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

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

#11

Post by soared »

I wanted: cheap, fast, minimalist, and easy to publish. Blot.im does all those very well. I used to use wordpress for everything but wanted to write something in a word doc and have it show up on my website with no fuss. (Fast load times and minimalist design were nice too).

Blot.im is like $20/yr and my domain is similar through google domains. Set up takes like 10 mins, and you just drop word docs into dropbox. There is some depth if you want to get into site structure, file hosting, etc.

Here is my site: npzero.com. For ~$3/mo its awesome.

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

#12

Post by codegeek »

WordPress could be a good fit if you set it up correctly. First, don't use cheap shared hosting. Get a VPS and setup a LEMP stack with PHP-FPM. Use PHP 7.2. Then select a non-bloated blog theme and delete/uninstall unnecessary plugins other than some caching (I highly recommend WP Fastest Cache & Autoptimize). Also, configure nginx to do things like gzip etc. I can assure you it will load fast. I have started my blog on a $5 DigitalOcean VPS with WP and it loads superfast but I only do basic blogging.

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

#13

Post by dhogan »

shivammishra wrote: post #10

Try Ghost, I use it for my blog, has a markdown editor, a beautiful no BS admin UI, seo friendly out of the box

https://ghost.org/

You can host it yourself. Made by former Wordpress people that wanted to narrow the focus to be just about blogging (rather than a huge CMS).

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

#14

Post by billconan »

right now my blog is on medium.com. I used to be picky about theme too, but now I prefer something simple. Medium.com is ok to me in that sense. I choose it for its content and audience discovery network. It's more social than other blog platforms I have tried.

But I'm also building a developer-centric blog platform now. it will support markdown, equations and code embedding.

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

#15

Post by DoreenMichele »

I moved from hand coding my sites to Word Press to BlogSpot. I get a lot more done on BlogSpot and it's completely free.

I actually set up BlogSpot sites for other people for a few bucks. So if you want help with getting the look you want, I'm for hire.

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

#16

Post by esalogika »

theoctopus wrote: post #7
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.

Have you checked out the series at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtIqKaDlqXo&list=PLLAZ4kZ9dF... ? It doesn't cover everything exhaustively, but it is a relatively good introduction if you haven't seen it. Hugo's documentation is also helpful. I want to stick with hugo just for it's speed and learning it seems like a worthy investment.

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

#17

Post by sammosummo »

Artemix wrote: post #3

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 ow…

Thanks! Could you be specific about where to purchase a domain? Sorry I’m not an expert in web-based stuff.

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

#18

Post by sammosummo »

codegeek wrote: post #12

WordPress could be a good fit if you set it up correctly. First, don't use cheap shared hosting. Get a VPS and setup a LEMP stack with PHP-FPM. Use PHP 7.2. Then select a non-bloated blog theme and delete/uninstall unnecessary plugins other than some caching (I highly recommend WP Fastest Cache & Autoptimize). Also, configure nginx to do things like gzip etc. I can assure you it will load fast. I have started my blog…

Thanks for the advice, I’ll investigate.

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

#19

Post by zhte415 »

Blogs are chronological. I decided that I didn't want to be bounded by that and went with pmwiki.

In this format things can be chronological, can be topic based, pages can be a work in progress, no default. Markdown editing. Files are stored as text also, no database. Choice of themes though nothing like Wordpress.

I host on personal domain on a $5 DO droplet.

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

#20

Post by vfulco2 »

Check out the amazing work Yihui Xie and other R-luminati have done with R's version of markdown and the package "blogdown". Plenty of academic examples around and can get up and running quickly, securely, and for free if you wish.

https://bookdown.org/yihui/blogdown/

All the cool kids are using static sites these days.

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