6 ms·

A personal blog should be whatever the author wants it to be of course, and a developer should play with whatever technology he/she wants. But as a backend deve

by DJHenk 6y ago

A personal blog should be whatever the author wants it to be of course, and a developer should play with whatever technology he/she wants. But as a backend developer, I don't want any Javascript on my site, because I hate writing it and I don't like browsing it. These statements indicate to me that this "ideal tech stack" is rather personal to the author: > I want to build the site in React and TypeScript > I don't want limitations on what my personal website can be/become. Sure, my current site consists of two simple, static blog posts. But down the road, I may want to... > I literally have zero memory of how we used to build forms in the pre-React times. I think I'll keep it at Hugo for now, with just HTML and CSS.

nallerooth 6y ago
Hugo is awesome! (Apart from the Go templates, before you get the hang of them..) A year or two back, shouting REACT at everything and everyone could actually land you a new job, but now... I'd just stick to Hugo and focus on my content if I wanted to impress any recruiters.
- nick_meister 6y ago
  Hugo is great but check out Zola, it is basically like Hugo but with better templates IMO.
  - Already__Taken 6y ago
    the built in image processing is kind of a big deal for Zola that's handy. a cut above all node based pipelines that have horrible native modules for that. I kinda just want to write Vue components for posts rather than markdown so turn between trying Zola it nuxts new content cms
Amorymeltzer 6y ago
The ideal tech stack for a personal blog is whatever the person wants to maintain, update, and, most importantly, use.
nicoburns 6y ago
As a full-stack developer who spends a good proportion of my time at my day-job working with React, I totally agree. My personal website is Hugo, and entirely JavaScript free.
- woutr_be 6y ago
  Same here, even a lot of my personal projects are now just SPA free by default. I do use Node on the backend, but most of the time, a templating language like pug gives me everything I need.
cableshaft 6y ago
Came here to say Hugo is the correct answer for a Personal Developer blog, unless you're using it to showcase your skills in a particular technology, at least in my experience. Finally dived into Hugo and it's just so easy to get going with making Markdown content and turning it into a static site with one of the themes from their gallery. There's a bit of a rabbit hole to go down if you want to get more custom than that, but it's extremely customizable and you can learn a lot about how to do so just looking at the source code from themes in the gallery. The only tech I really have to worry about is HTML, CSS, Markdown, and a little bit of template scripting for ranges and reading variables from the config files, if I want to customize the theme. I've gotten excited about building my personal website again because I don't have to screw around with the technology hardly at all, I can focus on just making content. Which is what you want for a personal site. You don't want a bunch of friction slowing you down from actually getting content out there. I don't have to worry about dependency hell with Hugo either, it's just an executable.
- fossuser 6y ago
  How do you host your site? I've been using Github Pages which has Jekyll support and that's worked fine, but I'm curious where people host their Hugo sites (or how hosting works when you run the server yourself). Is it AWS? Dreamhost? or something else? Do you have to manage a proxy or handle load/cost spikes? Can a surge of traffic take down the site? I haven't read a ton about this, but I'm curious about it. It'd be neat to have full control over my own publishing if something ever happened to github pages.
  - nickysielicki 6y ago
    That's the beauty of a static site generator -- github just expects valid HMTL to be generated and pushed to a specific branch. Github has no more Jekyll support than it has support for Hugo or a custom static site generator written in bash. I host my hugo-based blog with github pages.
    - fossuser 6y ago
      Ah ok - I think I understand. Github does have special Jekyll support, but you just generate the hugo static files locally and only push those up to where Github expects them to be? I think with Jekyll Github will re-generate the static files for you and works with the RSS plugin automatically. Good to know though - might be worth checking out Hugo, thanks!

by DJHenk 6y ago

nallerooth 6y ago

Hugo is awesome! (Apart from the Go templates, before you get the hang of them..) A year or two back, shouting REACT at everything and everyone could actually land you a new job, but now... I'd just stick to Hugo and focus on my content if I wanted to impress any recruiters.

nick_meister 6y ago
Hugo is great but check out Zola, it is basically like Hugo but with better templates IMO.
- Already__Taken 6y ago
  the built in image processing is kind of a big deal for Zola that's handy. a cut above all node based pipelines that have horrible native modules for that. I kinda just want to write Vue components for posts rather than markdown so turn between trying Zola it nuxts new content cms

Amorymeltzer 6y ago

The ideal tech stack for a personal blog is whatever the person wants to maintain, update, and, most importantly, use.

nicoburns 6y ago

As a full-stack developer who spends a good proportion of my time at my day-job working with React, I totally agree. My personal website is Hugo, and entirely JavaScript free.

woutr_be 6y ago
Same here, even a lot of my personal projects are now just SPA free by default. I do use Node on the backend, but most of the time, a templating language like pug gives me everything I need.

cableshaft 6y ago

Came here to say Hugo is the correct answer for a Personal Developer blog, unless you're using it to showcase your skills in a particular technology, at least in my experience. Finally dived into Hugo and it's just so easy to get going with making Markdown content and turning it into a static site with one of the themes from their gallery. There's a bit of a rabbit hole to go down if you want to get more custom than that, but it's extremely customizable and you can learn a lot about how to do so just looking at the source code from themes in the gallery. The only tech I really have to worry about is HTML, CSS, Markdown, and a little bit of template scripting for ranges and reading variables from the config files, if I want to customize the theme. I've gotten excited about building my personal website again because I don't have to screw around with the technology hardly at all, I can focus on just making content. Which is what you want for a personal site. You don't want a bunch of friction slowing you down from actually getting content out there. I don't have to worry about dependency hell with Hugo either, it's just an executable.

fossuser 6y ago
How do you host your site? I've been using Github Pages which has Jekyll support and that's worked fine, but I'm curious where people host their Hugo sites (or how hosting works when you run the server yourself). Is it AWS? Dreamhost? or something else? Do you have to manage a proxy or handle load/cost spikes? Can a surge of traffic take down the site? I haven't read a ton about this, but I'm curious about it. It'd be neat to have full control over my own publishing if something ever happened to github pages.
- nickysielicki 6y ago
  That's the beauty of a static site generator -- github just expects valid HMTL to be generated and pushed to a specific branch. Github has no more Jekyll support than it has support for Hugo or a custom static site generator written in bash. I host my hugo-based blog with github pages.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    Ah ok - I think I understand. Github does have special Jekyll support, but you just generate the hugo static files locally and only push those up to where Github expects them to be? I think with Jekyll Github will re-generate the static files for you and works with the RSS plugin automatically. Good to know though - might be worth checking out Hugo, thanks!