Ask HN: Looking for lightweight personal blogging platform

Hugo is getting a lot of love in here (with good reason). If you do end up trying Hugo and feel it's like 90% what you want but never quite perfect, do check out Zola (https://www.getzola.org/). It feels the most like Hugo of anything I've tried but I found the docs and the template system better.

I'll definitely go with Astro if you don't need any CMS stuff. They already have a blog template. It's super fast to deploy to vercel as well. So you can just focus write your content.

I've used hexo for years, I like it because it's simple, mature and has a large ecosystem of community plugins.

It is showing it's age with some of the tech choices, but it still works great and is easy to debug and tailor to specific needs

Distill for R Markdown is a great alternative too. I really like the layout and the flexibility you get with the plots.

The site can be hosted directly on github pages and you can configure the custom domain on github. Fairly easy to setup and use.

Comes out of the box with GDPR compliance, google analytics and cookie consent

https://rstudio.github.io/distill/website.html

Like many others here I'm going to recommend Jekyll too, and I recently started blogging with it [1]. Although the primary reason to suggest Jekyll would be that its non-nonsense and has been around a while (which is what the other comments mention), I would also like to add that when I needed customizations it was easy to Google for them because of the large community. Going in I believed that no platform will match all my needs, so I needed something where minor customizations wouldn't demand a steep learning curve. Some specific examples that I was able to solve with some basic searching:

[1] On the homepage [a] I needed some excerpts from the post to appear underneath the title. I also wanted this excerpt to show up in the RSS feed.

[2] Since I think of my posts as live documents - if I remember a new detail, I add it to my posts, because more than anything else my blog is notes for me -I also wanted to add a "Last major update" date to my posts - you can see this appear over the titles (the date after '||') and at the top of individual articles. I wanted this to be manual because I didn't want this date to change because I fixed a typo etc.

[3] Since I'm interested in technical articles, I wanted a good way to cite papers. I use jekyll scholar [b] for the purpose, and if you look at the last 2 articles on my blog you'll see the outcomes it produces.

[4] I also wanted my article URLs to be concise instead of the jekyll default which has year, month, day as part of it - this was a fairly easy change to make as well.

[5] Linking to a different section in an article or a section in another article without using the public URL (because this might change if for some reason I end up with a different namespace tomorrow) - this is also possible using variables, whose values get (re-)generated every time you change the document markdown.

[6] Before I push the article to github I usually have it served for a while (typically a few days) on a local server on my laptop (you don't have to install a separate server - the jekyll build system bundles one, this is how you locally see what the article would look like) which I proof-check from different devices while in the house, e.g., from my mobile when I'm not at my desk. Its convenient.

[7] Of course, support for MathJax.

[8] Lot's of themes to pick from. For ex. Al-Folio [c] is a minimalist theme that seems to be becoming popular for academic writing.

I'm sure some of the other solutions do most of these, but I wanted to draw your attention to the ease of customizability.

[a] https://blog.quipu-strands.com/

[b] https://github.com/inukshuk/jekyll-scholar

[c] https://github.com/alshedivat/al-folio?tab=readme-ov-file