Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How should I create my personal academic blog?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 32 posts

Ask HN: How should I create my personal academic blog?

#1

Post by sammosummo »

I’m a junior (ish) neuroscientist with some decent quantitative and coding skills. I want to create a personal website to share code, tutorials, opinions, those sorts of things. I would like the site to be quick to load and as small as possible; I’m not afraid to code and pay (a little) for hosting. Would HN readers like to inspire me by describing their blogging workflows?

To date I’ve tried two approaches, neither were ideal. (1) A WordPress site with Bluehost. This came with a domain and was extremely easy to use, the themes looked great, etc. The major downsides were that pages loaded really slowly and I was paying for features I would never use. (2) After a while I attempted to switched to Jekyll hosted at GitHub pages. The new site was quick to load and free, but I was uninspired by the available themes. I attempted to modify several of them but it was annoying as all hell Due to the lag between pushing a commit to GitHub and seeing the results on my webpage.

Re: Ask HN: How should I create my personal academic blog?

#2

Post by adrianN »

Anything other than a static site for a personal blog is madness imho. Personally I found writing markdown and using a Makefile and pandoc to generate the site to be good enough.

If the lag of pushing to Github to see your changes is annoying to you, you could just install jekyll and a simple web server locally to generate the site on your machine without having to push and wait for Github's magic to work.

Re: Ask HN: How should I create my personal academic blog?

#3

Post by Artemix »

Static websites are the way to go, and as for hosting, I personally find Netlify to be awesome, and well fit for static websites (my blog is built with a custom SSG, run by Netlify on every commit).

You can simply use git for versioning, FrontMatter for article metadata (like title, published status etc.), reStructuredText or Markdown for writeup, and whichever tool you may see fit.

If you don't want to build your own, Hexo, Hugo or Jekyll are well-known, but if you want something a bit more "fit" for you, I'd recommend checking out Metalsmith.

As for the website hosting, you have a lot of available options due to the simplicity of hosting some dumb HTML pages and medias.

- Git hosts, like Github, Gitlab (my favourite), Bitbucket

- Netlify, Surge

- Some shared web hosting, like the base offers at OVH: When you buy a domain name, you have, for free, 10MB of space for a shared web hosting, which can easily serve HTML files. Buy a .xyz domain for less than 3€/year and have free hosting.

Re: Ask HN: How should I create my personal academic blog?

#4

Post by jppope »

I would definitely go with a SSG (static site generator)... sounds like you might just need to do some custom theming. Personally I enjoy coding that sort of thing for myself... but if you didn't feel like doing the work you could grab a theme from themeforest or similar for $10 and put it into your SSG. please update the URL to this post ... I love reading well built academic blogs :)

Re: Ask HN: How should I create my personal academic blog?

#6

Post by fundamental »

Neuro is a cool area to be in right now. Are you going into the computational or more of the biological side?

I just got out of the computational side a short while ago. I didn't blog about it much since there is a lot of background which you need to explain for most numeric methods (not to mention all the time needed to provide good instructive data visualizations).

I've tried a few different iterations of posting content to my site. Initially it was editing raw HTML, then a small custom common lisp app, then there was a short lived rails project which I forked from the original dev, then there was a brief stint using ikiwiki, and now I'm using jekyll on my site for the blog side of things.

Per the current workflow I typically get a seed idea when I'm actively working on a topic and have a bunch of loose notes. Then I formulate the core idea of what can be conveyed to readers (and myself when I look at things months/years later) with pencil/paper. Next I typically transcribe things to an AsciiDoc document, build figures with Julia scripts or in a jupyter notebook, and edit a bunch. Once things are looking decent I use jekyll's auto-rebuild feature and built-in server for semi-final tweaks/formatting. Finally I commit it and verify that everything looks fine on my remote server. Some of the better posts I've made are collected at http://fundamental-code.com/ to give you an idea for the results.

Re: Ask HN: How should I create my personal academic blog?

#7

Post by theoctopus »

esalogika wrote: post #5

I've started to use http://gohugo.io/ and like it more than anything I've used earlier, including Jekyll.

I wanted to like Hugo (especially with its ridiculous speed compared to Jekyll), but I found that any time I wanted to do something slightly unusual I had to spend far too long finding what template file name I was supposed to use, mostly by trial and error. With Jekyll I just specify the template name in the front matter.

Re: Ask HN: How should I create my personal academic blog?

#8

Post by swaggyBoatswain »

My site runs on WordPress and sitegrounds, it's very fast. But the learning curve is higher than netlify and jekyll due to having to learn WordPress.

My site has too much garbage content I wrote on it at the moment (in hindsight I wrote whatever came to mind). Half my pages aren't even exactly done yet.

I'm going to focus less on writing opinionated articles, more on useful articles and or tutorials on there or well thought out reflections related to lessons learned.

Short term I'm going fix minor things now, write more useful content now. Long term do a 2ndary blog redesign from scratch, writing my own custom functions.php file.

I have used jekyll,hexo and hugo, but it's really convenient to just be able to download any plugin you want with wordpress. I'd rather focus on writing than site design ,SEO, analytics, integrations, etc.

Also it's nice having a useful skill that always has a market use.

My site is on my userhandle if your curious, would like feedback too.

Re: Ask HN: How should I create my personal academic blog?

#9

Post by halzenwick »

You are right with Jekyll, but quite on the wrong street with GitHub pages. It takes time to get your changes up and running, I would say that'd be around ~15 minutes, and I believe that depends on worker's availability on the GitHub server to "compile" or "render" your Jekyll blog.

My experience currently is with Hugo. I have a DigitalOcean (DO) VPS that I use to host my Hugo blog.

The workflow is as follows:

1. Commit and push from local to my VPS.

2. My VPS receives the commit, a git hook runs server-side build for my Hugo blog. The script is pretty short.

3. Server finishes build process, new changes are reflected.

Feel free to experiment with that others are suggesting here, e.g. Netlify. Jsyk, I pay $5/month for my DO VPS and that is $0.50 cheaper than my everyday coffee.

Post reply on HN