First I put it on my personal blog (11ty+netlify), so I own the rights. I wait at least a couple days before publishing or promoting elsewhere (medium, DEV, hackernoon)
Ask HN: Where do you write?
31–40 of 61 posts
Re: Ask HN: Where do you write?
#32I’m using ghost at https://mattbrandly.com/
I intend to write more technical content, and I don’t think ghost is that great for the purpose. I wish I were writing markdown and generating static assets locally. Having to send highlight.js to every client for syntax highlighting is unnecessary.
Re: Ask HN: Where do you write?
#33For personal blog: 11ty + travis ci + github pages. Its easy way to write and publish content. Just checkout git repo, write posts with your favourite editor and push changes to github - thats all. Previously, I've being using Wordpress and Ghost. Both were real nigtmare to manage.
I've not tried out Ghost yet - I thought it was suppose to solve WP's bloat and UX issues.
What was nightmarish about Ghost and when did you last use it?
Re: Ask HN: Where do you write?
#34If you just want to write and could care less about ownership of content, pick Medium.
Re: Ask HN: Where do you write?
#35I keep a blog at https://vorpalhex.com and I primarily keep it as a repository of thoughts, ideas and odd projects.
I use Hugo because it's simple yet flexible, powerful and produces a static bundle that is easily hostable anywhere. I use the `hello-friend` theme with significant tweaks, mostly a lot of shortcodes for better and more-responsive friendly image handling. I wanted a markdown based flow with minimal JS that didn't require node/rails/etc toolchains. Hugo is available both as a docker image and a small compiled binary so both local builds and CI builds are very easy. Currently I'm hosted via Gitlab for ease (I can use my own CI runner and the hosting itself is free with SSL support) but I've used S3 and others with great results.
I do my drafting in my favorite notes app InkDrop, and then just take my markdown file and drop it into my repo. One git push and it's published. Still haven't found a great platform to let non-technical folks edit my posts though.
I keep my images and big files in a Digital Ocean CDN. I use rclone to manage cdn contents (it uses the s3 protocol) and have some utility scripts to pull the cdn locally and then sync up changes. I ended up having to write a small golang program to easily bulk resize images at responsive breakpoints: https://gitlab.com/vorpalhex/responsimg
For me, this setup makes it very low friction to compose blog posts and get them published and it gets good lighthouse speed scores and loads quickly on even low end devices with bad connections. No medium paywall, no facebook SDK, etc. I did end up caving and installing Google Analytics (I was very displeased with piwik).
Re: Ask HN: Where do you write?
#36I am using a self-hosted Wordpress instance, lets encrypt, and cloudflare to proxy requests. A few automation scripts to ensure the apps are updated and IP changes are corrected with google domains. Every now and then I check my site to ensure everything is working as it should.
Granted, it doesn't get much traffic except for 2 post that gets me 5-10 visitors daily. https://ianmf.com
Re: Ask HN: Where do you write?
#37If you’re interested in short stories To be published I recommend trawling The Submissions Grinder. This is duotrope but free.
Re: Ask HN: Where do you write?
#38Serious question: have you considered writing for just yourself?
I've found in this age of online sharing my motivations and enjoyments of things is more pure if I just do it for myself, and maybe share with one or two appreciative people.
In addition, I find that not telling anyone your goals or ambitions is extremely underrated. There's research that shows that if you do that, you get some of the reward for having done something worthwhile without nearly as much of the work, so the actual work becomes harder to do. And personally, I find it's absolutely true. The rest of the world's noise and opinions interferes with my own developmental process.
If I do things for myself and only for myself, it usually goes so much better.
Re: Ask HN: Where do you write?
#39I self-host a couple of blogs using Wordpress. For over eleven years, I've posted a photo every day at https://www.75centralphotography.com/, but that's not really writing. For writing, I've just recently spun up http://www.robotsprocket.com/ to share ephemera, code and other things I've found interesting. Having played around with Medium, Squarespace and Wix, I find WP to be superior in its flexibility and the fact that I'm ensured that I own the content.
Re: Ask HN: Where do you write?
#40I use Hugo and I host my blog out of an AWS S3 bucket.
Pros:
- Cheap.
- Static and small. Hugo lets me really make everything tiny.
- Learned more about AWS.
- A lot of work because I had to setup Route 53, CloudFront, Certificate Manager and S3.
- Learning about the permission model and setting up an IAM user with right permissions.
- Figuring out how Route 53, Certificate Manager and CloudFront work together so I could have SSL.