[HN Gopher] How to Start Your Blog in 2023
___________________________________________________________________
How to Start Your Blog in 2023
Author : ymolodtsov
Score : 102 points
Date : 2023-02-20 12:01 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (molodtsov.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (molodtsov.me)
| chin_chillin wrote:
| [dead]
| YESIMFUNNY wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| Havoc wrote:
| Busy build out a Astro/mdx based one.
|
| I take notes in md anyway so hoping that'll be reasonably
| ergonomic
| otras wrote:
| 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 ``
|
| 3. Build and push to main, and then the image is available in
| minutes at `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 wrote:
| Is Hugo significantly different from Jekyll?
| otras wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Hugo is distributed as a single binary, but Jekyll requires a
| Ruby environment (assuming you want to test locally).
| fmajid wrote:
| Hugo and Cloudflare Pages is basically free, but you need to
| find somewhere to host your search.
| nindalf wrote:
| Cloudflare workers?
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| Well, true, but: 1. You might want to resize image if it's a
| photo 2. You might prefer a CMS to a plain code editor and then
| you need to use its uploader (both Forestry and NetlifyCMS
| aren't very seamless) 3. Try doing that on mobile
|
| And don't get me wrong, I use Hugo as well.
| rcarr wrote:
| Netlify CMS is dead[1] after the core dev left the company,
| Forestry is also officially dead as of April this year.
| Netlify CMS got forked into StaticCMS and the team behind
| Forestry have created TinaCMS. After experimenting with both
| last week, I recommend the latter if you're building a blog
| with Astro and want a Git based CMS.
|
| [1]https://answers.netlify.com/t/is-this-project-dead/70988
| baeconandeggz wrote:
| [dead]
| yuedongze wrote:
| 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 :((
| Artgor wrote:
| 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.
| dilawar wrote:
| 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.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| 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.
| jbaczuk wrote:
| 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.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Wordpress has an activitypub plugin to integrate with mastodon.
| There are others to automatically post to twitter/fb etc but
| those are usually paid.
| unfriendme wrote:
| [dead]
| sharedptr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| icodefuture wrote:
| Starting a blog in 2023 can be tricky. The increasing number of
| blogging platforms to start a blog might leave you super
| confused.
|
| Here is what I am building with my team to make things easier a
| bit. Introducing BlogHunch, an SEO-optimized, flexible No-Code
| blogging platform that lets you build and manage your blog
| without worrying about servers, developers, branding, and SEO.
|
| You can kickstart your blogging journey with BlogHunch in just 30
| seconds. Currently it has the following features to offer - Clean
| editor, Simple UI, NodeJS powered blogs, Edge caching, CDN, Auto
| SSL, Inbuilt comment system with moderation, add team members
| with different roles, connect to custom domain or subdomain,
| Flexiblity, API support, Design customization, Themes, Collect
| emails with inbuilt newsletter form, Auto table of contents, SEO
| suggestions tool.
|
| The best part is we have a decent free plan that offers you most
| of the features, lets you connect your domain and provides an
| automated SSL.
|
| We are actively working on the platform to make it better
| everyday.
|
| Please feel free to give it a try and share your
| thoughts/feedback - https://bloghunch.com
| bandana123 wrote:
| Saw your product in product hunt. congrats on being 4th product
| of the day. Your platform looks amazing. All the best to your
| team.
| voytec wrote:
| Am I the "My mobile git workflow guy"[1]?
|
| [1] https://wojteksychut.com/posts/this-domain-is-8-minutes-old/
| andy_ppp wrote:
| > ChatGPT can you write me a blog post on starting Blogs in 2023?
| onli wrote:
| 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.
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| The process you described is so much more complicated than
| signing up for Twitter or Medium though.
| onli wrote:
| Twitter is no blog. And with both you then later have to
| fight with the login/paywall. That's exactly what I meant:
| Looks easier in the beginning, but isn't after the very
| start.
| scarface74 wrote:
| And then you have to deal with the current Twitter shit show.
| I want to own my own content.
| criddell wrote:
| I don't know if you can still do this, but you used to be able
| to create public folders on Dropbox. Dave Winer ran a bunch of
| experiments serving a blog from a public Dropbox folder and
| IIRC, it worked great.
|
| If you are already paying for cloud storage somewhere, you
| might be able to start by saving your writing to a public
| folder. Instant blog.
| unity1001 wrote:
| None of that is necessary. Nowadays common consumer web hosts
| allow you to install Wordpress with a click. Actually most of
| them provide specialized WordPress hosting that comes with WP
| preinstalled and with a lot of optimization. (most of them are
| managed).
| onli wrote:
| Hm - Okay, you have a point there. My preferred hoster does
| not offer this, but many do, and if you don't want to go with
| a lesser known option that really is even easier. So the old
| way of hosting it with a shared hoster did improve, nice :)
| cassianoleal wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
| KronisLV wrote:
| > 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-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-
| 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.
| dsschnau wrote:
| https://danschnau.com is my home-grown asp.net cms and i'm proud
| of it
| tcmart14 wrote:
| 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.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| 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, 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.
| flangola7 wrote:
| There's so many better options better than .com (commercial)
|
| .net .org .me .io .blog .info
|
| You can make it topical too .expert .engineer .doctor .camera
| .software
|
| Or have fun with it .lol .wtf .foo
| tjr wrote:
| Lots of good options, but what in your opinion would make
| .net or .org a better choice than .com ?
|
| While perhaps not as pervasive as during the 1990s, I still
| feel like most people are more familiar with / assume /
| default to ".com" than any of the others.
| BizarreByte wrote:
| Always worth considering your national domain if it's easy to
| register. I use .ca because really why wouldn't I?
| voytec wrote:
| I'd advise against using "exotic" TLDs if you plan to send
| mail from this domain.
| mydriasis wrote:
| Very true. I picked one that uses the last two letters of my
| last name, so that my website it just my last name!
| Vvector wrote:
| My domain is firstnamelastname.me.
| scarface74 wrote:
| For a simple blog, micro.blog hits all of those points. It's
| very non scammy.
| rcarr wrote:
| I wanted to love it but I agree with Kev Quirk's take:
|
| https://kevquirk.com/micro-blog-is-still-confusing/
| scarface74 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| These are great points.
| bigfootisreal wrote:
| [dead]
| crecker wrote:
| Weird that I remember the same infographic by xkcd, is that
| possible? Or another Mandela effect?
| rambambram wrote:
| 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.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Why would you need to use docker for a SSG?
| raybb wrote:
| 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.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Is there a way for SSGs to support viewer comments?
| jrmg wrote:
| I'm a fan of Isso: https://isso-comments.de/
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There's a good resource of available commenting systems for
| static sites here (not mine):
| https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/
| darekkay wrote:
| 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.
| babydoodles wrote:
| [dead]
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| 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.
| coolshirtbra wrote:
| [dead]
| dusted wrote:
| 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.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _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 wrote:
| 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.
| josters wrote:
| 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/
| (disclaimer: the guide is from my blog)
| input_sh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| xwdv wrote:
| 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!
| lapcat wrote:
| 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.
| boredemployee wrote:
| Could you explain how do you do it? I really want to have a
| blog but I don't want to fuck with wordpress and all that I
| know is a little bit of html, python and sql.
| idlewords wrote:
| <head> <title>Title</title> </head>
| <body> <p><b>2023.02.20</b></p> <p>This is the
| first paragraph.</p> <p>This is the second.</p>
| </body>
|
| Save that as "blogpost.html" somewhere a web server can see
| it.
| BizarreByte wrote:
| Same here, I really can't be bothered with SSGs or something
| like WP. I don't even really bother with how my website looks,
| it's as plain of HTML as you could get.
|
| It suits me well.
| colinflane wrote:
| I was pleasantly surprised to learn writing raw html is not
| difficult, at all. I am not doing Rocket Science, though. As
| others say, static site generators introduce a layer of
| abstraction. I like writing in markdown too, but if I really
| cared to, I could write my own scripts to translate. However, I
| found that html does not introduce undue overhead. I am sure I
| could churn out content more quickly if I were writing in
| markdown, but at what cost? There is a cost to writing _too_
| quickly. Myself, I find I actually like a little friction.
| prox wrote:
| With Obsidian and an add-on you can output html pretty
| quickly (even with some CSS I believe)
|
| So from writing to publishing is a short flow.
| schemescape wrote:
| Mind sharing a link to your blog?
|
| I'm also a "tooling minimalist", but I'm curious how you handle
| things like grouping posts (or do you just not bother?).
|
| Assuming everything's not on a single page, how do you avoid
| tedious duplication?
| [deleted]
| idlewords wrote:
| Fellow raw HTML writer chiming in. My hand-built little web app
| for blogging broke maybe five years ago with some OS X update,
| and I have been too lazy to fix it.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Wait... You don't use an IDE taking up 2GB of RAM to write
| posts in "plain text" using a random flavor of Markdown, with
| custom extensions only supported by a single blog generator,
| and then use the command line to call 250MB worth of Node
| libraries which creates an AST from the barely parsable text
| file, all to then generate a basic static HTML file?
|
| What's wrong with you?
| nordsieck wrote:
| 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.
| ravagat wrote:
| > 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.
|
| SSG is third-party dependency in one way.
| malodyets wrote:
| It seems to me that a text editor is the same sort of
| dependency as a static site generator. Especially if you
| store the resulting site as rendered.
| BizarreByte wrote:
| I don't think a text editor can be called a dependency
| when every computer in the last 30 years has shipped with
| one.
|
| At the end of the day you have to pull in a SSG from
| elsewhere and run it.
| asdff wrote:
| You can drop in whatever text editor you like though.
| It's only a dependency like saying a keyboard is a
| dependency to writing code. There will always be new
| editors or you can use a 40 year old one just fine too.
| Can't say the same about the static site generator
| though, maybe your setup works when you swap one
| generator for another maybe it doesn't.
| ihateolives wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > Why add another layer?
|
| The answer given:
|
| > to take out some of the drudgery
| asdff wrote:
| 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.
| PixelForg wrote:
| Choosing the tool isn't the issue for me, writing is.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| As in you don't know what to write about? Or you don't like
| your writing?
| asdff wrote:
| 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.
| wenbin wrote:
| 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
| pivic wrote:
| 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/
| blakesterz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| These days, the WordPress power-users are all doing headless
| via the API, so there's little push for a better admin UI.
| fluffycookie wrote:
| [dead]
| RobotToaster wrote:
| I've had managed wordpress hosting from about PS5, not sure where
| he got those prices from.
|
| Still not sure I'd recommend it, the community can be pretty
| toxic.
| geekrax wrote:
| Is Medium not considered a good option anymore?
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| You never know where they'd go with their business model, how
| will they gate your content and what they will bundle it with.
| paride5745 wrote:
| 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.
| yacine_ wrote:
| no need
|
| just write
|
| stop using tools, just an HTML document is fine.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| 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.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > 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.
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| 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/), 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.
| eloisant wrote:
| 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).
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| Yep, so many blogs with a few posts where one of them
| explains their entire SSG set up and that's it.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Very true and good point-- and there's also nothing at all
| wrong with that!!
| OP_rah wrote:
| [dead]
| RistrettoMike wrote:
| 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.
| asdff wrote:
| 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.
| ant6n wrote:
| 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).
| fleddr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| kim_chi wrote:
| [dead]
| iNeed2p wrote:
| To choose a blogging topic, you should first keep 4 things in
| mind. that is,
|
| Knowledge Interest High Search and Low Competition Keyword Value
| lagniappe wrote:
| 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
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| 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
| lagniappe wrote:
| 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?
| veyh wrote:
| Cactus Comments [1] is another option. It uses Matrix under
| the hood.
|
| [1] https://cactus.chat/
| lagniappe wrote:
| [dead]
| indigodaddy wrote:
| This looks fantastic! I was going to mess about with Picocms
| but going to try this instead in conjunction with either Caddy
| or a spare shared hosting I've got laying around. And for the
| composing I will either tack on staticcms, or spin up a fly.io
| instance of stackedit (which I will push my md's/edits from
| there to GitHub and bearclaw). You were trying to keep things
| simple and here I go trying to complexify it lol..
|
| I'll try to remember to let you know how it turns out after I
| get it all going..
| [deleted]
| akshayrajp wrote:
| 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?
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| Jekyll is more oldschool. For me, Hugo seems to have a more
| active community and gets a lot of points for being a static
| binary (basically never fails and compiles very quickly).
| Haven't used Astro.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| I've been using Jekyll for a nuclear education site for many
| years, after doing it for even more in just manual text-edited
| HTML. It's great, and I'm impressed with all the little things
| I can do with it, such as highlighting the current page in the
| menu and having little back/forth buttons from page to page. No
| complaints.
|
| I also use self-hosted WordPress for a hobby blog and like the
| graphical editor and easy drag drop of images.
| schemescape wrote:
| Honestly, the overwhelming number of tool choices and themes is
| the biggest hurdle these days.
|
| I will shamelessly plug my solution: md2blog. You just plop
| Markdown files into folders and it does the rest, _without_
| letting you get distracted by themes.
|
| Edit: addressing the article, md2blog does not support email
| subscriptions, but it does generate an Atom feed. It also
| requires using a command line (but the tool is a single binary,
| so no installation or dependencies to deal with).
|
| Link: https://jaredkrinke.github.io/md2blog/
| akshayrajp wrote:
| Looks minimal and cool! Will check it out.
| losvedir wrote:
| I moved from jekyll (to hakyll) to hugo years ago since I found
| working with Ruby and its libraries slightly annoying and Hugo
| (packaged as a simple binary) more straightforward to use.
|
| That said, I haven't updated my blog in years, and at this
| point I'm not sure I still know how to! But the good thing
| about a static site generator, is it just sits there in S3,
| costing me just $0.14/month.
| xena wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| akshayrajp wrote:
| Exactly my problem. With what you've described, I think Astro
| + some headless CMS would be the way to go here. I say Astro
| because having JS is a nice thing and it will let you do
| things that would require more effort with Jekyll/Hugo.
| (since you say want to integrate with your existing hobby
| e-com website)
|
| Plus, it has the added benefit of keeping your front-end
| skills upto date.
| [deleted]
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Happy user of Ghost [0].
|
| Open source; small but smart team. Highly recommended.
|
| [0]: https://ghost.org/
| theusus wrote:
| I just want something that supports LaTeX without a fight.
| [deleted]
| groznyj wrote:
| 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/
|
| [1]: https://bearblog.dev/
|
| [2]: https://www.benkuhn.net/writing/#set-up-your-blog
| FrostedCupcake wrote:
| [dead]
| SaintBroseph wrote:
| [dead]
| Veuxdo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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) + *
| ManEatsPants wrote:
| [dead]
| georgehill wrote:
| Also worth reading https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/how-i-built-
| my-blog
| margorczynski wrote:
| 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.
| HeartTicker wrote:
| People are constantly searching on Google Search with many
| problems. When you solve those problems or provide useful
| information on various topics in your blog, people will come to
| your blog to read these articles/content.
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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.
| Tachyooon wrote:
| I like your four day interval - was the reason you choose this
| to not spam people?
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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.
| datavirtue wrote:
| 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?
| personjerry wrote:
| How to actually start your blog: Open up Notes and start writing.
|
| Worry about deployment later. The content is a bigger barrier.
| rcarr wrote:
| If you use https://montaigne.io you don't even have to leave
| notes.
| personjerry wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| wslh wrote:
| There is a need for security that is not addressed: install WP
| and some few plugins and your site will be hacked automatically.
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(page generated 2023-02-20 23:01 UTC)