelvalleroy 7y ago
  I used HTML and CSS (and Github Pages). I'll probably eventually add JavaScript and WebGL and WebAssembly for some specific project pages. https://joelvalleroy.github.io/ https://joelvalleroy.github.io/ eventually some more content might get added too ;)
• Adamantcheese 7y ago
  Bare HTML/CSS/JS. I did move to Netlify from Github Pages for privacy reasons (and Github Pages for private repos costs money). Works on every device as well!
• toyg 7y ago
  Blogger/Blogspot. Yes, it’s super-basic and frozen, but it’s also rock-solid. I’ve tried self-hosting and self-coding several things through the years, and almost all of that has been lost one way or the other... whereas good ol’ B still happily shows my posts from 2002, with zero effort on my part to keep it secure or up to date, and gets preferential seo treatment from Google.