20 ms·

How to Start Your Blog in 2023

198 points by ymolodtsov 4y ago

FrostedCupcake 4y ago
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ymolodtsov 4y ago
Running your own blog in 2023 is still needlessly complicated, especially if you have any kind of taste. Social apps and networks are obviously the easiest options, but they’re geared toward vastly different things, and I just don’t trust their longevity. There are many options out there, ranging from WordPress and Ghost to static blogs to managed online platforms and Micro.blog. In fact, none of the options out there seem ideal to me – they range from mediocre to acceptable.
- wesleychen 4y ago
  Is this an AI generated summary?
josters 4y ago
Totally agree on the seemingly unnecessary overhead. Just recently I was looking into platforms for starting a blog and was overwhelmed with the choices of which none really had a complete set of offerings. Having a feature comparison table or a guide for choosing the best service/platform for individual use cases would be nice. In the end, I chose Ghost's lowest tier. While it is limited regarding the theme choices, I've found that you can customize the free standard themes via their code injection feature[1]. [1]: https://www.shmostert.com/customize-standard-ghost-themes/ https://www.shmostert.com/customize-standard-ghost-themes/ (disclaimer: the guide is from my blog)
- input_sh 4y ago
  Ghost is also what I always recommend. With WordPress and Jekyll/Hugo, you'll fuck around with site setup way more than actually writing. Ghost is basically only good for actually writing. Pick a theme (plenty of them for ~$50, write. That's it. Customizing themes is also super simple in my opinion, though I've never tried their shared hosting and am unfamiliar with limitations that come from that.
  - ymolodtsov 4y ago
    I think the problem with customizing Ghost themes is that you actually have to tinker with their code, most don't really have settings at the scale WordPress themes used to have. But yeah, that's why I said that if you're OK with the workflow Ghost provides and at least one theme you should probably use it.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
> Running your own blog in 2023 is still needlessly complicated, especially if you have any kind of taste. Aside from taste being subjective, most of the tools mentioned are customizable. That is, you can tweak the markup and CSS to your own taste. The post starts being concerned about aesthetics but then finishes with: "Having the right tool certainly helps, but at the end of the day, what matters is what you write there. Focus more on the content and just ensure the process of writing and posting is simple enough." Finally, time is money. Spending an added hour (or two) with a build process (or whatever) isn't savings at all. If Goal #1 is to publish then anything that gets in the way should be avoided. There are some solid points made, but the argument is inconsistent.
- eloisant 4y ago
  Many people (including me) use static generation with a fancy build process because we find it fun, not to save time or money. I honestly find it more fun to setup my blog than writing content for it... Which might be a problem. (And also explain all the blog posts describing a complex setup).
  - naniwaduni 4y ago
    > Many people (including me) use static generation with a fancy build process because we find it fun, not to save time or money. Some people do this and won't admit it!
    - indigodaddy 4y ago
      Very true and good point— and there’s also nothing at all wrong with that!!
  - ymolodtsov 4y ago
    Yep, so many blogs with a few posts where one of them explains their entire SSG set up and that's it.
- ymolodtsov 4y ago
  But fine-tuning these blogs or themes is actually the complicated part. That's what I had to do. But I know a bit of coding and wanted to try. Not a great option for regular people. And it'd foolish not to say that at the end of the day writing is more important than having a blog that's just beautiful. There's one niche option I haven't covered there called [Aegea](https://blogengine.me/ https://blogengine.me/), which looks good out of the box, but I can't really recommend it based on the way the author develops it: no roadmap, no community feedback, basically no support, yet has paid features.
Artgor 4y ago
I started my website and blog in 2021. I used Jekyll + github pages with custom domain. I didn't want to setup everything by myself, so I bought a Jekyll theme that I liked and customized it. I did it lazily, so it took me around 1 month to complete the whole process, including copying my old blogposts from Medium.
sharedptr 4y ago
I just publish via blogger. In the past I have checked other options but I always spend more time looking for interesting ways to deploy content than writing content
- ghaff 4y ago
  I'm giving Wordpress.com an other try for a website/blog relaunch. But, for just a blog, Blogger has been fine for me for years.
onli 4y ago
I honestly think starting a blog in 2023 is exactly as easy as it was 2004 (the year he references), if you take the easiest route: 1. You pick a cheap shared hoster 2. You buy a domain and connect it 3. You download a PHP blog system, like Wordpress 4. You unpack the files into the webroot, configure the database (or use a blog system that supports sqlite, like Serendipity [which I develop for]) 5. Pick a theme, install a minimal amount of plugins. Optionally customize the theme a bit. 6. Done. Sure, going with a hosted offering looks easier, but you still have to manage things like your domain, interoperability and backups, so hosting it on your own gets easier very fast.
- cassianoleal 4y ago
  Depending on how much (or how little) customisation and interop you require, something like prose.sh makes blogging a lot simpler: No need to worry about points 3 and 4, and very little to do for 5. Backups can be a simple git push.
- ivanmontillam 4y ago
  I do this, but without the database. I chose Grav[0] because of its flat-fileness, but at the same time I did not want a build process (I mean, why? why do I need to rebuild my blog every time I post?) Put it behind a CloudFlare free tier. Been happy forever after. -- [0]: https://getgrav.org/ https://getgrav.org/
  - KronisLV 4y ago
    > I chose Grav ... Been happy forever after. I'm inclined to agree that Grav is a good choice, but it still has the exact same fault as other software out there, notably updates sometimes randomly breaking things in odd ways: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/grav-is-broken https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/grav-is-bro... (note: typically you shouldn't run software updates inside of containers due to their immutable nature and instead just run a newer version of the container, but if you're working with persistent volumes then there's also really nothing preventing you from doing so) Of course, if you don't update it, you'll eventually run into security related issues, which is more or less inevitable whenever you expose anything with write access (even when it is technically protected by an username and password; our industry still keeps getting basic things wrong all the time), as opposed to fully static assets: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/grav-security-is-broken https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/grav-securi... Personally, I will probably keep using Grav for the foreseeable future, maybe even some day carry over the theme customizations that I use as well as all of my content to a more recent version, but for now I'm stuck on a comparatively old version that's thankfully a bit locked down at the web server level. Don't get me the wrong way, WordPress will be even worse in regards to both updates and security, I've seen entire sites be brought down because of a single plugin needing an update that's no longer compatible with something else.
Brajeshwar 4y ago
1. What you use or wherever you host, make sure that you can export your content in either plain text or a universal format that can be used by another tool or host it yourself. In short, own the content and use whatever tool it fits your current situations and limitations. 2. Possibly, try to get a domain of your own, and preferably a `.com`. Point that to whichever server you use (if they don't allow you to point, that is a net negative). Keep pointing to the services that you keep moving as they keep dying. One day, you might just end up writing in plain HTML and (s)FTP into a folder. 3. If you are going to use images/audio/video quite a tad more than usual -- start using a CDN (pretty cheap and some are free these days). If those are hosted on https://cdn.mydomain.com https://cdn.mydomain.com, you can move your content wherever you want and those images, audio, video just works. I was able to change WordPress hosting providers in minutes because I don't have to move the static assets. edit: added the 3rd point.
- scarface74 4y ago
  For a simple blog, micro.blog hits all of those points. It’s very non scammy.
  - rcarr 4y ago
    I wanted to love it but I agree with Kev Quirk's take: https://kevquirk.com/micro-blog-is-still-confusing/ https://kevquirk.com/micro-blog-is-still-confusing/
    - scarface74 4y ago
      The one thing that drew me to micro blog was that it was a paid service. But honestly, my blog there is not about “engagement”. I don’t really care if anyone reads it. It’s more of a personal journal to blog about the multi year, “hybrid digital nomad” life we started last year.
- ymolodtsov 4y ago
  These are great points.
- 4y ago
manuelmoreale 4y ago
There’s also the option to ask someone with skills and expertise to set something up for you. Which is almost never taken into consideration as an option in this kind of posts. I don’t think it’s hard to start a blog in 2023. It’s hard to start a blog if you have very strict requirements AND you want to do everything on your own without being a developer/designer.
- onion2k 4y ago
  There’s also the option to ask someone with skills and expertise to set something up for you. It's an option, but it's a bad option. Setting up and running a blog is not a one off process. For things like Wordpress there are literally security patches. For most other platforms there are updates. Wordpress has auto-update but it can be flaky, especially if the site owner tinkers with things. If you get someone else to set something up for you it'll either rot, or you'll be pestering them to update it for you. If you don't have the technical ability to run something just pay for a service instead.
  - manuelmoreale 4y ago
    Well yes and there's also countless other options that are not wordpress that require very little maintenance. And you can also simply ask someone every year or so to perform some basic maintenance on your site like we already do for countless other things in our lives. > you'll be pestering them to update it for you. Am I pestering my mechanic to perform maintenance on my car every year? No it's called work. It's his job.
blakesterz 4y ago
I've been running a blog since '99. Started on phpslash, then slashcode, then Drupal for a loonnnnng time. I just recently moved everything to WordPress and I'm finding it mostly ok. It's not designed to do small, simple, easy, plain, but it gets the job done. I agree with this "The most popular CMS in the world, and yet I just can’t stand its admin page." There are some things in there I can't stand, but I said the same thing about Drupal and I used that for 15 years or so.
- blowski 4y ago
  These days, the WordPress power-users are all doing headless via the API, so there's little push for a better admin UI.
  - marc_io 4y ago
    The core team already has plans to do a backend design refresh: https://make.wordpress.org/design/2022/06/13/thinking-through-the-wordpress-admin-experience/ https://make.wordpress.org/design/2022/06/13/thinking-throug...
lagniappe 4y ago
Shameless plug but I built a tiny unopinionated static site generator that is great for blogs. No toolchain or anything fancy, I just added RSS support too :) It would be my pleasure if someone wants to try it https://github.com/donuts-are-good/bearclaw https://github.com/donuts-are-good/bearclaw
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  Just gave it a (very) quick look > a static site is a site with no fancy clicky things, signups, comments, just plain html Technically I think you can have comments via some embedded widget. Each page is still static, but there's a script tag in there that embeds a widget into the page that gives you commenting, usually via some SaaS I think Disqus was the big one for a while. There was one I saw recently that uses github as the auth provider, which was interesting
  - veyh 4y ago
    Cactus Comments [1] is another option. It uses Matrix under the hood. [1] https://cactus.chat/ https://cactus.chat/
    - lagniappe 4y ago
      oooh I like that, thanks!
  - lagniappe 4y ago
    Hey thanks for checking it out :) I have been thinking about the comments feature. It's like peas and carrots having comments on a blog. I have almost added them before, but didn't for fear it would sacrifice any of the simplicity - which led me to think about modules/plugins. I like the idea of plopping down a folder or zip that the Bearclaw binary then reads and incorporates. Maybe that's feasible, maybe it's not. I'm going on a walk in a little bit and will give thought to a plugin system. Any ideas you have in mind?
  - lagniappe 4y ago
    I have now added plugin support. This week I will write some sample plugins and then make a gallery for people to see them. Thanks for the inspiration!
datavirtue 4y ago
Isn't this what raw html was designed for? What is easier than following simple conventions and FTP'ing some files? What is it that people are trying to automate?
- corobo 4y ago
  Keeping the header and footer (eg menu links) synced across articles is the reason I use a generator
otras 4y ago
For the combination of Hugo and GitHub Pages, images are pretty effortless as well. For example, for a post with a path of `content/posts/post-title.md`: 1. Add the image at `content/posts/post-title/image-name.png` 2. Add markdown that references it, like `![alt-text](image-name.png)` 3. Build and push to main, and then the image is available in minutes at `https://<host>/posts/post-title/image-name.png https://<host>/posts/post-title/image-name.png` Part of the reason I use Hugo is because it's so low friction — the hard part is the writing (and writing consistently), and keeping everything else easy is key.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  Is Hugo significantly different from Jekyll?
  - otras 4y ago
    I'm not familiar with Jekyll, but if I recall correctly it's very, very similar. I just happened to pick Hugo at the start and haven't revisited the decision since, as it's tangential to the actual writing.
  - ymolodtsov 4y ago
    Hugo is much faster thanks to the fact it's written in Go. The approach by itself is the same. Also, seems to have one of the most active communities among blog-focused static generators.
  - schemescape 4y ago
    Hugo is distributed as a single binary, but Jekyll requires a Ruby environment (assuming you want to test locally).
  - clintonb 4y ago
    I found that Hugo requires a shift in asset organization in the sense that assets are collocated with posts. If your post has three images, those images are in the same directory as the post markdown. Jekyll keeps assets separated. Your posts live in _posts. Your static assets live together in a different directory. I briefly experimented with switching from Jekyll to Hugo, but had too much invested—custom plugins and reliance on existing Jekyll plugins—in the Jekyll ecosystem to make the switch worthwhile.
dsschnau 4y ago
https://danschnau.com https://danschnau.com is my home-grown asp.net cms and i'm proud of it
lloydatkinson 4y ago
A lot of expected pessimistic HN comments that seem to miss the point here. I think SSG's are pretty damn good, I use Astro. People seem to think that SSG's forces you to use markdown or something, they don't. It's literally a mechanism where content from somewhere is turned into static pages. You can even use Wordpress and it's API as the source of the content for a SSG. In my case I use MDX, which is Markdown that allows components (eg React) to be embedded. This is great for interactive content, articles with charts, visualisations, etc.
- kblev 4y ago
  Is there a way for SSGs to support viewer comments?
  - lloydatkinson 4y ago
    With something like Astro you can use React (or others, even vanilla) components that can either be fully server rendered, or sent to the client. With that you can allow people to post comments. As for how to render them, depends a bit on what you decide. You can either have comments displayed the next time the site is built, or you could have a posted comment trigger a build, or some other similar idea.
  - sphars 4y ago
    There's a good resource of available commenting systems for static sites here (not mine): https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/ https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/
    - darekkay 4y ago
      Thanks for posting! I update that blog post regularly to keep up with all the possibilities. Ironically, I decided to remove the comments from my own blog a few years ago. Comments still reach me, though, mostly via email.
  - jrmg 4y ago
    I’m a fan of Isso: https://isso-comments.de/ https://isso-comments.de/
geekrax 4y ago
Is Medium not considered a good option anymore?
- paride5745 4y ago
  I don't think Medium was ever a good option. Too much tracking, too many paywalls, and not easy to relocate your posts to another platform.
- ymolodtsov 4y ago
  You never know where they'd go with their business model, how will they gate your content and what they will bundle it with.
yacine_ 4y ago
no need just write stop using tools, just an HTML document is fine.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  Html does work, but can become a pain once you have a few dozen pages and want to maintain a consistent menu and footer and so on.
  - yacine_ 4y ago
    search and replace! Seriously, it's way easier than the node.js monstrosity I was maintaining
OP_rah 4y ago
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akshayrajp 4y ago
I want to start my own blog but the vast number of choices overwhelms me. Deciding between Astro/Hugo/Jekyll right now. Can anyone share their experiences if they have built their blogs using these tools?
- xena 4y ago
  I used to use Pelican but I eventually ended up writing my own backend in Moonscript and later rewrote it in Go and then Rust.
- wingerlang 4y ago
  Sure, I've used [tool] successfully in the past. Seriously, just pick one and set it up. People blog on manually edited HTML files, it really doesn't matter.
  - akshayrajp 4y ago
    Yeah, seems like the way to go here. To get something up and running first and then deciding if a different and shiny tool really would make much of a difference.
- etra0 4y ago
  I haven't tried Astro, but I moved my blog from Jekyll to Hugo. I did it because I remember having issues with jekyll installation from time to time, like it suddenly broke out of nowhere, and trying to fix it became a pain. Then I looked for alternatives and found Hugo, changed the template and installed in all my systems (Windows, Linux, macOS) and it has worked like a charm. Also, the speed boost was super noticeable, like, several times faster. So if I were to choose again between Jekyll and Hugo, I'd go with Hugo.
- chasd00 4y ago
  I want to do the same and integrate it with my existing hobby e-com website. I was thinking of finding something that just turns markdown into HTML and using that. On the other-hand, a wysiwyg editor would be nice. I have no desire to use something heavy like wordpress or anything that requires a database. My little e-com website has no database backend which i'm kind of proud of :) edit: on the third hand... i need a place to practice and stay in shape with full stack dev as i'm more of a manager/therapist these days. So maybe something from the ground up is in my future
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Veuxdo 4y ago
Probably the same way you start a blog in 2022, 2021, or 2020. I know there are ways around it, but does HN have filters for headlines ending in "in <year>"?
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  uBlock can do this. Addons -> uBlock Preferences -> My Filters # top (title / url) news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing span.titleline > a:has-text(/(GPT|blockchain|202[3-9]$)/):upward(tr) # bottom (stats / comments) news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing span.titleline > a:has-text(/(GPT|blockchain|202[3-9]$)/):upward(tr) + *
HeartTicker 4y ago
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Havoc 4y ago
Busy build out a Astro/mdx based one. I take notes in md anyway so hoping that’ll be reasonably ergonomic
yuedongze 4y ago
One thing I value the most is the combination of markdown and latex support, plus mermaid diagrams. It’s very hard to find something that works super well on everything. Right now a customized Hugo with KaTeX is the best solution, but I’m still sad I cannot use MathJAX :((
dilawar 4y ago
I've tried so many of these solutions. These days I am using Notion and generating static site using loconotion. For me, writing outside Notion has become impossible. Notion AI does a fantastic job fixing my grammar and style. My English has always been less than passable and Notion AI does make it much better. I hope they dont make it very costly when they take it out of alpha.
unfriendme 4y ago
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PixelForg 4y ago
Choosing the tool isn't the issue for me, writing is.
- manuelmoreale 4y ago
  As in you don't know what to write about? Or you don't like your writing?
- asdff 4y ago
  One strategy is to just always be blogging about problems you are working on, the audience being you three years from now when you forgot the context and have to solve the problem again. Best case, you now have an interesting blog related to something you have expertise in, worst case, you have a highly useful "lab notebook" for yourself you can always parse. "problems" could be things from work or from your hobbies.
pivic 4y ago
I use Mataroa the most, and I've used many different solutions, from WordPress, Ghost, Medium, Posterous/Blogger, Movable Type, and Contentful to self-hosted static sites that run on Hugo, Jekyll, or Zola. I've written a post about why I enjoy Mataroa a lot: https://pivic.blog/blog/mataroa/ https://pivic.blog/blog/mataroa/
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NoboruWataya 4y ago
Do any of these platforms provide additional discoverability? I occasionally publish articles, usually of the technical "how-to" variety with a focus on areas that aren't already widely documented. To date I have published these on Medium because if you publish via an established publication like Towards Data Science your articles can get decent reach without much effort. I'd ideally like to move away from Medium but as I am not well-known, without an established platform to provide visibility (or a lot of self-promotion) the reality is that no one would read my articles.
- RobotToaster 4y ago
  Wordpress has an activitypub plugin to integrate with mastodon. There are others to automatically post to twitter/fb etc but those are usually paid.
- jbaczuk 4y ago
  That's not necessarily true. I have had success in the past with certain specific articles ranking high on google because there wasn't anything that went into that much detail about a more focused topic. E.g. AWS Cognito. In fact, you could probably document almost anything technical about AWS and get a lot of traffic since their documentation (or lack thereof) is so bad.
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- bandana123 4y ago
  Saw your product in product hunt. congrats on being 4th product of the day. Your platform looks amazing. All the best to your team.
simonebrunozzi 4y ago
Happy user of Ghost [0]. Open source; small but smart team. Highly recommended. [0]: https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/
andy_ppp 4y ago
> ChatGPT can you write me a blog post on starting Blogs in 2023?
tcmart14 4y ago
I do an SSG, for me, the hardest part was finding an SSG I liked. I ended up settling on a small one that rarely gets talked about, blogc. It isn't perfect, but I like it.
wenbin 4y ago
If you like Cloudflare and want to host a few GB media files (e.g., audio, video...) for free, then you can try microfeed: https://github.com/microfeed/microfeed https://github.com/microfeed/microfeed
personjerry 4y ago
How to actually start your blog: Open up Notes and start writing. Worry about deployment later. The content is a bigger barrier.
- rcarr 4y ago
  If you use https://montaigne.io https://montaigne.io you don't even have to leave notes.
  - personjerry 4y ago
    Really interesting. Did you make this? Is there an API to Apple Notes? I've been wanting to programmatically interact with my notes for some time but found it to be a strangely closed ecosystem.
    - rcarr 4y ago
      I didn’t, from the docs it looks as if it takes advantage of cloud sharing. I imagine once’s it got the link it scrapes the notes and then uses the data. https://docs.montaigne.io/guides/new-site https://docs.montaigne.io/guides/new-site
  - podviaznikov 4y ago
    nice, good to see links to it! thank you for sharing it.
xwdv 4y ago
Want to start a blog? Good news, you already have one. Yes sir, with my new service you can just type in your Hackernews username and have a fully formed blog launched based off your comments to various posts, all properly dated and archived. And that’s not all, using the latest and greatest in AI tech, you can have automatically generated hash tags used for categorizing posts. Why waste time writing a blog from scratch? Have my service build you a full blog today!
RobotToaster 4y ago
I've had managed wordpress hosting from about £5, not sure where he got those prices from. Still not sure I'd recommend it, the community can be pretty toxic.
lapcat 4y ago
I am the "weird dude who writes raw HTML" LOL. I had a self-hosted WordPress blog from 2006-2010, but security updates become a burden, especially since I had to modify the WP source code a little to do exactly what I wanted with the RSS feeds. After a few years of not blogging at all, I decided to use the simplest possible "system", which is writing blog posts in raw HTML in a text editor, as well as writing the RSS feed in raw XML in a text editor. It's not pretty, but it's zero maintenance. I've been doing that for 10 years now, and I don't think I'd ever go back to a third-party dependency. I should mention my other motivation: occasionally one of my blog posts will get massive traffic, such as #1 HN, or getting linked by the tech media. In cases like these, static HTML files are great. My website never gets overwhelmed and becomes unresponsive from the load, even though it's just on a little shared hosted server.
- nordsieck 4y ago
  Not to knock your system since it sounds like it works great, but why not use a static site generator? That seems like it'd do the same thing and just take out some of the drudgery.
  - ihateolives 4y ago
    Why add another layer? Right now the only tool he needs is an editor. That's it. Can't get any simpler than that. He also probably has a set of templates by now.
    - jdminhbg 4y ago
      > Why add another layer? The answer given: > to take out some of the drudgery
      - asdff 4y ago
        At the end of the day the drudgery they are doing is writing the post, something they'd have to do anyway on a static site generator. Writing the raw html likely takes no friction at all, since they are probably copying and pasting some template or at this point know all the tags they use by heart so its no harder than a more abstract method.
RistrettoMike 4y ago
I ran into the exact same issues as the author of this post the other day. I have a static site built on Hugo that I (amateurishly) set up a year or so ago, and would like it to have better support for photos & galleries, but lack the time + skill to implement that. I spent a late-night research session a few weeks back running through many of the main options they mention only to settle on the conclusion that there wasn't something that had the compromise of features, simplicity, and price that I was looking for. I didn't check out write.as when I was looking into things though, so maybe that'll be my next failed experiment.
- ant6n 4y ago
  I came across an editor once where u can drop an image and it will put it in some directory and insert some markdown to link it. That seems like it would be a good choice for a static blog, although I didn’t try it (some Mac OS software from a year or two ago).
- asdff 4y ago
  It would be pretty easy to make your own photo gallery in raw html. have photos in a directory you want to link on your server. pick your favorite language, write some code to iterate through that list of files, and generate html pages for each containing the image, a previous hyperlink to go to the page for the last item iterated, and a next hyperlink to go to the next page. Throw in some button graphics and now its as sexy as any other static site generator, and you can now throw the entire codebase on github and put it on your resume and call yourself a webdev. get fancy, make a cron job that looks for new content added to that directory and runs your html generator, now all you do is drag and drop files and the site builds itself.
groznyj 4y ago
Happy user [0] of Bear Blog [1], would recommend. I would also recommend spending less than 30 minutes setting up a blog if you have less than 4 posts written. [2] [0]: https://thrice.me/ https://thrice.me/ [1]: https://bearblog.dev/ https://bearblog.dev/ [2]: https://www.benkuhn.net/writing/#set-up-your-blog https://www.benkuhn.net/writing/#set-up-your-blog
georgehill 4y ago
Also worth reading https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/how-i-built-my-blog https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/how-i-built-my-blog
- Mimmy 4y ago
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rambambram 4y ago
Shameless plug, but I made Hey Homepage (see bio) and it comes with a blog and microblog functionality. Also rich support for RSS as social media, with a feed reader, your own (photo) feed, and a list of shared links that resembles a webring or blogroll. The free version has all functionality, but is restricted in storage space and doesn't come with a nice domain name.
dusted 4y ago
I'm the weird dude who writes raw HTML[1], 5/5, highly recommended. [1] after 15+ years where I wrote my own CMS, wrote my own static site generator, used wordpress, used drupal.
theusus 4y ago
I just want something that supports LaTeX without a fight.
raybb 4y ago
I quite like hashnode.com, it is kinda like Medium but gives you your content in markdown and has the option to automatically sync it to a git repo when you publish a change.
margorczynski 4y ago
Can recommend Ghost self-hosted. Really good installation process and fine documentation with a big community around it - hosting with Ghost + Hetzner VPS my blog from my bio.
- troops_h8r 4y ago
  Heads up, it's failing to let me subscribe ('failed to send magic link email')
  - margorczynski 4y ago
    Hey, thanks for the info. Seems the SMTP got messed up :/ Will try to fix it soon EDIT: Fixed. But the battle with the ports and broken default SMTP server settings was hard
karaterobot 4y ago
Have been running the same blog, on and off, since 2001. It has gone through many iterations, including being nuked and restarted several times, using archive.org as my backup. The current iteration is optimized around not having it be a source of stress or anxiety for me. Here is my setup: * I just use self-hosted Wordpress site on a Digital Ocean droplet. * I made my own theme that strips pretty much everything out: it's one big page with 500+ posts on it, all text. No comments, images, video, anything like that. Minimal markup. Takes less than a second before the page can be interacted with. * There are no post pages, and no archives (again, just one big page). * Consequently, you search by pressing cmd-f in your browser, which is so much better than a search widget (and is the main reason I went with this design). * I make entries whenever I want to, and then queue them up with a plugin that releases 1 post every 4 days, on a schedule. I have 112 posts in the queue, so I could not touch this thing for a year and it would be still running. * My main goal for the blog is to record things that have happened: diary, commonplace book, repository for movie and book reviews. Not to make money or be a famous thought leader and influencer. I recognize that's not everybody's goal, but with those simplifying assumptions in place, it became super easy to make and maintain a blog.
- viscousviolin 4y ago
  I like your four day interval - was the reason you choose this to not spam people?
  - karaterobot 4y ago
    It used to be a week, but then the queue of unpublished articles got to be around 150. I want it to be around a year, but it was more like 3 years, which I thought was just silly.
- darraghor 4y ago
  I wish more documentation sites just loaded a wall of text with page anchors for navigation rather than separate pages. Ctrl-f/cmd-f is the best search engine for documentation
voytec 4y ago
Am I the "My mobile git workflow guy"[1]? [1] https://wojteksychut.com/posts/this-domain-is-8-minutes-old/ https://wojteksychut.com/posts/this-domain-is-8-minutes-old/
- kstrauser 4y ago
  Mine’s similar but with fewer steps. - My blog lives in a Git repo I host on my own Gitea server. - I run Working Copy on my iPad to push to/pull from the repo. - I use iA Writer to edit files in Working Copy. - Every 5 minutes, a script on my webserver runs `git pull`. If anything changed, it runs `hugo build`, then rsyncs the output to the webroot for my domain. What I see in iA Writer is my blog’s contents. When I edit those words and `git commit` them in Working Copy, they magically show up on the web a few minutes later.
  - corobo 4y ago
    I have similar with even fewer steps! Edit directly in working copy Blog repo is on GitHub When I push to the main repo Cloudflare Pages does hugo build
    - kstrauser 4y ago
      Alright, you win. I do love iA Writer for writing prose, though.
      - corobo 4y ago
        That is fair, it is a very nice app to write in
wslh 4y ago
There is a need for security that is not addressed: install WP and some few plugins and your site will be hacked automatically.
serhack_ 4y ago
Weird that I remember the same infographic by xkcd, is that possible? Or another Mandela effect?
quickthrower2 4y ago
I almost always use Wordpress for Blogs and sites in general. Reasons: If I leave it for 10 years and come back I will know how to maintain it. The tools will exist (especially if WordPress auto upgrades). If I use some static site gen, I will need to remember all the syntax, use some docker container to run the version I used all that time ago. Even coming back to it after a year can leave me with confusion. Also WordPress has a brilliant ecosystem of plugins and themes. And if you are worried about security, there are plugins that will pump it out into a static site on S3, if you like, so you can use WordPress to author, and S3 to host. The WordPress ecosystem can rival most no-code tools too. Also hosting is ubiquitous, and cheap, and usually simple (open CPanel, hit install new Wordpress Blog).
- worldofmatthew 4y ago
  Why would you need to use docker for a SSG?
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    For example, could you today run a ruby based SSG from 10 years ago? Let's pretend there is a bit of custom code and time invested in it. I guess you could install a bunch of old versions on Ruby, gems, etc. on your machine too, but docker, or a VM might be easier. Or you could go through, remember how all the code works and upgrade it to the latest versions of everything to run it. Assuming the SSG du jour 2013 is still maintained :-). I tried to resurrect a 2 year old NodeJS project and gave up trying to upgrade it to the latest versions, NodeJS people really love their major version changes, and breaking back compat for no real reason.
    - worldofmatthew 4y ago
      You don't need docker for that. Also if you leave a WordPress for years with auto-updates, the plugins will often be abandoned causing your site to be vulnerable.Not to mention any breaking changes that can be introduced. A SSG generated site will be the same in 10 years as its today, even if you might need to fix some things with your project to make further updates.
fleddr 4y ago
Really weird that a very obvious choice, Medium, did not make the cut. I'm quite aware of how unpopular it is here on HN, but that's mostly a meme. It doesn't cost anything and there's no ads. Even linking your domain to it used to be free (sadly no longer true). It has a very decent writing experience and the out of the box design is simple but effective. It has a reasonable amount of customization. It has wide support for apps. It's part of a network so you get functionality like claps, a comment system, followers, the like. Blogging with a "social network" built-in. It has newsletter support. I think that's a sweet deal for such low (or even zero) costs. Ultimately I'd think your writing is what the value of your blog is, not the behind-the-scenes technical tinkering. Unless that really is your thing. Should you be paranoid about Medium going under, there's an export option. Note that I'm the kind of person that wrote my own blogging software in the early 2000s. Tinkered and managed it that way for well over a decade. I've given up on it. It's time wasted. Nobody cares about your blog design, it's hard enough for anybody to care about the actual text in today's landscape. Hence, pick your battles, keep it simple.
- guywithahat 4y ago
  It's not even in their list of things on might have done in the past, they seem to not regard anything other than self-hosting as a blog, which seems a bit archaic. Building a blog shouldn't be about learning a new framework it should be about writing
- pyrolistical 4y ago
  Medium is now dead to me because it prevents the very one thing blogsites must do. Publish the damn blog! The mandatory (unless are able to join their program to opt-out) paywall reduces the number of people who can even see your blog
  - fleddr 4y ago
    The paywall is a writer option, indeed one can opt-out.
- throwaway675309 4y ago
  I feel like a lot of people here have moved from medium to sub stack. Also medium just sort of naturally gatekeeps your articles by eventually forcing potential readers to login to medium.
riidom 4y ago
I'm using https://picocms.org/ https://picocms.org/. It is PHP based, works on a cheap limited web hoster. The concept is: Upload a markdown file plus associated media, and it does the rest for you. For customisation, you can use Twig and CSS, or a predefined theme (I didn't look into these, I wanted a custom appearance). For feeds there are plugins, for comments I use a "mail me at post023@mydomain.url" approach.
jbarham 4y ago
Hey.com includes a hosted blog as an extension to its core email hosting: https://www.hey.com/world/ https://www.hey.com/world/ E.g., here is DHH's blog: https://world.hey.com/dhh https://world.hey.com/dhh
naet 4y ago
How to start your blog in 2023: start writing. Upload wherever you want on whatever platform you want. You can always change it later. Content should come first, before worrying about optimizing your static build or tweaking your CSS or moving to Substack or whatever else. That can all be done later when you've found your writing rhythm.
joelrunyon 4y ago
If you want to just write - the answer is still wordpress (https://startablog.com/guide https://startablog.com/guide). If you want to focus on tweaking the site to your heart's content, go right ahead, but the number #1 component to a blog is...writing. Focus on that and stop worrying about the rest of the details.
sam1r 4y ago
>> Focus more on the content and just ensure the process of writing and posting is simple enough. I wonder if there’s any tools or pipelines for 1 place to write content and then deploy to many platforms based on our config / api keys..
emptysuitcase 4y ago
are people still interested in writing blogs?? when ChatGPT can write blog posts, why should we?
- marc_io 4y ago
  Of course, ChatGPT can only respond about things already created, it cannot create new things. This would be AGI territory.
hota_mazi 4y ago
I would love to get a similar article describing the options for developer-oriented blogs. Some requirements: - Code snippets are pretty and colored, and cover multiple languages - Posting images is easy - There's a tool to convert my existing Wordpress articles into it (I have 20+ years of that) - Ideally, Markdown, but I'd consider similarly intuitive mark ups (I can do HTML but would rather not)
propiro 4y ago
that graph made me feel like exception from the rules, as I use statoc page generator (publii), and I post whenever I do something
piroslav 4y ago
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piroslav 4y ago
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ulizzle 4y ago
Needlessly complicated? there’s a thousand ways to start a blog in 2023; sure, your artisanal handcrafted static site generator can handle traffic, but so can my free Substack blog The hard part is sticking to it; content is truly king
sourcecodeplz 4y ago
Just use Blogger. Unlimited everything and full HTML, CSS, Javascript control for every page/post/category. Plus it's free and been around since '99.
HermanMartinus 4y ago
Creator of Bear here. I've actually done a full writeup recently on how Bear is more immune to being discontinued than some of the bigger VC funded platforms. If you're interested I've linked it below. - https://bearblog.dev https://bearblog.dev - https://herman.bearblog.dev/building-software-to-last-forever/ https://herman.bearblog.dev/building-software-to-last-foreve...
worldmerge 4y ago
How do you get traction on your blog? Whenever I post it on here the posts never get any traction.
tobiasbischoff 4y ago
Blogging advice from the guy who choose a platform thats about to shut down for his own blog, thats my kind of humor. Just kidding, the actual post is fine but hosting a blog seems to be either a) running a vps incl managing all its updates and security b) trusting a service not to shut down in the next years to come. That sucks.
d4rkp4ttern 4y ago
My requirements for a technical blog platform are markdown, math notation, syntax highlighting. I settled on Ghost a while ago but wonder if there are better choices these days.
shivenigma 4y ago
hashnode.com checks all the criteria you mentioned. Worth checking about.
pdx_flyer 4y ago
I write pretty frequently and use WordPress. Over the past few years I've felt that it's clunky to just get words out there. I've wanted to move to something simpler but looking at the options like Jekyll or self-hosted Ghost just seems like a different type of work rather than less work. I want something with a clean, easy to read front end -- that's where WordPress has really struggled, good looking "blog" focused themes.
ry8806 4y ago
couldn't agree more with the section about Ghost, their shifted focus is something I've picked up on recently too [0]. I started to dislike their interface more and more when creating/editing posts. Couple that with the regular "your theme is no longer supported" messages, I got fed up of burning time to keep up with their updates, which offered no benefits to me. I quit and moved to Hugo (using a ghost-to-hugo migration tool [1]). [0] https://ryansouthgate.com/goodbye-ghost-hello-hugo/#im-no-longer-ghosts-target-customer https://ryansouthgate.com/goodbye-ghost-hello-hugo/#im-no-lo... [1] https://github.com/jbarone/ghostToHugo https://github.com/jbarone/ghostToHugo
damethos 4y ago
I am using https://docusaurus.io https://docusaurus.io in combination with GitHub pages by committing to a personal public GitHub repo and let travis-ci automatically build the site. I am happy.
slorber 4y ago
Docusaurus is a great way to start a static blog. Give it a try! Lots of features included: RSS, sitemaps, multi author, regular/guests, tags, unlisted/draft, i18n, accessibility, very customizable... My newsletter is based on it: https://thisweekinreact.com/ https://thisweekinreact.com/ I edit content there first in Markdown and then copy paste to ConvertKit

198 points by ymolodtsov 4y ago

[dead]

Running your own blog in 2023 is still needlessly complicated, especially if you have any kind of taste. Social apps and networks are obviously the easiest options, but they’re geared toward vastly different things, and I just don’t trust their longevity. There are many options out there, ranging from WordPress and Ghost to static blogs to managed online platforms and Micro.blog. In fact, none of the options out there seem ideal to me – they range from mediocre to acceptable.

wesleychen 4y ago
Is this an AI generated summary?

josters 4y ago

Totally agree on the seemingly unnecessary overhead. Just recently I was looking into platforms for starting a blog and was overwhelmed with the choices of which none really had a complete set of offerings. Having a feature comparison table or a guide for choosing the best service/platform for individual use cases would be nice. In the end, I chose Ghost's lowest tier. While it is limited regarding the theme choices, I've found that you can customize the free standard themes via their code injection feature[1]. [1]: https://www.shmostert.com/customize-standard-ghost-themes/ https://www.shmostert.com/customize-standard-ghost-themes/ (disclaimer: the guide is from my blog)

input_sh 4y ago
Ghost is also what I always recommend. With WordPress and Jekyll/Hugo, you'll fuck around with site setup way more than actually writing. Ghost is basically only good for actually writing. Pick a theme (plenty of them for ~$50, write. That's it. Customizing themes is also super simple in my opinion, though I've never tried their shared hosting and am unfamiliar with limitations that come from that.
- ymolodtsov 4y ago
  I think the problem with customizing Ghost themes is that you actually have to tinker with their code, most don't really have settings at the scale WordPress themes used to have. But yeah, that's why I said that if you're OK with the workflow Ghost provides and at least one theme you should probably use it.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

> Running your own blog in 2023 is still needlessly complicated, especially if you have any kind of taste. Aside from taste being subjective, most of the tools mentioned are customizable. That is, you can tweak the markup and CSS to your own taste. The post starts being concerned about aesthetics but then finishes with: "Having the right tool certainly helps, but at the end of the day, what matters is what you write there. Focus more on the content and just ensure the process of writing and posting is simple enough." Finally, time is money. Spending an added hour (or two) with a build process (or whatever) isn't savings at all. If Goal #1 is to publish then anything that gets in the way should be avoided. There are some solid points made, but the argument is inconsistent.

eloisant 4y ago
Many people (including me) use static generation with a fancy build process because we find it fun, not to save time or money. I honestly find it more fun to setup my blog than writing content for it... Which might be a problem. (And also explain all the blog posts describing a complex setup).
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  > Many people (including me) use static generation with a fancy build process because we find it fun, not to save time or money. Some people do this and won't admit it!
  - indigodaddy 4y ago
    Very true and good point— and there’s also nothing at all wrong with that!!
- ymolodtsov 4y ago
  Yep, so many blogs with a few posts where one of them explains their entire SSG set up and that's it.
ymolodtsov 4y ago
But fine-tuning these blogs or themes is actually the complicated part. That's what I had to do. But I know a bit of coding and wanted to try. Not a great option for regular people. And it'd foolish not to say that at the end of the day writing is more important than having a blog that's just beautiful. There's one niche option I haven't covered there called [Aegea](https://blogengine.me/ https://blogengine.me/), which looks good out of the box, but I can't really recommend it based on the way the author develops it: no roadmap, no community feedback, basically no support, yet has paid features.

Artgor 4y ago

I started my website and blog in 2021. I used Jekyll + github pages with custom domain. I didn't want to setup everything by myself, so I bought a Jekyll theme that I liked and customized it. I did it lazily, so it took me around 1 month to complete the whole process, including copying my old blogposts from Medium.

sharedptr 4y ago

I just publish via blogger. In the past I have checked other options but I always spend more time looking for interesting ways to deploy content than writing content

ghaff 4y ago
I'm giving Wordpress.com an other try for a website/blog relaunch. But, for just a blog, Blogger has been fine for me for years.

onli 4y ago

I honestly think starting a blog in 2023 is exactly as easy as it was 2004 (the year he references), if you take the easiest route: 1. You pick a cheap shared hoster 2. You buy a domain and connect it 3. You download a PHP blog system, like Wordpress 4. You unpack the files into the webroot, configure the database (or use a blog system that supports sqlite, like Serendipity [which I develop for]) 5. Pick a theme, install a minimal amount of plugins. Optionally customize the theme a bit. 6. Done. Sure, going with a hosted offering looks easier, but you still have to manage things like your domain, interoperability and backups, so hosting it on your own gets easier very fast.

cassianoleal 4y ago
Depending on how much (or how little) customisation and interop you require, something like prose.sh makes blogging a lot simpler: No need to worry about points 3 and 4, and very little to do for 5. Backups can be a simple git push.
ivanmontillam 4y ago
I do this, but without the database. I chose Grav[0] because of its flat-fileness, but at the same time I did not want a build process (I mean, why? why do I need to rebuild my blog every time I post?) Put it behind a CloudFlare free tier. Been happy forever after. -- [0]: https://getgrav.org/ https://getgrav.org/
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > I chose Grav ... Been happy forever after. I'm inclined to agree that Grav is a good choice, but it still has the exact same fault as other software out there, notably updates sometimes randomly breaking things in odd ways: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/grav-is-broken https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/grav-is-bro... (note: typically you shouldn't run software updates inside of containers due to their immutable nature and instead just run a newer version of the container, but if you're working with persistent volumes then there's also really nothing preventing you from doing so) Of course, if you don't update it, you'll eventually run into security related issues, which is more or less inevitable whenever you expose anything with write access (even when it is technically protected by an username and password; our industry still keeps getting basic things wrong all the time), as opposed to fully static assets: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/grav-security-is-broken https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/grav-securi... Personally, I will probably keep using Grav for the foreseeable future, maybe even some day carry over the theme customizations that I use as well as all of my content to a more recent version, but for now I'm stuck on a comparatively old version that's thankfully a bit locked down at the web server level. Don't get me the wrong way, WordPress will be even worse in regards to both updates and security, I've seen entire sites be brought down because of a single plugin needing an update that's no longer compatible with something else.

Brajeshwar 4y ago

1. What you use or wherever you host, make sure that you can export your content in either plain text or a universal format that can be used by another tool or host it yourself. In short, own the content and use whatever tool it fits your current situations and limitations. 2. Possibly, try to get a domain of your own, and preferably a `.com`. Point that to whichever server you use (if they don't allow you to point, that is a net negative). Keep pointing to the services that you keep moving as they keep dying. One day, you might just end up writing in plain HTML and (s)FTP into a folder. 3. If you are going to use images/audio/video quite a tad more than usual -- start using a CDN (pretty cheap and some are free these days). If those are hosted on https://cdn.mydomain.com https://cdn.mydomain.com, you can move your content wherever you want and those images, audio, video just works. I was able to change WordPress hosting providers in minutes because I don't have to move the static assets. edit: added the 3rd point.

scarface74 4y ago
For a simple blog, micro.blog hits all of those points. It’s very non scammy.
- rcarr 4y ago
  I wanted to love it but I agree with Kev Quirk's take: https://kevquirk.com/micro-blog-is-still-confusing/ https://kevquirk.com/micro-blog-is-still-confusing/
  - scarface74 4y ago
    The one thing that drew me to micro blog was that it was a paid service. But honestly, my blog there is not about “engagement”. I don’t really care if anyone reads it. It’s more of a personal journal to blog about the multi year, “hybrid digital nomad” life we started last year.
ymolodtsov 4y ago
These are great points.
4y ago

manuelmoreale 4y ago

There’s also the option to ask someone with skills and expertise to set something up for you. Which is almost never taken into consideration as an option in this kind of posts. I don’t think it’s hard to start a blog in 2023. It’s hard to start a blog if you have very strict requirements AND you want to do everything on your own without being a developer/designer.

onion2k 4y ago
There’s also the option to ask someone with skills and expertise to set something up for you. It's an option, but it's a bad option. Setting up and running a blog is not a one off process. For things like Wordpress there are literally security patches. For most other platforms there are updates. Wordpress has auto-update but it can be flaky, especially if the site owner tinkers with things. If you get someone else to set something up for you it'll either rot, or you'll be pestering them to update it for you. If you don't have the technical ability to run something just pay for a service instead.
- manuelmoreale 4y ago
  Well yes and there's also countless other options that are not wordpress that require very little maintenance. And you can also simply ask someone every year or so to perform some basic maintenance on your site like we already do for countless other things in our lives. > you'll be pestering them to update it for you. Am I pestering my mechanic to perform maintenance on my car every year? No it's called work. It's his job.

blakesterz 4y ago

I've been running a blog since '99. Started on phpslash, then slashcode, then Drupal for a loonnnnng time. I just recently moved everything to WordPress and I'm finding it mostly ok. It's not designed to do small, simple, easy, plain, but it gets the job done. I agree with this "The most popular CMS in the world, and yet I just can’t stand its admin page." There are some things in there I can't stand, but I said the same thing about Drupal and I used that for 15 years or so.

blowski 4y ago
These days, the WordPress power-users are all doing headless via the API, so there's little push for a better admin UI.
- marc_io 4y ago
  The core team already has plans to do a backend design refresh: https://make.wordpress.org/design/2022/06/13/thinking-through-the-wordpress-admin-experience/ https://make.wordpress.org/design/2022/06/13/thinking-throug...

lagniappe 4y ago

Shameless plug but I built a tiny unopinionated static site generator that is great for blogs. No toolchain or anything fancy, I just added RSS support too :) It would be my pleasure if someone wants to try it https://github.com/donuts-are-good/bearclaw https://github.com/donuts-are-good/bearclaw

pcthrowaway 4y ago
Just gave it a (very) quick look > a static site is a site with no fancy clicky things, signups, comments, just plain html Technically I think you can have comments via some embedded widget. Each page is still static, but there's a script tag in there that embeds a widget into the page that gives you commenting, usually via some SaaS I think Disqus was the big one for a while. There was one I saw recently that uses github as the auth provider, which was interesting
- veyh 4y ago
  Cactus Comments [1] is another option. It uses Matrix under the hood. [1] https://cactus.chat/ https://cactus.chat/
  - lagniappe 4y ago
    oooh I like that, thanks!
- lagniappe 4y ago
  Hey thanks for checking it out :) I have been thinking about the comments feature. It's like peas and carrots having comments on a blog. I have almost added them before, but didn't for fear it would sacrifice any of the simplicity - which led me to think about modules/plugins. I like the idea of plopping down a folder or zip that the Bearclaw binary then reads and incorporates. Maybe that's feasible, maybe it's not. I'm going on a walk in a little bit and will give thought to a plugin system. Any ideas you have in mind?
- lagniappe 4y ago
  I have now added plugin support. This week I will write some sample plugins and then make a gallery for people to see them. Thanks for the inspiration!

datavirtue 4y ago

Isn't this what raw html was designed for? What is easier than following simple conventions and FTP'ing some files? What is it that people are trying to automate?

corobo 4y ago
Keeping the header and footer (eg menu links) synced across articles is the reason I use a generator

otras 4y ago

For the combination of Hugo and GitHub Pages, images are pretty effortless as well. For example, for a post with a path of `content/posts/post-title.md`: 1. Add the image at `content/posts/post-title/image-name.png` 2. Add markdown that references it, like `![alt-text](image-name.png)` 3. Build and push to main, and then the image is available in minutes at `https://<host>/posts/post-title/image-name.png https://<host>/posts/post-title/image-name.png` Part of the reason I use Hugo is because it's so low friction — the hard part is the writing (and writing consistently), and keeping everything else easy is key.

pcthrowaway 4y ago
Is Hugo significantly different from Jekyll?
- otras 4y ago
  I'm not familiar with Jekyll, but if I recall correctly it's very, very similar. I just happened to pick Hugo at the start and haven't revisited the decision since, as it's tangential to the actual writing.
- ymolodtsov 4y ago
  Hugo is much faster thanks to the fact it's written in Go. The approach by itself is the same. Also, seems to have one of the most active communities among blog-focused static generators.
- schemescape 4y ago
  Hugo is distributed as a single binary, but Jekyll requires a Ruby environment (assuming you want to test locally).
- clintonb 4y ago
  I found that Hugo requires a shift in asset organization in the sense that assets are collocated with posts. If your post has three images, those images are in the same directory as the post markdown. Jekyll keeps assets separated. Your posts live in _posts. Your static assets live together in a different directory. I briefly experimented with switching from Jekyll to Hugo, but had too much invested—custom plugins and reliance on existing Jekyll plugins—in the Jekyll ecosystem to make the switch worthwhile.

dsschnau 4y ago

https://danschnau.com https://danschnau.com is my home-grown asp.net cms and i'm proud of it

lloydatkinson 4y ago

A lot of expected pessimistic HN comments that seem to miss the point here. I think SSG's are pretty damn good, I use Astro. People seem to think that SSG's forces you to use markdown or something, they don't. It's literally a mechanism where content from somewhere is turned into static pages. You can even use Wordpress and it's API as the source of the content for a SSG. In my case I use MDX, which is Markdown that allows components (eg React) to be embedded. This is great for interactive content, articles with charts, visualisations, etc.

kblev 4y ago
Is there a way for SSGs to support viewer comments?
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  With something like Astro you can use React (or others, even vanilla) components that can either be fully server rendered, or sent to the client. With that you can allow people to post comments. As for how to render them, depends a bit on what you decide. You can either have comments displayed the next time the site is built, or you could have a posted comment trigger a build, or some other similar idea.
- sphars 4y ago
  There's a good resource of available commenting systems for static sites here (not mine): https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/ https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/
  - darekkay 4y ago
    Thanks for posting! I update that blog post regularly to keep up with all the possibilities. Ironically, I decided to remove the comments from my own blog a few years ago. Comments still reach me, though, mostly via email.
- jrmg 4y ago
  I’m a fan of Isso: https://isso-comments.de/ https://isso-comments.de/

geekrax 4y ago

Is Medium not considered a good option anymore?

paride5745 4y ago
I don't think Medium was ever a good option. Too much tracking, too many paywalls, and not easy to relocate your posts to another platform.
ymolodtsov 4y ago
You never know where they'd go with their business model, how will they gate your content and what they will bundle it with.

yacine_ 4y ago

no need just write stop using tools, just an HTML document is fine.

acidburnNSA 4y ago
Html does work, but can become a pain once you have a few dozen pages and want to maintain a consistent menu and footer and so on.
- yacine_ 4y ago
  search and replace! Seriously, it's way easier than the node.js monstrosity I was maintaining

OP_rah 4y ago

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akshayrajp 4y ago

I want to start my own blog but the vast number of choices overwhelms me. Deciding between Astro/Hugo/Jekyll right now. Can anyone share their experiences if they have built their blogs using these tools?

xena 4y ago
I used to use Pelican but I eventually ended up writing my own backend in Moonscript and later rewrote it in Go and then Rust.
wingerlang 4y ago
Sure, I've used [tool] successfully in the past. Seriously, just pick one and set it up. People blog on manually edited HTML files, it really doesn't matter.
- akshayrajp 4y ago
  Yeah, seems like the way to go here. To get something up and running first and then deciding if a different and shiny tool really would make much of a difference.
etra0 4y ago
I haven't tried Astro, but I moved my blog from Jekyll to Hugo. I did it because I remember having issues with jekyll installation from time to time, like it suddenly broke out of nowhere, and trying to fix it became a pain. Then I looked for alternatives and found Hugo, changed the template and installed in all my systems (Windows, Linux, macOS) and it has worked like a charm. Also, the speed boost was super noticeable, like, several times faster. So if I were to choose again between Jekyll and Hugo, I'd go with Hugo.
chasd00 4y ago
I want to do the same and integrate it with my existing hobby e-com website. I was thinking of finding something that just turns markdown into HTML and using that. On the other-hand, a wysiwyg editor would be nice. I have no desire to use something heavy like wordpress or anything that requires a database. My little e-com website has no database backend which i'm kind of proud of :) edit: on the third hand... i need a place to practice and stay in shape with full stack dev as i'm more of a manager/therapist these days. So maybe something from the ground up is in my future

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Veuxdo 4y ago

Probably the same way you start a blog in 2022, 2021, or 2020. I know there are ways around it, but does HN have filters for headlines ending in "in <year>"?

LinuxBender 4y ago
uBlock can do this. Addons -> uBlock Preferences -> My Filters # top (title / url) news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing span.titleline > a:has-text(/(GPT|blockchain|202[3-9]$)/):upward(tr) # bottom (stats / comments) news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing span.titleline > a:has-text(/(GPT|blockchain|202[3-9]$)/):upward(tr) + *

HeartTicker 4y ago

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Havoc 4y ago

Busy build out a Astro/mdx based one. I take notes in md anyway so hoping that’ll be reasonably ergonomic

yuedongze 4y ago

One thing I value the most is the combination of markdown and latex support, plus mermaid diagrams. It’s very hard to find something that works super well on everything. Right now a customized Hugo with KaTeX is the best solution, but I’m still sad I cannot use MathJAX :((

dilawar 4y ago

I've tried so many of these solutions. These days I am using Notion and generating static site using loconotion. For me, writing outside Notion has become impossible. Notion AI does a fantastic job fixing my grammar and style. My English has always been less than passable and Notion AI does make it much better. I hope they dont make it very costly when they take it out of alpha.

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PixelForg 4y ago

Choosing the tool isn't the issue for me, writing is.

manuelmoreale 4y ago
As in you don't know what to write about? Or you don't like your writing?
asdff 4y ago
One strategy is to just always be blogging about problems you are working on, the audience being you three years from now when you forgot the context and have to solve the problem again. Best case, you now have an interesting blog related to something you have expertise in, worst case, you have a highly useful "lab notebook" for yourself you can always parse. "problems" could be things from work or from your hobbies.

pivic 4y ago

I use Mataroa the most, and I've used many different solutions, from WordPress, Ghost, Medium, Posterous/Blogger, Movable Type, and Contentful to self-hosted static sites that run on Hugo, Jekyll, or Zola. I've written a post about why I enjoy Mataroa a lot: https://pivic.blog/blog/mataroa/ https://pivic.blog/blog/mataroa/

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NoboruWataya 4y ago

Do any of these platforms provide additional discoverability? I occasionally publish articles, usually of the technical "how-to" variety with a focus on areas that aren't already widely documented. To date I have published these on Medium because if you publish via an established publication like Towards Data Science your articles can get decent reach without much effort. I'd ideally like to move away from Medium but as I am not well-known, without an established platform to provide visibility (or a lot of self-promotion) the reality is that no one would read my articles.

RobotToaster 4y ago
Wordpress has an activitypub plugin to integrate with mastodon. There are others to automatically post to twitter/fb etc but those are usually paid.
jbaczuk 4y ago
That's not necessarily true. I have had success in the past with certain specific articles ranking high on google because there wasn't anything that went into that much detail about a more focused topic. E.g. AWS Cognito. In fact, you could probably document almost anything technical about AWS and get a lot of traffic since their documentation (or lack thereof) is so bad.

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bandana123 4y ago
Saw your product in product hunt. congrats on being 4th product of the day. Your platform looks amazing. All the best to your team.

simonebrunozzi 4y ago

Happy user of Ghost [0]. Open source; small but smart team. Highly recommended. [0]: https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/

andy_ppp 4y ago

> ChatGPT can you write me a blog post on starting Blogs in 2023?

tcmart14 4y ago

I do an SSG, for me, the hardest part was finding an SSG I liked. I ended up settling on a small one that rarely gets talked about, blogc. It isn't perfect, but I like it.

wenbin 4y ago

If you like Cloudflare and want to host a few GB media files (e.g., audio, video...) for free, then you can try microfeed: https://github.com/microfeed/microfeed https://github.com/microfeed/microfeed

personjerry 4y ago

How to actually start your blog: Open up Notes and start writing. Worry about deployment later. The content is a bigger barrier.

rcarr 4y ago
If you use https://montaigne.io https://montaigne.io you don't even have to leave notes.
- personjerry 4y ago
  Really interesting. Did you make this? Is there an API to Apple Notes? I've been wanting to programmatically interact with my notes for some time but found it to be a strangely closed ecosystem.
  - rcarr 4y ago
    I didn’t, from the docs it looks as if it takes advantage of cloud sharing. I imagine once’s it got the link it scrapes the notes and then uses the data. https://docs.montaigne.io/guides/new-site https://docs.montaigne.io/guides/new-site
- podviaznikov 4y ago
  nice, good to see links to it! thank you for sharing it.

xwdv 4y ago

Want to start a blog? Good news, you already have one. Yes sir, with my new service you can just type in your Hackernews username and have a fully formed blog launched based off your comments to various posts, all properly dated and archived. And that’s not all, using the latest and greatest in AI tech, you can have automatically generated hash tags used for categorizing posts. Why waste time writing a blog from scratch? Have my service build you a full blog today!

RobotToaster 4y ago

I've had managed wordpress hosting from about £5, not sure where he got those prices from. Still not sure I'd recommend it, the community can be pretty toxic.

lapcat 4y ago

I am the "weird dude who writes raw HTML" LOL. I had a self-hosted WordPress blog from 2006-2010, but security updates become a burden, especially since I had to modify the WP source code a little to do exactly what I wanted with the RSS feeds. After a few years of not blogging at all, I decided to use the simplest possible "system", which is writing blog posts in raw HTML in a text editor, as well as writing the RSS feed in raw XML in a text editor. It's not pretty, but it's zero maintenance. I've been doing that for 10 years now, and I don't think I'd ever go back to a third-party dependency. I should mention my other motivation: occasionally one of my blog posts will get massive traffic, such as #1 HN, or getting linked by the tech media. In cases like these, static HTML files are great. My website never gets overwhelmed and becomes unresponsive from the load, even though it's just on a little shared hosted server.

nordsieck 4y ago
Not to knock your system since it sounds like it works great, but why not use a static site generator? That seems like it'd do the same thing and just take out some of the drudgery.
- ihateolives 4y ago
  Why add another layer? Right now the only tool he needs is an editor. That's it. Can't get any simpler than that. He also probably has a set of templates by now.
  - jdminhbg 4y ago
    > Why add another layer? The answer given: > to take out some of the drudgery
    - asdff 4y ago
      At the end of the day the drudgery they are doing is writing the post, something they'd have to do anyway on a static site generator. Writing the raw html likely takes no friction at all, since they are probably copying and pasting some template or at this point know all the tags they use by heart so its no harder than a more abstract method.

RistrettoMike 4y ago

I ran into the exact same issues as the author of this post the other day. I have a static site built on Hugo that I (amateurishly) set up a year or so ago, and would like it to have better support for photos & galleries, but lack the time + skill to implement that. I spent a late-night research session a few weeks back running through many of the main options they mention only to settle on the conclusion that there wasn't something that had the compromise of features, simplicity, and price that I was looking for. I didn't check out write.as when I was looking into things though, so maybe that'll be my next failed experiment.

ant6n 4y ago
I came across an editor once where u can drop an image and it will put it in some directory and insert some markdown to link it. That seems like it would be a good choice for a static blog, although I didn’t try it (some Mac OS software from a year or two ago).
asdff 4y ago
It would be pretty easy to make your own photo gallery in raw html. have photos in a directory you want to link on your server. pick your favorite language, write some code to iterate through that list of files, and generate html pages for each containing the image, a previous hyperlink to go to the page for the last item iterated, and a next hyperlink to go to the next page. Throw in some button graphics and now its as sexy as any other static site generator, and you can now throw the entire codebase on github and put it on your resume and call yourself a webdev. get fancy, make a cron job that looks for new content added to that directory and runs your html generator, now all you do is drag and drop files and the site builds itself.

groznyj 4y ago

Happy user [0] of Bear Blog [1], would recommend. I would also recommend spending less than 30 minutes setting up a blog if you have less than 4 posts written. [2] [0]: https://thrice.me/ https://thrice.me/ [1]: https://bearblog.dev/ https://bearblog.dev/ [2]: https://www.benkuhn.net/writing/#set-up-your-blog https://www.benkuhn.net/writing/#set-up-your-blog

georgehill 4y ago

Also worth reading https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/how-i-built-my-blog https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/how-i-built-my-blog

Mimmy 4y ago
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rambambram 4y ago

Shameless plug, but I made Hey Homepage (see bio) and it comes with a blog and microblog functionality. Also rich support for RSS as social media, with a feed reader, your own (photo) feed, and a list of shared links that resembles a webring or blogroll. The free version has all functionality, but is restricted in storage space and doesn't come with a nice domain name.

dusted 4y ago

I'm the weird dude who writes raw HTML[1], 5/5, highly recommended. [1] after 15+ years where I wrote my own CMS, wrote my own static site generator, used wordpress, used drupal.

theusus 4y ago

I just want something that supports LaTeX without a fight.

raybb 4y ago

I quite like hashnode.com, it is kinda like Medium but gives you your content in markdown and has the option to automatically sync it to a git repo when you publish a change.

margorczynski 4y ago

Can recommend Ghost self-hosted. Really good installation process and fine documentation with a big community around it - hosting with Ghost + Hetzner VPS my blog from my bio.

troops_h8r 4y ago
Heads up, it's failing to let me subscribe ('failed to send magic link email')
- margorczynski 4y ago
  Hey, thanks for the info. Seems the SMTP got messed up :/ Will try to fix it soon EDIT: Fixed. But the battle with the ports and broken default SMTP server settings was hard

karaterobot 4y ago

Have been running the same blog, on and off, since 2001. It has gone through many iterations, including being nuked and restarted several times, using archive.org as my backup. The current iteration is optimized around not having it be a source of stress or anxiety for me. Here is my setup: * I just use self-hosted Wordpress site on a Digital Ocean droplet. * I made my own theme that strips pretty much everything out: it's one big page with 500+ posts on it, all text. No comments, images, video, anything like that. Minimal markup. Takes less than a second before the page can be interacted with. * There are no post pages, and no archives (again, just one big page). * Consequently, you search by pressing cmd-f in your browser, which is so much better than a search widget (and is the main reason I went with this design). * I make entries whenever I want to, and then queue them up with a plugin that releases 1 post every 4 days, on a schedule. I have 112 posts in the queue, so I could not touch this thing for a year and it would be still running. * My main goal for the blog is to record things that have happened: diary, commonplace book, repository for movie and book reviews. Not to make money or be a famous thought leader and influencer. I recognize that's not everybody's goal, but with those simplifying assumptions in place, it became super easy to make and maintain a blog.

viscousviolin 4y ago
I like your four day interval - was the reason you choose this to not spam people?
- karaterobot 4y ago
  It used to be a week, but then the queue of unpublished articles got to be around 150. I want it to be around a year, but it was more like 3 years, which I thought was just silly.
darraghor 4y ago
I wish more documentation sites just loaded a wall of text with page anchors for navigation rather than separate pages. Ctrl-f/cmd-f is the best search engine for documentation

voytec 4y ago

Am I the "My mobile git workflow guy"[1]? [1] https://wojteksychut.com/posts/this-domain-is-8-minutes-old/ https://wojteksychut.com/posts/this-domain-is-8-minutes-old/

kstrauser 4y ago
Mine’s similar but with fewer steps. - My blog lives in a Git repo I host on my own Gitea server. - I run Working Copy on my iPad to push to/pull from the repo. - I use iA Writer to edit files in Working Copy. - Every 5 minutes, a script on my webserver runs `git pull`. If anything changed, it runs `hugo build`, then rsyncs the output to the webroot for my domain. What I see in iA Writer is my blog’s contents. When I edit those words and `git commit` them in Working Copy, they magically show up on the web a few minutes later.
- corobo 4y ago
  I have similar with even fewer steps! Edit directly in working copy Blog repo is on GitHub When I push to the main repo Cloudflare Pages does hugo build
  - kstrauser 4y ago
    Alright, you win. I do love iA Writer for writing prose, though.
    - corobo 4y ago
      That is fair, it is a very nice app to write in

wslh 4y ago

There is a need for security that is not addressed: install WP and some few plugins and your site will be hacked automatically.

serhack_ 4y ago

Weird that I remember the same infographic by xkcd, is that possible? Or another Mandela effect?

quickthrower2 4y ago

I almost always use Wordpress for Blogs and sites in general. Reasons: If I leave it for 10 years and come back I will know how to maintain it. The tools will exist (especially if WordPress auto upgrades). If I use some static site gen, I will need to remember all the syntax, use some docker container to run the version I used all that time ago. Even coming back to it after a year can leave me with confusion. Also WordPress has a brilliant ecosystem of plugins and themes. And if you are worried about security, there are plugins that will pump it out into a static site on S3, if you like, so you can use WordPress to author, and S3 to host. The WordPress ecosystem can rival most no-code tools too. Also hosting is ubiquitous, and cheap, and usually simple (open CPanel, hit install new Wordpress Blog).

worldofmatthew 4y ago
Why would you need to use docker for a SSG?
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  For example, could you today run a ruby based SSG from 10 years ago? Let's pretend there is a bit of custom code and time invested in it. I guess you could install a bunch of old versions on Ruby, gems, etc. on your machine too, but docker, or a VM might be easier. Or you could go through, remember how all the code works and upgrade it to the latest versions of everything to run it. Assuming the SSG du jour 2013 is still maintained :-). I tried to resurrect a 2 year old NodeJS project and gave up trying to upgrade it to the latest versions, NodeJS people really love their major version changes, and breaking back compat for no real reason.
  - worldofmatthew 4y ago
    You don't need docker for that. Also if you leave a WordPress for years with auto-updates, the plugins will often be abandoned causing your site to be vulnerable.Not to mention any breaking changes that can be introduced. A SSG generated site will be the same in 10 years as its today, even if you might need to fix some things with your project to make further updates.

fleddr 4y ago

Really weird that a very obvious choice, Medium, did not make the cut. I'm quite aware of how unpopular it is here on HN, but that's mostly a meme. It doesn't cost anything and there's no ads. Even linking your domain to it used to be free (sadly no longer true). It has a very decent writing experience and the out of the box design is simple but effective. It has a reasonable amount of customization. It has wide support for apps. It's part of a network so you get functionality like claps, a comment system, followers, the like. Blogging with a "social network" built-in. It has newsletter support. I think that's a sweet deal for such low (or even zero) costs. Ultimately I'd think your writing is what the value of your blog is, not the behind-the-scenes technical tinkering. Unless that really is your thing. Should you be paranoid about Medium going under, there's an export option. Note that I'm the kind of person that wrote my own blogging software in the early 2000s. Tinkered and managed it that way for well over a decade. I've given up on it. It's time wasted. Nobody cares about your blog design, it's hard enough for anybody to care about the actual text in today's landscape. Hence, pick your battles, keep it simple.

guywithahat 4y ago
It's not even in their list of things on might have done in the past, they seem to not regard anything other than self-hosting as a blog, which seems a bit archaic. Building a blog shouldn't be about learning a new framework it should be about writing
pyrolistical 4y ago
Medium is now dead to me because it prevents the very one thing blogsites must do. Publish the damn blog! The mandatory (unless are able to join their program to opt-out) paywall reduces the number of people who can even see your blog
- fleddr 4y ago
  The paywall is a writer option, indeed one can opt-out.
throwaway675309 4y ago
I feel like a lot of people here have moved from medium to sub stack. Also medium just sort of naturally gatekeeps your articles by eventually forcing potential readers to login to medium.

riidom 4y ago

I'm using https://picocms.org/ https://picocms.org/. It is PHP based, works on a cheap limited web hoster. The concept is: Upload a markdown file plus associated media, and it does the rest for you. For customisation, you can use Twig and CSS, or a predefined theme (I didn't look into these, I wanted a custom appearance). For feeds there are plugins, for comments I use a "mail me at post023@mydomain.url" approach.

jbarham 4y ago

Hey.com includes a hosted blog as an extension to its core email hosting: https://www.hey.com/world/ https://www.hey.com/world/ E.g., here is DHH's blog: https://world.hey.com/dhh https://world.hey.com/dhh

naet 4y ago

How to start your blog in 2023: start writing. Upload wherever you want on whatever platform you want. You can always change it later. Content should come first, before worrying about optimizing your static build or tweaking your CSS or moving to Substack or whatever else. That can all be done later when you've found your writing rhythm.

joelrunyon 4y ago

If you want to just write - the answer is still wordpress (https://startablog.com/guide https://startablog.com/guide). If you want to focus on tweaking the site to your heart's content, go right ahead, but the number #1 component to a blog is...writing. Focus on that and stop worrying about the rest of the details.

sam1r 4y ago

>> Focus more on the content and just ensure the process of writing and posting is simple enough. I wonder if there’s any tools or pipelines for 1 place to write content and then deploy to many platforms based on our config / api keys..

emptysuitcase 4y ago

are people still interested in writing blogs?? when ChatGPT can write blog posts, why should we?

marc_io 4y ago
Of course, ChatGPT can only respond about things already created, it cannot create new things. This would be AGI territory.

hota_mazi 4y ago

I would love to get a similar article describing the options for developer-oriented blogs. Some requirements: - Code snippets are pretty and colored, and cover multiple languages - Posting images is easy - There's a tool to convert my existing Wordpress articles into it (I have 20+ years of that) - Ideally, Markdown, but I'd consider similarly intuitive mark ups (I can do HTML but would rather not)

propiro 4y ago

that graph made me feel like exception from the rules, as I use statoc page generator (publii), and I post whenever I do something

piroslav 4y ago

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piroslav 4y ago

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ulizzle 4y ago

Needlessly complicated? there’s a thousand ways to start a blog in 2023; sure, your artisanal handcrafted static site generator can handle traffic, but so can my free Substack blog The hard part is sticking to it; content is truly king

sourcecodeplz 4y ago

Just use Blogger. Unlimited everything and full HTML, CSS, Javascript control for every page/post/category. Plus it's free and been around since '99.

HermanMartinus 4y ago

Creator of Bear here. I've actually done a full writeup recently on how Bear is more immune to being discontinued than some of the bigger VC funded platforms. If you're interested I've linked it below. - https://bearblog.dev https://bearblog.dev - https://herman.bearblog.dev/building-software-to-last-forever/ https://herman.bearblog.dev/building-software-to-last-foreve...

worldmerge 4y ago

How do you get traction on your blog? Whenever I post it on here the posts never get any traction.

tobiasbischoff 4y ago

Blogging advice from the guy who choose a platform thats about to shut down for his own blog, thats my kind of humor. Just kidding, the actual post is fine but hosting a blog seems to be either a) running a vps incl managing all its updates and security b) trusting a service not to shut down in the next years to come. That sucks.

d4rkp4ttern 4y ago

My requirements for a technical blog platform are markdown, math notation, syntax highlighting. I settled on Ghost a while ago but wonder if there are better choices these days.

shivenigma 4y ago

hashnode.com checks all the criteria you mentioned. Worth checking about.

pdx_flyer 4y ago

I write pretty frequently and use WordPress. Over the past few years I've felt that it's clunky to just get words out there. I've wanted to move to something simpler but looking at the options like Jekyll or self-hosted Ghost just seems like a different type of work rather than less work. I want something with a clean, easy to read front end -- that's where WordPress has really struggled, good looking "blog" focused themes.

ry8806 4y ago

couldn't agree more with the section about Ghost, their shifted focus is something I've picked up on recently too [0]. I started to dislike their interface more and more when creating/editing posts. Couple that with the regular "your theme is no longer supported" messages, I got fed up of burning time to keep up with their updates, which offered no benefits to me. I quit and moved to Hugo (using a ghost-to-hugo migration tool [1]). [0] https://ryansouthgate.com/goodbye-ghost-hello-hugo/#im-no-longer-ghosts-target-customer https://ryansouthgate.com/goodbye-ghost-hello-hugo/#im-no-lo... [1] https://github.com/jbarone/ghostToHugo https://github.com/jbarone/ghostToHugo

damethos 4y ago

I am using https://docusaurus.io https://docusaurus.io in combination with GitHub pages by committing to a personal public GitHub repo and let travis-ci automatically build the site. I am happy.

slorber 4y ago

Docusaurus is a great way to start a static blog. Give it a try! Lots of features included: RSS, sitemaps, multi author, regular/guests, tags, unlisted/draft, i18n, accessibility, very customizable... My newsletter is based on it: https://thisweekinreact.com/ https://thisweekinreact.com/ I edit content there first in Markdown and then copy paste to ConvertKit