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Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?

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Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?

#41

Post by sircastor »

I have tried to travel tot’s road a number of times, and I am a WordPress user too. I’ve given up and stick with WP. I find it reliable. I have of course added cache plugins and contemplated using a static plugin to output to straight html. I’m curious what kind of bugs you’re running into with Wordpress?

I wish you luck. Lots of pile have had success with Jekyll. I was leaning towards Pelican or Hugo.

Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?

#42

Post by yogsototh »

I use a single Makefile with pandoc.

https://her.esy.fun/posts/0018-makefile-as-static-site-build...

I use org-mode instead of markdown. But this system is agnostic of your source. Low maintenance, and will probably still work in a long time in the future. The most fragile part of it is pandoc, which I think will be retro compatible for a long time.

Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?

#44

Post by jonpalmisc »

My site [0] uses Jekyll. Jekyll it stable, mature, and easy to work with. It has solutions to common needs, e.g. layouts, components, Markdown.

I’d suggest starting with the barebones option and making a theme yourself if you’re comfortable with CSS; it will yield a lighter site and also be easier to maintain than using some big pre-made Jekyll theme.

[0] https://jonpalmisc.com/

Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?

#45

Post by phoboslab »

A while ago I published pagenode[1] which powers my own blog[2] and some of my other sites. It sits somewhere in between a CMS-"library" and a static site generator, with all content stored in markdown files. It comes in as single .php file.

Note that pagenode is not a ready made blog system, but rather a library to build a blog, portfolio site or anything else that does not have user-generated content.

[1] https://pagenode.org

[2] https://phoboslab.org

Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?

#46

Post by southerntofu »

nikivi wrote: post #9

I am evaluating these options now: - https://github.com/alaq/adrien.sh for NextJS - https://github.com/sw-yx/swyxkit or Svelte - https://github.com/SimeonGriggs/simeonGriggs for Remix All have designs I like. I am only familiar with NextJS and find it a pleasure to work with.

Why all the JS/TS though? Part of what's great about a static site is serving simple HTML/CSS pages that look great, degrade gracefully, and don't hog users CPU/RAM like JS applets do.

Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?

#49

Post by parsimo2010 »

dinamic wrote: post #35

You can use GitHub pages with Jekyll. Easy to setup and run, there are a lot of custom Jekyll blog themes available online. Custom domain with private repo costs few dollars per month.

Seconded. OP, this is the way to do it unless you want to build your own thing. Setting up a custom domain is easy and GitHub has a guide. You can use a public repo if you don’t have GitHub premium. The website is public anyway so there isn’t much reason you would need to keep the markdown files private. Backups are easy, you’ll have a local copy of the repo and an online copy with a fairly reliable provider.

Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?

#50

Post by jonwinstanley »

the-dude wrote: post #32

I am really interested in the 'buggy'ness of WP. Especially when you basically would be served with a static website, I do wonder which 'bugs' in WP are annoying you so much.

Agreed, if you stick to basic WP I can't imagine you'd see many bugs due to the huge audience that use the platform.

If you'd said WP is unpleasant to extend, or written using dated PHP techniques I'd have agreed whole-heartedly.

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