Ask HN: Looking for lightweight personal blogging platform

Most SSGs, or if you want to have it easy: https://getpublii.com/ - generates static sites, can publish to github pages (among others), has themes.

Here's my personal blog, set up in 2019 on github pages (free hosting), built with Jekyll [1] which supports markdown, code snippets, tags, sections and more.

For a technical person, it does the job pretty well and almost without any maintenance effort:

- Github: https://github.com/TCGV/Blog

- Live: https://thomasvilhena.com/

[1] https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll

Many of the recommendations in this thread are great. Go with a SSG; almost all of the bigger players will be able to do everything you list and (a lot) more. Personally a big fan of Astro[1] but Hugo, Jekyll, 11ty, etc. will do the job just fine and there's imo no reason to pick one over the other in your case apart from working with a framework in a language you're comfortable with.

If you're looking to get started right away and don't care about having it hosted by someone else there's also bearblog[2] which I can recommend btw.

[1] https://astro.build/ [2] https://bearblog.dev/

If you don't need tagging (as http://danluu.com/ doesn't, for example), you can use my "no workflow" solution:

* draft in markdown

* render in HTML (using any Markdown to HTML tool, e.g. pandoc)

* link your CSS in the HTML file.

* push to your preferred serving platform

This has the advantage of getting you started as quick as you can open an editor.

If after 5 posts you are wanting a tool, pick whichever (Hugo).

As per many other comments, it sounds like a static site generator like Hugo (https://gohugo.io/) or Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/), hosted on GitHub Pages (https://pages.github.com/) or GitLab Pages (https://about.gitlab.com/stages-devops-lifecycle/pages/), would be a good match. If you set up GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD to do the build and deploy (see e.g. https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/), your normal workflow will simply be to edit your markdown and do a git add/commit/push to make your changes live. There are a number of pre-built themes (e.g. https://themes.gohugo.io/) you can use, and these are relatively straightforward to tweak to your requirements. In theory, since the content (markdown) is separate from the presentation (theme), you can change design relatively easily (although in practice there's often theme specific config).