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Ask HN: What is the best way to author blogs in 2024?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the best way to author blogs in 2024?

#61

Post by blooalien »

pjot wrote: post #56
nicbou wrote: post #53

I run allaboutberlin.com for a living. I switched from Craft CMS to a homebrew static site generator (Markdown + Jekyll) and it was a game changer. Static sites are almost maintenance-free. They cost pennies to host. You work on your content using the tools that you love, if necessary offline. There are many excellent markdown editors and no CMS comes close. Everything is under source control and deploys with a push.…

Why not roll your own? Sure, you have to build it and maintain it, but isn’t that in the spirit of programming? It’s fun.

Or if you can find one that's close to your exact needs, use that and submit patches and pull requests upstream, or fork and maintain your fork if your changes aren't appropriate or acceptable for upstream. Easier than rolling your own if you just don't feel like going to that extreme, and still helps the ecosystem grow and thrive.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best way to author blogs in 2024?

#62

Post by rtpg »

You could probably get far with Wordpress. Why? Because if you're technical you can navigate the tricky setup well, and it's made in a way to support a lot of things for non-technical people.

Of course you gotta get it running (or pay people like WP Engine), but you're going to end up with a thing that will work.

That or dev.to is a good spot I think.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best way to author blogs in 2024?

#63

Post by fragmede »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #44
Vaslo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean to code it by yourself? Nah, I, like most people interested in blogging, will pass.

Why so against it though? HTML isn't hard to understand. Like I said you can set it up in an afternoon. With any tool you have to learn how to use it. You use some website builder you aren't going to know what all of their gui functions do off the bat either, you will have to read up how to do what you want in their way. Might as well learn to use the right tool for the job which in this case is probably the easiest…

It's easy to understand, but modern tools are much more convenient for multimedia posts. I want to put an image in my post. I find the jpeg/png I want, (s)cp it over to the exacty right location, and then figure out how to inline or link to it in the assets folder as a separate thing. Compare that to the much smoother workflow with a platform like facebook.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best way to author blogs in 2024?

#65

Post by Brajeshwar »

My personal blog/website (and a lot of my other small websites) are hosted on Github. Jekyll, the OG of SSG, manages them. Github also has a built-in editor that you can write directly in the browser. If you are starting from scratch, it should be pretty straight forward and easy.

I wrote an article on how I moved to this much simpler setup from WordPress after 15+ years https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/

You focus on the content, let Github take care of the tooling.

- https://docs.github.com/en/codespaces/the-githubdev-web-base...

- https://jekyllrb.com/docs/github-pages/

Re: Ask HN: What is the best way to author blogs in 2024?

#66

Post by Brajeshwar »

nicbou wrote: post #53

I run allaboutberlin.com for a living. I switched from Craft CMS to a homebrew static site generator (Markdown + Jekyll) and it was a game changer. Static sites are almost maintenance-free. They cost pennies to host. You work on your content using the tools that you love, if necessary offline. There are many excellent markdown editors and no CMS comes close. Everything is under source control and deploys with a push.…

All about Berlin is beautiful. I felt nice to know about the simple but powerful setup. I was all after CloudFlare pages with all the options a few years back and I experienced downtimes. I don't remember a single downtime in the last year or so with GitHub Pages. Of course, I use CloudFlare on top to greet the visitors.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best way to author blogs in 2024?

#67

Post by maddynator »

I use substack thinkingthrough.substack.com

I have hosted many in the past. Self hosted, wordpress, and a php version (I forgot what it was called)

The biggest problem with all those was dealing in spam comments and bad cross links.

Then I tried medium but it didn’t use to share subscriber emails.

Ended up migrating to Substack and been very happy with it for past 3 years

Re: Ask HN: What is the best way to author blogs in 2024?

#68

Post by tiffanyh »

maddynator wrote: post #67

I use substack thinkingthrough.substack.com I have hosted many in the past. Self hosted, wordpress, and a php version (I forgot what it was called) The biggest problem with all those was dealing in spam comments and bad cross links. Then I tried medium but it didn’t use to share subscriber emails. Ended up migrating to Substack and been very happy with it for past 3 years

Have you considered not having Comments?

That would completely eliminate spam and ~100% of your troubles.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best way to author blogs in 2024?

#69

Post by manuelmoreale »

prepend wrote: post #48
manuelmoreale wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know but I don’t want to mess with the site css since that’s literally the only table I have used in 7 years ahah I do want to make a better page for that list though so I appreciate you nudging me.

Could you just use a markdown table and have it generate from a csv of all your tools? Many ssgs will go this.

I could yes but when I added that page my site was as simple as it gets and it wasn’t worth the hassle to add a bunch of stuff for literally one table in a post out of almost 500 posts on the site.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best way to author blogs in 2024?

#70

Post by BasiliusCarver »

sakesun wrote: post #9

I'd suggest Astro ( https://astro.build/ )

Astro is awesome. It’s easy enough to get started with a template for a static site and flexible enough to build dynamic web apps.

My static personal site is Astro hosted on cloudflare pages https://github.com/ShaunLawrie/shaunlawrie.com

And I used their documentation template https://starlight.astro.build/ for my autogenerated docs on https://pwshspectreconsole.com/

I love having the ability to focus on the content and never having any blockers if I want to do something weird like embed a prebuilt react component for some edge cases.

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