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Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

92 points by mrfusion 7y ago

I’m curious what everyone would recommend for a new blog? I really want to focus on the writing and not deal with updates and viruses. But I’d still like to do a good degree of customization and plugins and a custom domain name.

gitgud 7y ago
If you really want to avoid updates and viruses, you need to go static. There's hundreds of static site generators out there. I recommend [1] hexo, for it's simplicity. You can write in markdown files and generate a static blog for static hosting. But [2] Gatsby is another similar framework, but it uses React. [1] https://hexo.io/ https://hexo.io/ [2] https://www.gatsbyjs.org https://www.gatsbyjs.org
- yagodragon 7y ago
  Another static site generator that is gaining traction is Eleventy[1]. It's very small and simple, entirely build in js, supports most templating languages you already know and it's more flexible than GatbyJS. For a more complete blogging solution, though, I'd recommend Ghost.[2]. If you're building a small blog just for fun you should definitely go static and scratch your hacker's itch. [1]https://www.11ty.io https://www.11ty.io [2]https://ghost.org https://ghost.org
  - gHosts 7y ago
    I feel...... spuriously invoked
  - johnonolan 7y ago
    You can also combine the two and use a Ghost back end with an Eleventy front-end, fwiw: https://ghost.org/docs/api/v2/eleventy/ https://ghost.org/docs/api/v2/eleventy/
sergiotapia 7y ago
I ended up with a domain purchased on Gandi. A Hugo static website on Github. Netlify hosting that Github repo. It's really turnkey and zero maintenance, and free. https://sergio.dev/posts/genserver-webcrawling-in-pure-elixir/ https://sergio.dev/posts/genserver-webcrawling-in-pure-elixi...
DoreenMichele 7y ago
Humorously, you can (probably) do all that with BlogSpot.
- bishalb 7y ago
  Blogspot is still a very good platform. If I am not hosting it myself, I would choose a Blogspot blog over a GitHub pages one anyday. And blogspot also allows advertisements which is great.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - bovermyer 7y ago
    I would argue that advertisements are not, in fact, great. But Blogspot as a blogging platform is still a viable choice.
    - bishalb 7y ago
      Yes of course ads aren't great but I love me some money on the side while I am blogging away :). Also I don't find adsense small text ads to be very obtrusive. 10 years ago I knew a few bloggers that were making 4 figure earnings via just blogspot blogs and adsense. Adsense pays like shit these days.
jamesponddotco 7y ago
While it doesn't seem very popular in Hacker News, I think WordPress [1] is an excellent platform for a blog. The community is terrific, there is a tremendous amount of documentation out there, and it is entirely customisable. If you go with the managed hosting route, most companies handle security and updates for you, so you can focus on writing and leave everything technical to someone else. I am working on one myself — and have a private beta running, if you are interested [2], —, but of the top of my head, some companies that will go above and beyond as far as WordPress is concerned, include Kinsta [3], Pantheon [4] and Presslabs [5]. The last one is based in Romania and open sourced a bunch of their stack, worth checking out. [1] https://wordpress.org https://wordpress.org [2] Just email me at help@madpony.co for information [3] https://kinsta.com https://kinsta.com [4] https://pantheon.io https://pantheon.io [5] https://www.presslabs.com https://www.presslabs.com
- mraudiobook_com 7y ago
  What is the benefit of wordpress over hosting yourself?
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    The OP's footnote for WordPress linked to wordpress.org, which suggests they meant the self-hostable software.
- non-entity 7y ago
  I think Wordpress is fine if you keep it maintained. I've just seen a ton of sites end up with malware, gaping security holes, etc. because the site owner didn't vet the plugins they were installing.
- sneak 7y ago
  Wordpress falls over under an even modest amount of traffic without jumping through a bunch of caching plugin hoops, it’s written in PHP, it requires dynamic hosting, and it regularly has major security issues. It’s not good.
davewasthere 7y ago
Gatsby, Hugo or plain(ish) Jekkyl. Simple, clean, fast. Updates and viruses are a non-issue. Depends what plugins you're talking about, but if you're a non-programmer/dev type, then you're probably better off using Wordpress as a blogging platform if some serious customisation is wanted.
- save_ferris 7y ago
  Tried gatsby recently and I hate it. Their choice to use graphql for a static site generator makes no sense to me. Trying to build anything beyond a super generic blog is a huge chore. Hugo has a much, much better community IMO
  - pknopf 7y ago
    I agree. Gatsby is one of the worst products I have ever worked with. The code itself isn't bad, but the tech stack and UX is horrible. It's the epitome of hipster JavaScript. I'm amazed that they got funding for it...
    - edude03 7y ago
      I hate to be negative about products others have built as I tend to believe that if it "sucks" it's because I'm not the target audience. That said, I am happy to hear I'm not the only one with this sentiment.
      - save_ferris 7y ago
        I’m the same way, but there’s a big difference between using a technology that’s not designed for your use case and using a technology that just sucks, and frankly gatsby is the latter. It in no way outshines any other major static site generator available today.
tomlockwood 7y ago
Github Pages + Jekyll. Can use it with your custom domain, pretty customisable, and since its a static site, relatively secure.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  That’s what I use, but one word of warning: if you rely on GitHub to generate the pages for you, you can’t use any custom plugins aside from the ones they’ve whitelisted.
  - dangoldin 7y ago
    I had a similar issue - turns out you can generate it statically locally and commit the generated HTML files: https://help.github.com/en/articles/using-a-static-site-generator-other-than-jekyll https://help.github.com/en/articles/using-a-static-site-gene...
nimchimpsky 7y ago
github pages, and commit my own vanilla html
arkitaip 7y ago
WordPress all the way. I genuinely think it's the self-hosted solution that offers the best combination of control, flexibility and ease-of-use. You just need a couple of plugins for performance and safety and you are set [0]. There are literally tens of thousands of themes - open source and commercial - that you can try out in a matter of minutes instead of wasting days or weeks designing your own theme. You rarely have to code stuff by yourself because there is a plugin for any functionality you can imagine. Latest version of WordPress comes with the new Gutenberg editor which I'm personally not a huge fan of as it obfuscates too much of WordPress' inner workings. You might, therefore, want to use the Classic Editor plugin as a solution. If you haven't already bought a domain name, I recommend Porkbun. Moved several domains to them in the past months and have found them to be cheap and yet reliable straight shooters. [0] My list of must-have plugins: Yoast (for SEO), Autoptimize (caching/performance), Wordfence Security (multi-layer security).
- bishalb 7y ago
  For any serious blogging project, WordPress is by far the best choice, nothing comes close in terms of features, ease of use and ease of customization. I would also add contact form 7 to the list.
ibudiallo 7y ago
This may not be for everyone but here is what I did. I wrote 5 articles that I thought were interesting. Then I bought a domain name, wrote a php script to serve them. (If url1 do x, if url2 do y) nothing fancy. Only when I saw that I could sustain writing regularly I started worrying about the platform. And there is no best platform, only the one you are familiar with.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  Curious, why didn't you just make it a static site then?
  - ibudiallo 7y ago
    Only to have a reusable header and footer.
    - davidcollantes 7y ago
      You can do that with a static site and includes.
CameronNemo 7y ago
I use hugo with gitlab pages. Hugo is customizeable and portable. You can host with anything, not just gitlab. nginx even.
pknopf 7y ago
I wrote my own one-off static site generator. It is freeing. Anything is possible, and nothing is in your way. It really doesn't take that much time. https://github.com/pauldotknopf/pauldotknopf.github.io/blob/staging/generator/src/Blog/Program.cs https://github.com/pauldotknopf/pauldotknopf.github.io/blob/... https://pknopf.com/ https://pknopf.com/
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  Yeah I find just knock something up in NodeJS. Then when you need to do something custom you are writing JS. Familiar stuff. Compare that to the headache of figuring out how to get Hugo templates to do anything non trivial. Or even getting Jekyll to run.
hamaluik 7y ago
After years of trying different things, I found something that works great for me, though I suspect you’ll have to try a few things until you find what is comfortable for you. I publish my blog as a static site served by nginx on a $5 / node (which also hosts a dozen other things—I don’t get much traffic). Every once in a while I ssh in and run an apt upgrade but no updates to manage beyond that. I use https://getstatik.com/ https://getstatik.com/ to generate the site from markdown files. I’m surprised it hasn’t caught on more given how flexible it lets you be with defining how your site should work. The whole thing is stored on git and I can deploy with a push to my server remote. That said if you want to focus on writing I would start with something as simple as ghost of medium to see if you’re actually as into writing as you think.
clintonb 7y ago
I got tired of dealing with WordPress. I moved to Jekyll hosted on Netlify. I use Forestry as a frontend. You can read more at https://dev.clintonblackburn.com/2019/03/31/wordpress-to-jekyll/ https://dev.clintonblackburn.com/2019/03/31/wordpress-to-jek....
ascales 7y ago
In my experience Hugo has been really nice and simple to work with. I just push markdown to git and it shows up on my site.
PatrolX 7y ago
Ghost https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/ https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost is best for the need you've described, it's no-nonsense fast as lightning, unlike bloated WordPress.
- bovermyer 7y ago
  Hosted Ghost is really expensive. Self-hosted Ghost is a pain in the ass to maintain. Disclaimer: the above is my own experience, and not necessarily that of others.
  - dewey 7y ago
    How is it a pain to maintain? I’m using the Dockerized version and apart from increasing the version number in the Docker Compose file there’s 0 maintenance in the last years of running it.
    - bovermyer 7y ago
      The Docker community maintains that image, not Ghost directly. I ran into several problems writing Ansible automation to spin up and configure a Ghost server. Eventually I gave up and used a different blog engine that was more amenable to automation. Granted, this may just be a low motivation on my part to use Ghost, in favor of just getting something up and running.
BayesStreet 7y ago
We’re working on a security focused managed Wordpress hosting platform with custom email and templates included. If you’d like to beta test it email admin@ sitebay.org and we’ll put you up for however long you need free. Thanks to YC summer startup school for hooking us up with some compute credits.
jefftk 7y ago
Static is great: more secure, stands up to very high loads, minimal maintenance. I'd actually recommend writing in plain html+css at first, and then moving over to a static site generator once you have ~10 posts. You'll have a much better idea about what makes a good system at that point. (I wrote my own static site generator after ~100 posts, which is longer than I'd recommend going!)
johnnyAghands 7y ago
If you like writing some code, want full control (i.e. payload size, extensibility, theming, etc) with some OOTB features (i.e. zero setup, server rendering, static exporting, etc), and don't mind react or markdown, I'd recommend nextjs + netlify. I find Gatsby and Hugo very powerful; but miss the simplicity of Jykell. Even if you don't think nextjs is great for blogging, it's still worth checking out! Their docs + getting started guide are some of the best. For example; writing up a small MVP site to test out a business idea (https://www.hiredsomehelp.com/ https://www.hiredsomehelp.com/), it's in progress, but even still, only took about 15 minutes to push up via netlify. That being said, I feel like all these new static site generators are terrific; a real sweet spot in web development in my opinion :) Stay the hell away from Wordpress. It. Will. Get. You. When you least expect it ️
awill 7y ago
I used Wordpress for years. It was such a hassle constantly getting emails about patching. In the end I got fed up and moved to hugo hosted on netlify. Fantastic. Zero maintenance.
- hellwd 7y ago
  I was also impressed by Netlify. I tried multiple other solutions to host my website but Netlify was my favorite at the end. Easy to setup, free and fast. I configured my account, access to Github, deployment, custom domain and SSL in 5 minutes.
nstart 7y ago
Highly recommend the ghost platform. It gets out of your way and lets you focus on writing. Nothing else. You can customize it as much as you want but it's primary focus is getting you to writing first. This is assuming you are willing to pay for at least your own server. Their hosted option is also great and highly recommended if you want to just start writing before thinking of customizations. I find static site generators to be awesome but generally a hindrance to the flow of wanting to start writing spontaneously. More often than not, more time goes into figuring out the perfect workflow for the blog system rather than writing. Caveats, YMMV etc apply :)
- bishalb 7y ago
  Does Ghost support commenting yet? Can't imagine a blog without a commenting feature.
  - DavidDarnes 7y ago
    There's several comment integrations you can choose from https://ghost.org/integrations/community/ https://ghost.org/integrations/community/
    - bishalb 7y ago
      That is exactly my point. With Ghost, I would have to resort to a third party service to have something so essential as a commenting system for a blog. Comments are a part of your blog's content and it is necessary to have your own control over it, as these third party providers can shut down or just ban your site for any reason(take Google Plus comments for instance which many blogs were using as a commenting platform for their blogs). Relying on a third party provider for comments should be a choice, not a compulsion.
      - DavidDarnes 7y ago
        Aren't comments a response to your blog content and not part of the content itself? Having the option to use a multitude of commenting services seems like lots of control surely? If you look at the various options being suggested in the comments here you'll see many of them don't come with comments out of the box. Jekyll, Gatsby, Hugo, 11ty all require you to use a third party service or roll your own.
dceddia 7y ago
To avoid updates and viruses, go with a static site. There are a ton of good static site generators out there. My blog[0] runs on Jekyll[1]. Hugo[2] is a popular option. I've fiddled with Gatsby[3] and heard good things. Eleventy[4] looks as close to Jekyll-but-in-JavaScript as I've seen. Since you want to be able to customize it, I'd probably take the static site generator's language into account. Do you like... Ruby? -> Jekyll[1] Go? -> Hugo[2] JavaScript? -> Gatsby[3] or Eleventy[4] Some other language? -> google "[language] static site generator" and see how many GitHub stars it has. Once you've figured that out, most of the hosts support custom domains. Netlify[5] is free, and works very well. It's what I use currently. I used to host my site on DigitalOcean[6], but Netlify is definitely more painless, especially from a devops/patching standpoint. Plus it has a CDN so your site would be faster. [0] https://daveceddia.com/ https://daveceddia.com/ [1] https://jekyllrb.com/ https://jekyllrb.com/ [2] https://gohugo.io/ https://gohugo.io/ [3] https://www.gatsbyjs.org/ https://www.gatsbyjs.org/ [4] https://www.11ty.io/ https://www.11ty.io/ [5] https://www.netlify.com/ https://www.netlify.com/ [6] https://www.digitalocean.com/ https://www.digitalocean.com/
- nyolfen 7y ago
  big props to hugo for using a static binary without some insane dependency chain, i'm really pleased with it. hosting my blog on a $15/y vps with a vanity domain and hugo was one of my first projects to learn to manage a server, and i gave up with jekyll after way too much struggling with ruby. that said i'm not sure how it fares wrt to plugins, i think it's pretty vanilla in terms of user-facing features (though plenty of very straightforward theme tweaking is possible).
  - OJFord 7y ago
    I was balking at $15 (for a static site) until I re-read and got /y right. Who offers that?
    - nyolfen 7y ago
      i use ramnode but you should check out lowendbox, they aggregate cheap vps services and deals
susam 7y ago
If you like writing Python code, I recommend https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite (makesite.py). As the README says, it is a simple, lightweight, and magic-free static blog generator. The entire static blog generator code is in a single file named makesite.py. Add your content to the `content` directory. Then run `python3 makesite.py` to generate the static blog. It writes the generated blog to the `_site` directory. Finally copy this directory to wherever you want to serve your blog from, e.g., GitHub repo with GitHub pages enabled, virtual private server, cloud storage, etc. It works pretty well out of the box and it is highly customizable too because doing so involves just modifying the existing Python code or writing your own Python code. Disclaimer: This project has been written by my wife. I use it myself to render my static blog at https://susam.in/ https://susam.in/.
- thekyle 7y ago
  > This project has been written by my wife. Aww... That's so sweet.
- majewsky 7y ago
  FYI: That's a disclosure, not a disclaimer. A disclaimer would be something like "This project has been written by my wife, so I don't take any responsibility for its quality", which is clearly not your intention.
  - susam 7y ago
    Thanks for correcting me. Indeed, I meant it as a disclosure, not a disclaimer. I was aware of the difference between the two words but I made a thinking error while writing my comment.
- scoobyyabbadoo 7y ago
  I have a soft spot for python modules that fit in a single file like this, like bottle.py as well. Gives you so much freedom to just drop a file in a folder and call it a day, instead of having to worry about what can sometimes be complex dependency management.
- deleted 7y ago
imwally 7y ago
I've been using pelican [1] with S3 for my blog [2]. It comes with a nice makefile that handles the generation (markdown -> HTML), dev server (localhost:8000 that regenerates files upon modification) and deployment to S3 (uses s3cmd along with API keys to upload to a designated bucket). It offers GitHub, ftp, ssh, and dropbox options for deployment as well, but I've never tried them. [1] https://blog.getpelican.com https://blog.getpelican.com [2] http://nil.wallyjones.com http://nil.wallyjones.com
- IronBacon 7y ago
  Also rsync (the one I use).
rukshn 7y ago
Sadly even though it is not popular in HN WordPress is the best for you. Easy to set up and try and you can customize it as well. With lots of plugins for everything. You can go with the paid WordPress.com and they will handle all the updates for you. Static sites are good but when it is time for SEO and customisation you will realize that it can get really painful in a static site generator.
- pier25 7y ago
  > Static sites are good but when it is time for SEO and customisation you will realize that it can get really painful in a static site generator. My experience has been quite the contrary. I've found it super easy to get good SEO with Jekyll sites. What have you found to be painful?
- masukomi 7y ago
  > Static sites are good but when it is time for SEO and customisation you will realize that it can get really painful in a static site generator. care to explain? because that makes _no_ sense to me. SEO is primarily about content these days. The little "add this tag for SEO WIN" type things stopped being useful years ago. Have a good title, have good content, link your stuff well, update regularly: success!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
gexla 7y ago
If you have a gun pointed to your head with the requirements you have listed then you go Wordpress. Updates aren't difficult. I'm not sure about plugins (I haven't used WP in a long time,) but you can set the core Wordpress updates to be automatic. It will handle everything you need. If after a week of coding you arrive to the weekend and think "I want to do a bunch more coding" then you go with a static site generator. Then you don't finish over the weekend and have to screw with it the following weekend as well. Then you finally publish the thing with "good enough but not quite what you wanted" functionality and let it sit there for weeks. Then you come back to it and scratch your head trying to remember how to publish / build / deploy it (or you cycle through your shell history hoping the commands are still in there.) One day you decide that you want to add that functionality you left out the first time and find that you have to relearn everything you had to learn to build the thing in the first place. Sure, you vaguely remember the easy stuff, but you have to refresh on the easy stuff to get back to the harder stuff which you never had time to figure out from the beginning. Anyone been there? ;) In this case, I'm thinking of Hugo, but I imagine it's much the same for all the others. With Wordpress you get enough balance of customization and ease of use that you can just get on with it. If you need a bit of help, then get on Fiverr or similar and have someone throw you pointers (or just do it for you) to save you time in getting past tricky parts. There's a reason loads of sites on the internet are using WP. People use it to GTD and move on to something else.
- bishalb 7y ago
  Exactly. Outside of the nerd bubble of HN, Wordpress is still the defacto choice for a blogging platform. Nothing comes close to WordPress in terms of customization freedom and "zero to deploy".
  - ryandrake 7y ago
    I agree. A social (card gaming) group I’m involved with used self-hosted WordPress and it’s been great. We use it primarily for events and post-game blog posts. Non technical people can contribute blog posts and other stuff, and I can occasionally pretend to be a sysadmin. Cost is essentially free since it piggy backs on a VPS that would otherwise be running anyway.
rishav_sharan 7y ago
Github + github pages. Keep your text in md files and host them for free.
Teichopsia 7y ago
Recently I looked into the landscape to see what I felt comfortable with. tl;dr: I ended up using eleventy with tailwindcss. It depends what you are comfortable with... There are a few blogging sites (their names escape me at the moment but are similar to https://write.as https://write.as) that seemed interesting. Again, I did a quick search but couldn't find the one I had in mind. My preference is python, so naturally I looked there first. I can't remember what happened to pelican, why I didn't go for it. Nikola seemed nice until I started reading the documentation. I also looked at some that were further down static gens list. But something was missing. Jekyll has great documentation, but there are a lot of moving pieces. You can make it into a full fledge website that has a blog, or make it into a blog - quite easily. It seems that whoever states that Jekyll is geared towards creating a blog..... who knows why?! Played around with Hugo last year and meh... Now, I don't know how much looking into different ssg influenced the ease it was to pick up eleventy, but it just made sense. It's a bare bones static site generator that - just works. There are several blog posts that will get you up and running quickly. There are several skeleton GitHub repos, some use tailwindCSS, some have netlify Cms already configured, some are plain. Or you can just build your own. Another I picked it, which is on a personal level. Since it's such a well structured, bare-bone project, its helping me learn/practice JavaScript and it's ecosystem. npm scripts is all you need. All the other tools, gatsby, etc - are great if you already understand react. And even if you don't but are interested - I got the impression (gatsby at least) that it's documentation was good and you could learn a great deal about react going through it. Maybe, I don't know. Finally... I feel that some projects could do with an overhaul, at least with their documentation. Some parts felt like an afterthought instead of one cohesive, linear explanation. Not an easy task in the least, but what is? But more importantly, pick one thing and stick to it (unless it proves to be hindering productivity).
zoeybourqueee 7y ago
If you're looking for a blog to help you with your productivity, I highly recommend https://quire.io/blog/ https://quire.io/blog/
- bovermyer 7y ago
  This has nothing to do with the OP's question, though...
SanchoPanda 7y ago
Static sites are cool but annoying to customize. WordPress is cool but a server is annoying to maintain. Solution: build on WordPress, use wget to pull a mirror, serve that as a static site. This is way more common than you may initially guess.
flaviocopes 7y ago
I use Hugo for my blog but also for other non-blog sites. Generating static HTML gives me peace of mind and Go is super fast at regenerating the site. Deploying is a joyful process using GitHub and Netlify. I’d go static just to use Netlify. And the best part for me is the tech is “boring” so I just focus on the content, rather than on the blog platform.
- olingern 7y ago
  Your posts have been helpful, thanks for the writing you do!
stockkid 7y ago
> I really want to focus on the writing and not deal with updates and viruses. In such case, html+css might be a good choice for you. Using static site generator could make it easier to maintain your blog. I personally like Hugo due to its speed.
jjjbokma 7y ago
I also wrote my own static blog generator. It's available as either a Perl or a Python program [0]. I use it to write a static microblog [1]. [0] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog [1] http://plurrrr.com/ http://plurrrr.com/
cyneox 7y ago
Tiddlywiki! Currently I'm working on having Tiddlywiki in a serverless env: Lambda + DynamDB + API Gateway.
dlphn___xyz 7y ago
jekyll, ghost, and wordpress are the easiest to setup and customize
amerkhalid 7y ago
I use both, WordPress and Hugo. I use WordPress for personal blog, which consist mostly of links, highlights from books, photography, and stream of concise writing. And I use Hugo for my professional website with a few blog posts but it is mostly focused on resume. WordPress makes it super easy to share content via its app or bookmarklet on computer. Writing experience on WordPress editor is okay. I get average of 100 visitors per month but don't get any comments. I leave comments turned on because if I want to add a note when using someone else's machine, I can. Otherwise, I would turn off commenting and reduce one risk vector. For Hugo, I use dedicated writing app, iaWriter[0]. It is definitely better experience of writing. My Hugo blog also has a private area where I write my fiction projects or write private notes. Of course, Hugo has no comments or search. Not really important for me. You can easily modify Hugo template to your liking but stuff like scheduled posts, automatic sharing on social networks, related posts, etc is not easily doable. Based on the fact that you want to focus on writing, I would suggest Hugo with a good writing app. Of course, you can write blog posts in any editor and copy paste into WordPress or wherever. [0]: https://ia.net/writer https://ia.net/writer
wheresvic3 7y ago
I personally started with a hand-rolled static html site and some content. When I decided to self-host, I got a super cheap VPS and just ran the site off of Node.js with an nginx reverse proxy. After around 10 blog posts, I just wrote my own static site generator: https://smalldata.tech/blog/2018/08/16/building-a-simple-static-site-generator-using-node-js https://smalldata.tech/blog/2018/08/16/building-a-simple-sta... Most importantly, what works for me is just writing in HTML. It is more expressive than markdown and the browser preview _just works_ (including displaying images and/or running inlined js if certain posts require it)!
ggoss 7y ago
I also wrote my own static site generator using Python [0] that I use to generate my personal site [2], and that I introduced as a blog post here [1]. Posts are written in Markdown with simple formatting, templates are HTML/CSS with Jinja2 templating, and it includes support for things like automatic table-of-contents generation for posts, blog index pagination, tags, related posts (manually tagged, for now), comments (using utteranc.es and GitHub issues), and automatic image compression/scaling/caching (between builds). Eventually, I intend to add things automated 'related posts' list generation, but haven't gotten around to it yet. [0]: https://github.com/ggoss/sitegen https://github.com/ggoss/sitegen [1]: https://garrettgoss.com/blog/2019/05/sitegen.html https://garrettgoss.com/blog/2019/05/sitegen.html [2]: https://garrettgoss.com https://garrettgoss.com
randomsearch 7y ago
I’ve spent countless days trying various static site generators and alternatives. I was trying to replace a self host Wordpress site with github pages to save money. I am now planning to instead build a new wordpress site and self host somewhere cheaper. WP is a PITA from a security point of view, but the alternatives are IMO uniformly terrible. WordPress just works and has a good ecosystem of plugins and themes. I was really disappointed with the static site generators. I’d love to write one that works as I’d expect - a simple way to turn markdown into a site with a single config file and python command, no complex setup, no using git as a package manager etc. with a ready set of auto-generated based on themes for other packages - but this will be a future project. It would look something like: /pages - contains markdown pages /posts - markdown posts /themes - one subdir per theme /output - generated html To generation html “ssg” in the root dir. The themes would be anything you like, with very few template tags. The markdown would be translated to simple html and inserted in the files. pip install ssg create a page in /posts with a title and body ssg open output/index.html
ryanmercer 7y ago
I'm a Suarepspace guy myself, have been for 9 years in November.
bovermyer 7y ago
You're describing hosted WordPress (wordpress.com, instead of wordpress.org). If you don't care as much about customization or plugins, then WriteFreely is quite nice. If you're willing to put in a fair amount of coding and design effort, you could use a static site generator, backed by Netlify as the host.
gmays 7y ago
WordPress is hard to beat. For a simple blog the updates are minimal and there are even Managed WordPress hosts that will keep it updated for you as part of the hosting plan. They typically also have on boarding.setup wizards to get it all fully setup in a few minutes. Sure, you could use something more custom, but you'll just spend more time coding rather than writing on your blog.
jeromescuggs 7y ago
wordpress always felt really overkill for what i wanted, and static site gens are fun for people who like to tinker under the hood. personally i use hugo, but i am still shopping around for something a little less convoluted. stumbled onto a super old package called blazeblogger and it'a been neat, but we will see when i just want something i can setup with minimal hassle, i have always loved GetSimple (http://get-simple.info/ http://get-simple.info/) although i imagine mentioning a flat-file platform will probably elicit some reactions - flat-file meaning it doesn't use a database to store content, but instead simply stores the data, encrypted, in actual textfiles on your webserver. when i was using godaddy as a host, their mysql db's were always a bit laggy, and something like wordpress would always have that extra, noticeable pause during loading that bugged me to no end. getsimple with the blogging plugin was always faster, configuring it was easy, and i didn't have to stray too far outside my limited knowledge of html/css/php to play with the styling and theming.
marc_io 7y ago
Publii + Netlify
KajMagnus 7y ago
There's Zola, a bit like Hugo but written in Rust, https://github.com/getzola/zola https://github.com/getzola/zola, and, looking at the readme, a bit more features than Hugo, e.g. built in search (how does that work?).
mattbgates 7y ago
https://micro.blog https://micro.blog is nice too.
wishinghand 7y ago
Unless you absolutely cannot stand PHP I will always recommend Kirby. You get blogging out of the box, comments, search, tags, related posts, featured posts, metadata stuff like SEO/RSS/Sitemaps is easy, a decent amount of themes out there, easy to make your own, can be deployed on shared hosting like Siteground or a bespoke server like Digita Ocean and the CMS interface is a joy to use. Downsides: all the code is on github but it’s not technically open source. I forget what the license is but it’s not MIT or anything like that. It also technically costs money. The maintainers let you download a working basic site and never nag you about paying. It’s an honor system.
pier25 7y ago
Another options that seems promising is Netlify CMS: https://www.netlifycms.org https://www.netlifycms.org It puts the content in the git repo so that your SSG can read from that. Then your CI can trigger a build and deploy after each push to the repo.

92 points by mrfusion 7y ago

gitgud 7y ago

If you really want to avoid updates and viruses, you need to go static. There's hundreds of static site generators out there. I recommend [1] hexo, for it's simplicity. You can write in markdown files and generate a static blog for static hosting. But [2] Gatsby is another similar framework, but it uses React. [1] https://hexo.io/ https://hexo.io/ [2] https://www.gatsbyjs.org https://www.gatsbyjs.org

yagodragon 7y ago
Another static site generator that is gaining traction is Eleventy[1]. It's very small and simple, entirely build in js, supports most templating languages you already know and it's more flexible than GatbyJS. For a more complete blogging solution, though, I'd recommend Ghost.[2]. If you're building a small blog just for fun you should definitely go static and scratch your hacker's itch. [1]https://www.11ty.io https://www.11ty.io [2]https://ghost.org https://ghost.org
- gHosts 7y ago
  I feel...... spuriously invoked
- johnonolan 7y ago
  You can also combine the two and use a Ghost back end with an Eleventy front-end, fwiw: https://ghost.org/docs/api/v2/eleventy/ https://ghost.org/docs/api/v2/eleventy/

sergiotapia 7y ago

I ended up with a domain purchased on Gandi. A Hugo static website on Github. Netlify hosting that Github repo. It's really turnkey and zero maintenance, and free. https://sergio.dev/posts/genserver-webcrawling-in-pure-elixir/ https://sergio.dev/posts/genserver-webcrawling-in-pure-elixi...

DoreenMichele 7y ago

Humorously, you can (probably) do all that with BlogSpot.

bishalb 7y ago
Blogspot is still a very good platform. If I am not hosting it myself, I would choose a Blogspot blog over a GitHub pages one anyday. And blogspot also allows advertisements which is great.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- bovermyer 7y ago
  I would argue that advertisements are not, in fact, great. But Blogspot as a blogging platform is still a viable choice.
  - bishalb 7y ago
    Yes of course ads aren't great but I love me some money on the side while I am blogging away :). Also I don't find adsense small text ads to be very obtrusive. 10 years ago I knew a few bloggers that were making 4 figure earnings via just blogspot blogs and adsense. Adsense pays like shit these days.

jamesponddotco 7y ago

While it doesn't seem very popular in Hacker News, I think WordPress [1] is an excellent platform for a blog. The community is terrific, there is a tremendous amount of documentation out there, and it is entirely customisable. If you go with the managed hosting route, most companies handle security and updates for you, so you can focus on writing and leave everything technical to someone else. I am working on one myself — and have a private beta running, if you are interested [2], —, but of the top of my head, some companies that will go above and beyond as far as WordPress is concerned, include Kinsta [3], Pantheon [4] and Presslabs [5]. The last one is based in Romania and open sourced a bunch of their stack, worth checking out. [1] https://wordpress.org https://wordpress.org [2] Just email me at help@madpony.co for information [3] https://kinsta.com https://kinsta.com [4] https://pantheon.io https://pantheon.io [5] https://www.presslabs.com https://www.presslabs.com

mraudiobook_com 7y ago
What is the benefit of wordpress over hosting yourself?
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  The OP's footnote for WordPress linked to wordpress.org, which suggests they meant the self-hostable software.
non-entity 7y ago
I think Wordpress is fine if you keep it maintained. I've just seen a ton of sites end up with malware, gaping security holes, etc. because the site owner didn't vet the plugins they were installing.
sneak 7y ago
Wordpress falls over under an even modest amount of traffic without jumping through a bunch of caching plugin hoops, it’s written in PHP, it requires dynamic hosting, and it regularly has major security issues. It’s not good.

davewasthere 7y ago

Gatsby, Hugo or plain(ish) Jekkyl. Simple, clean, fast. Updates and viruses are a non-issue. Depends what plugins you're talking about, but if you're a non-programmer/dev type, then you're probably better off using Wordpress as a blogging platform if some serious customisation is wanted.

save_ferris 7y ago
Tried gatsby recently and I hate it. Their choice to use graphql for a static site generator makes no sense to me. Trying to build anything beyond a super generic blog is a huge chore. Hugo has a much, much better community IMO
- pknopf 7y ago
  I agree. Gatsby is one of the worst products I have ever worked with. The code itself isn't bad, but the tech stack and UX is horrible. It's the epitome of hipster JavaScript. I'm amazed that they got funding for it...
  - edude03 7y ago
    I hate to be negative about products others have built as I tend to believe that if it "sucks" it's because I'm not the target audience. That said, I am happy to hear I'm not the only one with this sentiment.
    - save_ferris 7y ago
      I’m the same way, but there’s a big difference between using a technology that’s not designed for your use case and using a technology that just sucks, and frankly gatsby is the latter. It in no way outshines any other major static site generator available today.

tomlockwood 7y ago

Github Pages + Jekyll. Can use it with your custom domain, pretty customisable, and since its a static site, relatively secure.

saagarjha 7y ago
That’s what I use, but one word of warning: if you rely on GitHub to generate the pages for you, you can’t use any custom plugins aside from the ones they’ve whitelisted.
- dangoldin 7y ago
  I had a similar issue - turns out you can generate it statically locally and commit the generated HTML files: https://help.github.com/en/articles/using-a-static-site-generator-other-than-jekyll https://help.github.com/en/articles/using-a-static-site-gene...

nimchimpsky 7y ago

github pages, and commit my own vanilla html

arkitaip 7y ago

WordPress all the way. I genuinely think it's the self-hosted solution that offers the best combination of control, flexibility and ease-of-use. You just need a couple of plugins for performance and safety and you are set [0]. There are literally tens of thousands of themes - open source and commercial - that you can try out in a matter of minutes instead of wasting days or weeks designing your own theme. You rarely have to code stuff by yourself because there is a plugin for any functionality you can imagine. Latest version of WordPress comes with the new Gutenberg editor which I'm personally not a huge fan of as it obfuscates too much of WordPress' inner workings. You might, therefore, want to use the Classic Editor plugin as a solution. If you haven't already bought a domain name, I recommend Porkbun. Moved several domains to them in the past months and have found them to be cheap and yet reliable straight shooters. [0] My list of must-have plugins: Yoast (for SEO), Autoptimize (caching/performance), Wordfence Security (multi-layer security).

bishalb 7y ago
For any serious blogging project, WordPress is by far the best choice, nothing comes close in terms of features, ease of use and ease of customization. I would also add contact form 7 to the list.

ibudiallo 7y ago

This may not be for everyone but here is what I did. I wrote 5 articles that I thought were interesting. Then I bought a domain name, wrote a php script to serve them. (If url1 do x, if url2 do y) nothing fancy. Only when I saw that I could sustain writing regularly I started worrying about the platform. And there is no best platform, only the one you are familiar with.

bdcravens 7y ago
Curious, why didn't you just make it a static site then?
- ibudiallo 7y ago
  Only to have a reusable header and footer.
  - davidcollantes 7y ago
    You can do that with a static site and includes.

CameronNemo 7y ago

I use hugo with gitlab pages. Hugo is customizeable and portable. You can host with anything, not just gitlab. nginx even.

pknopf 7y ago

I wrote my own one-off static site generator. It is freeing. Anything is possible, and nothing is in your way. It really doesn't take that much time. https://github.com/pauldotknopf/pauldotknopf.github.io/blob/staging/generator/src/Blog/Program.cs https://github.com/pauldotknopf/pauldotknopf.github.io/blob/... https://pknopf.com/ https://pknopf.com/

quickthrower2 7y ago
Yeah I find just knock something up in NodeJS. Then when you need to do something custom you are writing JS. Familiar stuff. Compare that to the headache of figuring out how to get Hugo templates to do anything non trivial. Or even getting Jekyll to run.

hamaluik 7y ago

After years of trying different things, I found something that works great for me, though I suspect you’ll have to try a few things until you find what is comfortable for you. I publish my blog as a static site served by nginx on a $5 / node (which also hosts a dozen other things—I don’t get much traffic). Every once in a while I ssh in and run an apt upgrade but no updates to manage beyond that. I use https://getstatik.com/ https://getstatik.com/ to generate the site from markdown files. I’m surprised it hasn’t caught on more given how flexible it lets you be with defining how your site should work. The whole thing is stored on git and I can deploy with a push to my server remote. That said if you want to focus on writing I would start with something as simple as ghost of medium to see if you’re actually as into writing as you think.

clintonb 7y ago

I got tired of dealing with WordPress. I moved to Jekyll hosted on Netlify. I use Forestry as a frontend. You can read more at https://dev.clintonblackburn.com/2019/03/31/wordpress-to-jekyll/ https://dev.clintonblackburn.com/2019/03/31/wordpress-to-jek....

ascales 7y ago

In my experience Hugo has been really nice and simple to work with. I just push markdown to git and it shows up on my site.

PatrolX 7y ago

Ghost https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/ https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost is best for the need you've described, it's no-nonsense fast as lightning, unlike bloated WordPress.

bovermyer 7y ago
Hosted Ghost is really expensive. Self-hosted Ghost is a pain in the ass to maintain. Disclaimer: the above is my own experience, and not necessarily that of others.
- dewey 7y ago
  How is it a pain to maintain? I’m using the Dockerized version and apart from increasing the version number in the Docker Compose file there’s 0 maintenance in the last years of running it.
  - bovermyer 7y ago
    The Docker community maintains that image, not Ghost directly. I ran into several problems writing Ansible automation to spin up and configure a Ghost server. Eventually I gave up and used a different blog engine that was more amenable to automation. Granted, this may just be a low motivation on my part to use Ghost, in favor of just getting something up and running.

BayesStreet 7y ago

We’re working on a security focused managed Wordpress hosting platform with custom email and templates included. If you’d like to beta test it email admin@ sitebay.org and we’ll put you up for however long you need free. Thanks to YC summer startup school for hooking us up with some compute credits.

jefftk 7y ago

Static is great: more secure, stands up to very high loads, minimal maintenance. I'd actually recommend writing in plain html+css at first, and then moving over to a static site generator once you have ~10 posts. You'll have a much better idea about what makes a good system at that point. (I wrote my own static site generator after ~100 posts, which is longer than I'd recommend going!)

johnnyAghands 7y ago

If you like writing some code, want full control (i.e. payload size, extensibility, theming, etc) with some OOTB features (i.e. zero setup, server rendering, static exporting, etc), and don't mind react or markdown, I'd recommend nextjs + netlify. I find Gatsby and Hugo very powerful; but miss the simplicity of Jykell. Even if you don't think nextjs is great for blogging, it's still worth checking out! Their docs + getting started guide are some of the best. For example; writing up a small MVP site to test out a business idea (https://www.hiredsomehelp.com/ https://www.hiredsomehelp.com/), it's in progress, but even still, only took about 15 minutes to push up via netlify. That being said, I feel like all these new static site generators are terrific; a real sweet spot in web development in my opinion :) Stay the hell away from Wordpress. It. Will. Get. You. When you least expect it ️

awill 7y ago

I used Wordpress for years. It was such a hassle constantly getting emails about patching. In the end I got fed up and moved to hugo hosted on netlify. Fantastic. Zero maintenance.

hellwd 7y ago
I was also impressed by Netlify. I tried multiple other solutions to host my website but Netlify was my favorite at the end. Easy to setup, free and fast. I configured my account, access to Github, deployment, custom domain and SSL in 5 minutes.

nstart 7y ago

Highly recommend the ghost platform. It gets out of your way and lets you focus on writing. Nothing else. You can customize it as much as you want but it's primary focus is getting you to writing first. This is assuming you are willing to pay for at least your own server. Their hosted option is also great and highly recommended if you want to just start writing before thinking of customizations. I find static site generators to be awesome but generally a hindrance to the flow of wanting to start writing spontaneously. More often than not, more time goes into figuring out the perfect workflow for the blog system rather than writing. Caveats, YMMV etc apply :)

bishalb 7y ago
Does Ghost support commenting yet? Can't imagine a blog without a commenting feature.
- DavidDarnes 7y ago
  There's several comment integrations you can choose from https://ghost.org/integrations/community/ https://ghost.org/integrations/community/
  - bishalb 7y ago
    That is exactly my point. With Ghost, I would have to resort to a third party service to have something so essential as a commenting system for a blog. Comments are a part of your blog's content and it is necessary to have your own control over it, as these third party providers can shut down or just ban your site for any reason(take Google Plus comments for instance which many blogs were using as a commenting platform for their blogs). Relying on a third party provider for comments should be a choice, not a compulsion.
    - DavidDarnes 7y ago
      Aren't comments a response to your blog content and not part of the content itself? Having the option to use a multitude of commenting services seems like lots of control surely? If you look at the various options being suggested in the comments here you'll see many of them don't come with comments out of the box. Jekyll, Gatsby, Hugo, 11ty all require you to use a third party service or roll your own.

dceddia 7y ago

To avoid updates and viruses, go with a static site. There are a ton of good static site generators out there. My blog[0] runs on Jekyll[1]. Hugo[2] is a popular option. I've fiddled with Gatsby[3] and heard good things. Eleventy[4] looks as close to Jekyll-but-in-JavaScript as I've seen. Since you want to be able to customize it, I'd probably take the static site generator's language into account. Do you like... Ruby? -> Jekyll[1] Go? -> Hugo[2] JavaScript? -> Gatsby[3] or Eleventy[4] Some other language? -> google "[language] static site generator" and see how many GitHub stars it has. Once you've figured that out, most of the hosts support custom domains. Netlify[5] is free, and works very well. It's what I use currently. I used to host my site on DigitalOcean[6], but Netlify is definitely more painless, especially from a devops/patching standpoint. Plus it has a CDN so your site would be faster. [0] https://daveceddia.com/ https://daveceddia.com/ [1] https://jekyllrb.com/ https://jekyllrb.com/ [2] https://gohugo.io/ https://gohugo.io/ [3] https://www.gatsbyjs.org/ https://www.gatsbyjs.org/ [4] https://www.11ty.io/ https://www.11ty.io/ [5] https://www.netlify.com/ https://www.netlify.com/ [6] https://www.digitalocean.com/ https://www.digitalocean.com/

nyolfen 7y ago
big props to hugo for using a static binary without some insane dependency chain, i'm really pleased with it. hosting my blog on a $15/y vps with a vanity domain and hugo was one of my first projects to learn to manage a server, and i gave up with jekyll after way too much struggling with ruby. that said i'm not sure how it fares wrt to plugins, i think it's pretty vanilla in terms of user-facing features (though plenty of very straightforward theme tweaking is possible).
- OJFord 7y ago
  I was balking at $15 (for a static site) until I re-read and got /y right. Who offers that?
  - nyolfen 7y ago
    i use ramnode but you should check out lowendbox, they aggregate cheap vps services and deals

susam 7y ago

If you like writing Python code, I recommend https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite (makesite.py). As the README says, it is a simple, lightweight, and magic-free static blog generator. The entire static blog generator code is in a single file named makesite.py. Add your content to the `content` directory. Then run `python3 makesite.py` to generate the static blog. It writes the generated blog to the `_site` directory. Finally copy this directory to wherever you want to serve your blog from, e.g., GitHub repo with GitHub pages enabled, virtual private server, cloud storage, etc. It works pretty well out of the box and it is highly customizable too because doing so involves just modifying the existing Python code or writing your own Python code. Disclaimer: This project has been written by my wife. I use it myself to render my static blog at https://susam.in/ https://susam.in/.

thekyle 7y ago
> This project has been written by my wife. Aww... That's so sweet.
majewsky 7y ago
FYI: That's a disclosure, not a disclaimer. A disclaimer would be something like "This project has been written by my wife, so I don't take any responsibility for its quality", which is clearly not your intention.
- susam 7y ago
  Thanks for correcting me. Indeed, I meant it as a disclosure, not a disclaimer. I was aware of the difference between the two words but I made a thinking error while writing my comment.
scoobyyabbadoo 7y ago
I have a soft spot for python modules that fit in a single file like this, like bottle.py as well. Gives you so much freedom to just drop a file in a folder and call it a day, instead of having to worry about what can sometimes be complex dependency management.
deleted 7y ago

imwally 7y ago

I've been using pelican [1] with S3 for my blog [2]. It comes with a nice makefile that handles the generation (markdown -> HTML), dev server (localhost:8000 that regenerates files upon modification) and deployment to S3 (uses s3cmd along with API keys to upload to a designated bucket). It offers GitHub, ftp, ssh, and dropbox options for deployment as well, but I've never tried them. [1] https://blog.getpelican.com https://blog.getpelican.com [2] http://nil.wallyjones.com http://nil.wallyjones.com

IronBacon 7y ago
Also rsync (the one I use).

rukshn 7y ago

Sadly even though it is not popular in HN WordPress is the best for you. Easy to set up and try and you can customize it as well. With lots of plugins for everything. You can go with the paid WordPress.com and they will handle all the updates for you. Static sites are good but when it is time for SEO and customisation you will realize that it can get really painful in a static site generator.

pier25 7y ago
> Static sites are good but when it is time for SEO and customisation you will realize that it can get really painful in a static site generator. My experience has been quite the contrary. I've found it super easy to get good SEO with Jekyll sites. What have you found to be painful?
masukomi 7y ago
> Static sites are good but when it is time for SEO and customisation you will realize that it can get really painful in a static site generator. care to explain? because that makes _no_ sense to me. SEO is primarily about content these days. The little "add this tag for SEO WIN" type things stopped being useful years ago. Have a good title, have good content, link your stuff well, update regularly: success!

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

gexla 7y ago

If you have a gun pointed to your head with the requirements you have listed then you go Wordpress. Updates aren't difficult. I'm not sure about plugins (I haven't used WP in a long time,) but you can set the core Wordpress updates to be automatic. It will handle everything you need. If after a week of coding you arrive to the weekend and think "I want to do a bunch more coding" then you go with a static site generator. Then you don't finish over the weekend and have to screw with it the following weekend as well. Then you finally publish the thing with "good enough but not quite what you wanted" functionality and let it sit there for weeks. Then you come back to it and scratch your head trying to remember how to publish / build / deploy it (or you cycle through your shell history hoping the commands are still in there.) One day you decide that you want to add that functionality you left out the first time and find that you have to relearn everything you had to learn to build the thing in the first place. Sure, you vaguely remember the easy stuff, but you have to refresh on the easy stuff to get back to the harder stuff which you never had time to figure out from the beginning. Anyone been there? ;) In this case, I'm thinking of Hugo, but I imagine it's much the same for all the others. With Wordpress you get enough balance of customization and ease of use that you can just get on with it. If you need a bit of help, then get on Fiverr or similar and have someone throw you pointers (or just do it for you) to save you time in getting past tricky parts. There's a reason loads of sites on the internet are using WP. People use it to GTD and move on to something else.

bishalb 7y ago
Exactly. Outside of the nerd bubble of HN, Wordpress is still the defacto choice for a blogging platform. Nothing comes close to WordPress in terms of customization freedom and "zero to deploy".
- ryandrake 7y ago
  I agree. A social (card gaming) group I’m involved with used self-hosted WordPress and it’s been great. We use it primarily for events and post-game blog posts. Non technical people can contribute blog posts and other stuff, and I can occasionally pretend to be a sysadmin. Cost is essentially free since it piggy backs on a VPS that would otherwise be running anyway.

rishav_sharan 7y ago

Github + github pages. Keep your text in md files and host them for free.

Teichopsia 7y ago

Recently I looked into the landscape to see what I felt comfortable with. tl;dr: I ended up using eleventy with tailwindcss. It depends what you are comfortable with... There are a few blogging sites (their names escape me at the moment but are similar to https://write.as https://write.as) that seemed interesting. Again, I did a quick search but couldn't find the one I had in mind. My preference is python, so naturally I looked there first. I can't remember what happened to pelican, why I didn't go for it. Nikola seemed nice until I started reading the documentation. I also looked at some that were further down static gens list. But something was missing. Jekyll has great documentation, but there are a lot of moving pieces. You can make it into a full fledge website that has a blog, or make it into a blog - quite easily. It seems that whoever states that Jekyll is geared towards creating a blog..... who knows why?! Played around with Hugo last year and meh... Now, I don't know how much looking into different ssg influenced the ease it was to pick up eleventy, but it just made sense. It's a bare bones static site generator that - just works. There are several blog posts that will get you up and running quickly. There are several skeleton GitHub repos, some use tailwindCSS, some have netlify Cms already configured, some are plain. Or you can just build your own. Another I picked it, which is on a personal level. Since it's such a well structured, bare-bone project, its helping me learn/practice JavaScript and it's ecosystem. npm scripts is all you need. All the other tools, gatsby, etc - are great if you already understand react. And even if you don't but are interested - I got the impression (gatsby at least) that it's documentation was good and you could learn a great deal about react going through it. Maybe, I don't know. Finally... I feel that some projects could do with an overhaul, at least with their documentation. Some parts felt like an afterthought instead of one cohesive, linear explanation. Not an easy task in the least, but what is? But more importantly, pick one thing and stick to it (unless it proves to be hindering productivity).

zoeybourqueee 7y ago

If you're looking for a blog to help you with your productivity, I highly recommend https://quire.io/blog/ https://quire.io/blog/

bovermyer 7y ago
This has nothing to do with the OP's question, though...

SanchoPanda 7y ago

Static sites are cool but annoying to customize. WordPress is cool but a server is annoying to maintain. Solution: build on WordPress, use wget to pull a mirror, serve that as a static site. This is way more common than you may initially guess.

flaviocopes 7y ago

I use Hugo for my blog but also for other non-blog sites. Generating static HTML gives me peace of mind and Go is super fast at regenerating the site. Deploying is a joyful process using GitHub and Netlify. I’d go static just to use Netlify. And the best part for me is the tech is “boring” so I just focus on the content, rather than on the blog platform.

olingern 7y ago
Your posts have been helpful, thanks for the writing you do!

stockkid 7y ago

> I really want to focus on the writing and not deal with updates and viruses. In such case, html+css might be a good choice for you. Using static site generator could make it easier to maintain your blog. I personally like Hugo due to its speed.

jjjbokma 7y ago

I also wrote my own static blog generator. It's available as either a Perl or a Python program [0]. I use it to write a static microblog [1]. [0] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog [1] http://plurrrr.com/ http://plurrrr.com/

cyneox 7y ago

Tiddlywiki! Currently I'm working on having Tiddlywiki in a serverless env: Lambda + DynamDB + API Gateway.

dlphn___xyz 7y ago

jekyll, ghost, and wordpress are the easiest to setup and customize

amerkhalid 7y ago

I use both, WordPress and Hugo. I use WordPress for personal blog, which consist mostly of links, highlights from books, photography, and stream of concise writing. And I use Hugo for my professional website with a few blog posts but it is mostly focused on resume. WordPress makes it super easy to share content via its app or bookmarklet on computer. Writing experience on WordPress editor is okay. I get average of 100 visitors per month but don't get any comments. I leave comments turned on because if I want to add a note when using someone else's machine, I can. Otherwise, I would turn off commenting and reduce one risk vector. For Hugo, I use dedicated writing app, iaWriter[0]. It is definitely better experience of writing. My Hugo blog also has a private area where I write my fiction projects or write private notes. Of course, Hugo has no comments or search. Not really important for me. You can easily modify Hugo template to your liking but stuff like scheduled posts, automatic sharing on social networks, related posts, etc is not easily doable. Based on the fact that you want to focus on writing, I would suggest Hugo with a good writing app. Of course, you can write blog posts in any editor and copy paste into WordPress or wherever. [0]: https://ia.net/writer https://ia.net/writer

wheresvic3 7y ago

I personally started with a hand-rolled static html site and some content. When I decided to self-host, I got a super cheap VPS and just ran the site off of Node.js with an nginx reverse proxy. After around 10 blog posts, I just wrote my own static site generator: https://smalldata.tech/blog/2018/08/16/building-a-simple-static-site-generator-using-node-js https://smalldata.tech/blog/2018/08/16/building-a-simple-sta... Most importantly, what works for me is just writing in HTML. It is more expressive than markdown and the browser preview _just works_ (including displaying images and/or running inlined js if certain posts require it)!

ggoss 7y ago

I also wrote my own static site generator using Python [0] that I use to generate my personal site [2], and that I introduced as a blog post here [1]. Posts are written in Markdown with simple formatting, templates are HTML/CSS with Jinja2 templating, and it includes support for things like automatic table-of-contents generation for posts, blog index pagination, tags, related posts (manually tagged, for now), comments (using utteranc.es and GitHub issues), and automatic image compression/scaling/caching (between builds). Eventually, I intend to add things automated 'related posts' list generation, but haven't gotten around to it yet. [0]: https://github.com/ggoss/sitegen https://github.com/ggoss/sitegen [1]: https://garrettgoss.com/blog/2019/05/sitegen.html https://garrettgoss.com/blog/2019/05/sitegen.html [2]: https://garrettgoss.com https://garrettgoss.com

randomsearch 7y ago

I’ve spent countless days trying various static site generators and alternatives. I was trying to replace a self host Wordpress site with github pages to save money. I am now planning to instead build a new wordpress site and self host somewhere cheaper. WP is a PITA from a security point of view, but the alternatives are IMO uniformly terrible. WordPress just works and has a good ecosystem of plugins and themes. I was really disappointed with the static site generators. I’d love to write one that works as I’d expect - a simple way to turn markdown into a site with a single config file and python command, no complex setup, no using git as a package manager etc. with a ready set of auto-generated based on themes for other packages - but this will be a future project. It would look something like: /pages - contains markdown pages /posts - markdown posts /themes - one subdir per theme /output - generated html To generation html “ssg” in the root dir. The themes would be anything you like, with very few template tags. The markdown would be translated to simple html and inserted in the files. pip install ssg create a page in /posts with a title and body ssg open output/index.html

ryanmercer 7y ago

I'm a Suarepspace guy myself, have been for 9 years in November.

bovermyer 7y ago

You're describing hosted WordPress (wordpress.com, instead of wordpress.org). If you don't care as much about customization or plugins, then WriteFreely is quite nice. If you're willing to put in a fair amount of coding and design effort, you could use a static site generator, backed by Netlify as the host.

gmays 7y ago

WordPress is hard to beat. For a simple blog the updates are minimal and there are even Managed WordPress hosts that will keep it updated for you as part of the hosting plan. They typically also have on boarding.setup wizards to get it all fully setup in a few minutes. Sure, you could use something more custom, but you'll just spend more time coding rather than writing on your blog.

jeromescuggs 7y ago

wordpress always felt really overkill for what i wanted, and static site gens are fun for people who like to tinker under the hood. personally i use hugo, but i am still shopping around for something a little less convoluted. stumbled onto a super old package called blazeblogger and it'a been neat, but we will see when i just want something i can setup with minimal hassle, i have always loved GetSimple (http://get-simple.info/ http://get-simple.info/) although i imagine mentioning a flat-file platform will probably elicit some reactions - flat-file meaning it doesn't use a database to store content, but instead simply stores the data, encrypted, in actual textfiles on your webserver. when i was using godaddy as a host, their mysql db's were always a bit laggy, and something like wordpress would always have that extra, noticeable pause during loading that bugged me to no end. getsimple with the blogging plugin was always faster, configuring it was easy, and i didn't have to stray too far outside my limited knowledge of html/css/php to play with the styling and theming.

marc_io 7y ago

Publii + Netlify

KajMagnus 7y ago

There's Zola, a bit like Hugo but written in Rust, https://github.com/getzola/zola https://github.com/getzola/zola, and, looking at the readme, a bit more features than Hugo, e.g. built in search (how does that work?).

mattbgates 7y ago

https://micro.blog https://micro.blog is nice too.

wishinghand 7y ago

Unless you absolutely cannot stand PHP I will always recommend Kirby. You get blogging out of the box, comments, search, tags, related posts, featured posts, metadata stuff like SEO/RSS/Sitemaps is easy, a decent amount of themes out there, easy to make your own, can be deployed on shared hosting like Siteground or a bespoke server like Digita Ocean and the CMS interface is a joy to use. Downsides: all the code is on github but it’s not technically open source. I forget what the license is but it’s not MIT or anything like that. It also technically costs money. The maintainers let you download a working basic site and never nag you about paying. It’s an honor system.

pier25 7y ago

Another options that seems promising is Netlify CMS: https://www.netlifycms.org https://www.netlifycms.org It puts the content in the git repo so that your SSG can read from that. Then your CI can trigger a build and deploy after each push to the repo.