91–100 of 133 posts
If you don't care as much about customization or plugins, then WriteFreely is quite nice.
If you're willing to put in a fair amount of coding and design effort, you could use a static site generator, backed by Netlify as the host.
Ghost https://ghost.org/ https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost is best for the need you've described, it's no-nonsense fast as lightning, unlike bloated WordPress.
Hosted Ghost is really expensive. Self-hosted Ghost is a pain in the ass to maintain. Disclaimer: the above is my own experience, and not necessarily that of others.
To avoid updates and viruses, go with a static site. There are a ton of good static site generators out there. My blog[0] runs on Jekyll[1]. Hugo[2] is a popular option. I've fiddled with Gatsby[3] and heard good things. Eleventy[4] looks as close to Jekyll-but-in-JavaScript as I've seen. Since you want to be able to customize it, I'd probably take the static site generator's language into account. Do you like... Rub…
big props to hugo for using a static binary without some insane dependency chain, i'm really pleased with it. hosting my blog on a $15/y vps with a vanity domain and hugo was one of my first projects to learn to manage a server, and i gave up with jekyll after way too much struggling with ruby. that said i'm not sure how it fares wrt to plugins, i think it's pretty vanilla in terms of user-facing features (though ple…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do people write their own static site generators because they're bored, or because templating is always annoying and it's more fun to write your own than learn a new system? None of them do anything novel, or particularly better than all the others. They just have some quirk that makes people choose them. "This one is a static binary!" "This one uses a specific programming language!" "This one uses a unique templatin…
> Do people write their own static site generators because they're bored, or because templating is always annoying and it's more fun to write your own than learn a new system? In my case [0] because I wanted to generate the site from a single Markdown file. I wrote a Perl program to accomplish this. Then I got bored and wrote a Python version as well. And it works, I have kept up posting to my blog [1] for 150+ days…
Did you consider pandoc?
To avoid updates and viruses, go with a static site. There are a ton of good static site generators out there. My blog[0] runs on Jekyll[1]. Hugo[2] is a popular option. I've fiddled with Gatsby[3] and heard good things. Eleventy[4] looks as close to Jekyll-but-in-JavaScript as I've seen. Since you want to be able to customize it, I'd probably take the static site generator's language into account. Do you like... Rub…
While it doesn't seem very popular in Hacker News, I think WordPress [1] is an excellent platform for a blog. The community is terrific, there is a tremendous amount of documentation out there, and it is entirely customisable. If you go with the managed hosting route, most companies handle security and updates for you, so you can focus on writing and leave everything technical to someone else. I am working on one mys…
To avoid updates and viruses, go with a static site. There are a ton of good static site generators out there. My blog[0] runs on Jekyll[1]. Hugo[2] is a popular option. I've fiddled with Gatsby[3] and heard good things. Eleventy[4] looks as close to Jekyll-but-in-JavaScript as I've seen. Since you want to be able to customize it, I'd probably take the static site generator's language into account. Do you like... Rub…
It's been running like a charm for ~1 year.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hosted Ghost is really expensive. Self-hosted Ghost is a pain in the ass to maintain. Disclaimer: the above is my own experience, and not necessarily that of others.
How is it a pain to maintain? I’m using the Dockerized version and apart from increasing the version number in the Docker Compose file there’s 0 maintenance in the last years of running it.
I ran into several problems writing Ansible automation to spin up and configure a Ghost server. Eventually I gave up and used a different blog engine that was more amenable to automation.
Granted, this may just be a low motivation on my part to use Ghost, in favor of just getting something up and running.
If you have a gun pointed to your head with the requirements you have listed then you go Wordpress. Updates aren't difficult. I'm not sure about plugins (I haven't used WP in a long time,) but you can set the core Wordpress updates to be automatic. It will handle everything you need. If after a week of coding you arrive to the weekend and think "I want to do a bunch more coding" then you go with a static site generat…
Exactly. Outside of the nerd bubble of HN, Wordpress is still the defacto choice for a blogging platform. Nothing comes close to WordPress in terms of customization freedom and "zero to deploy".
Cost is essentially free since it piggy backs on a VPS that would otherwise be running anyway.
While it doesn't seem very popular in Hacker News, I think WordPress [1] is an excellent platform for a blog. The community is terrific, there is a tremendous amount of documentation out there, and it is entirely customisable. If you go with the managed hosting route, most companies handle security and updates for you, so you can focus on writing and leave everything technical to someone else. I am working on one mys…
Wordpress falls over under an even modest amount of traffic without jumping through a bunch of caching plugin hoops, it’s written in PHP, it requires dynamic hosting, and it regularly has major security issues. It’s not good.
I will never, ever, ever advocate for running Wordpress for much of anything, but I would also argue that any nontrivial piece of software has a fair number of security issues and that Wordpress vulnerabilities are particularly visible because of how widely used it is and the public-facing nature of the software.