Ask HN: What platform are you building a niche site on in 2023? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What platform are you building a niche site on in 2023?

#11

Post by ecornflak » Wed, Oct 26, 2022, 9:19 PM UTC

Every once in a while I go through an “I want a website” phase and try something new, but always end up back with Wordpress.

Ultimately I wanted to write content and play around with CSS making it look nice, and Wordpress handles that. Many of the other options felt like I was forever tweaking things or upgrading a dependency or something - very much mike the old days of Linux where making the modem work was an achievement.

If I couldn’t use Wordpress I’d probably go with Jekyll or Ghost.

Re: Ask HN: What platform are you building a niche site on in 2023?

#12

Post by MisterSandman » Wed, Oct 26, 2022, 9:34 PM UTC

is0tope wrote: post #9

For my blog, Hugo + Netlify. It's free, simple to use and works well.

Same but Hugo + GitHub pages

Re: Ask HN: What platform are you building a niche site on in 2023?

#13

Post by h4waii » Wed, Oct 26, 2022, 10:14 PM UTC

I think my e-commerce site is niche, I don't have huge amounts of monthly traffic but product sales pay all my monthly bills.

It's just static HTML deployed to CloudFlare Pages with a $9/month Shopify button, and a $2/year VPS acting as an API endpoint.

I've used Ghost, WordPress, Hugo, Pelican, etc...and would 100% go with a static site generator over a full blown CMS.

Re: Ask HN: What platform are you building a niche site on in 2023?

#14

Post by mod » Wed, Oct 26, 2022, 11:30 PM UTC

Comevius wrote: post #2

Astro + Cloudflare Pages is pretty good. You can start with just a static site, fetch content from anywhere, including Markdown files or an API, and you can provide interactivity in islands. https://astro.build/

Tangent: Man this landing page is hard to read. For the record, I'm a full stack web programmer.

What the fuck is an island?

"Lazy loading islands" What?

"Components only hydrate when they scroll in to view" WHAT?

"Need interactive UI? Load individual, non-blocking component islands in parallel." WHAAAT!?

"...and live server output (SSR)" SSR = Live Server Output. OOOOOOOkay.

50 acronyms later and I'm way too fatigued to try this shit out.

Re: Ask HN: What platform are you building a niche site on in 2023?

#15

Post by kbrannigan » Wed, Oct 26, 2022, 11:58 PM UTC

WordPress is pretty hard to beat. Despite all the fancy js, webpack etc...

WordPress just chugs along. It's like an old farm tractor... Not the most pretty but gets the job done

Re: Ask HN: What platform are you building a niche site on in 2023?

#16

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 27, 2022, 12:16 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What platform are you building a niche site on in 2023?

#17

Post by thegoatman » Thu, Oct 27, 2022, 4:22 AM UTC

I don't like to complicate things or chase the newest shinny thing. So that's why I always use WordPress to build landing pages.

You can do so many things for free(lots of tutorials online, community help, easy to find codes) or hire a pro for cheap.

Re: Ask HN: What platform are you building a niche site on in 2023?

#18

Post by farseer » Thu, Oct 27, 2022, 5:59 AM UTC

Wordpress with a small set of free, commercial and custom plugins. Typically around ~15. Allows you to focus on the content and not on the stack.

Re: Ask HN: What platform are you building a niche site on in 2023?

#19

Post by PainfullyNormal » Thu, Oct 27, 2022, 10:28 AM UTC

IMHO, the sweet spot for me is still writing raw html, css and php and throwing it up onto a shared server somewhere via sftp. Quick, easy, and extendable. It's too bad the good WYSIWYG editors have died out.

Re: Ask HN: What platform are you building a niche site on in 2023?

#20

Post by karimf » Thu, Oct 27, 2022, 12:55 PM UTC

I’m working at Makeswift, and this could be exactly what you’re looking for. Basically, Makeswift is a visual builder for Next.js. It’s a drag-and-drop website builder, similar to Webflow, but you can easily extend it by using a custom React component.

So if your team is already using React or Next.js, you can reuse the same components you already have and use them in Makeswift to build custom-coded pages.