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Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

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Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#11

Post by save_ferris »

davewasthere wrote: post #7

Gatsby, Hugo or plain(ish) Jekkyl. Simple, clean, fast. Updates and viruses are a non-issue. Depends what plugins you're talking about, but if you're a non-programmer/dev type, then you're probably better off using Wordpress as a blogging platform if some serious customisation is wanted.

Tried gatsby recently and I hate it. Their choice to use graphql for a static site generator makes no sense to me.

Trying to build anything beyond a super generic blog is a huge chore. Hugo has a much, much better community IMO

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#12

Post by saagarjha »

tomlockwood wrote: post #8

Github Pages + Jekyll. Can use it with your custom domain, pretty customisable, and since its a static site, relatively secure.

That’s what I use, but one word of warning: if you rely on GitHub to generate the pages for you, you can’t use any custom plugins aside from the ones they’ve whitelisted.

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#13

Post by ibudiallo »

This may not be for everyone but here is what I did.

I wrote 5 articles that I thought were interesting. Then I bought a domain name, wrote a php script to serve them. (If url1 do x, if url2 do y) nothing fancy.

Only when I saw that I could sustain writing regularly I started worrying about the platform. And there is no best platform, only the one you are familiar with.

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#14

Post by dangoldin »

saagarjha wrote: post #12
tomlockwood wrote: post #8

Github Pages + Jekyll. Can use it with your custom domain, pretty customisable, and since its a static site, relatively secure.

That’s what I use, but one word of warning: if you rely on GitHub to generate the pages for you, you can’t use any custom plugins aside from the ones they’ve whitelisted.

I had a similar issue - turns out you can generate it statically locally and commit the generated HTML files: https://help.github.com/en/articles/using-a-static-site-gene...

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#16

Post by bdcravens »

ibudiallo wrote: post #13

This may not be for everyone but here is what I did. I wrote 5 articles that I thought were interesting. Then I bought a domain name, wrote a php script to serve them. (If url1 do x, if url2 do y) nothing fancy. Only when I saw that I could sustain writing regularly I started worrying about the platform. And there is no best platform, only the one you are familiar with.

Curious, why didn't you just make it a static site then?

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#18

Post by hamaluik »

After years of trying different things, I found something that works great for me, though I suspect you’ll have to try a few things until you find what is comfortable for you.

I publish my blog as a static site served by nginx on a $5 / node (which also hosts a dozen other things—I don’t get much traffic). Every once in a while I ssh in and run an apt upgrade but no updates to manage beyond that. I use https://getstatik.com/ to generate the site from markdown files. I’m surprised it hasn’t caught on more given how flexible it lets you be with defining how your site should work. The whole thing is stored on git and I can deploy with a push to my server remote.

That said if you want to focus on writing I would start with something as simple as ghost of medium to see if you’re actually as into writing as you think.

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#19

Post by pknopf »

save_ferris wrote: post #11
davewasthere wrote: post #7

Gatsby, Hugo or plain(ish) Jekkyl. Simple, clean, fast. Updates and viruses are a non-issue. Depends what plugins you're talking about, but if you're a non-programmer/dev type, then you're probably better off using Wordpress as a blogging platform if some serious customisation is wanted.

Tried gatsby recently and I hate it. Their choice to use graphql for a static site generator makes no sense to me. Trying to build anything beyond a super generic blog is a huge chore. Hugo has a much, much better community IMO

I agree. Gatsby is one of the worst products I have ever worked with. The code itself isn't bad, but the tech stack and UX is horrible. It's the epitome of hipster JavaScript.

I'm amazed that they got funding for it...

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#20

Post by gHosts »

yagodragon wrote: post #6
gitgud wrote: post #2

If you really want to avoid updates and viruses, you need to go static . There's hundreds of static site generators out there. I recommend [1] hexo, for it's simplicity. You can write in markdown files and generate a static blog for static hosting. But [2] Gatsby is another similar framework, but it uses React. [1] https://hexo.io/ [2] https://www.gatsbyjs.org

Another static site generator that is gaining traction is Eleventy[1]. It's very small and simple, entirely build in js, supports most templating languages you already know and it's more flexible than GatbyJS. For a more complete blogging solution, though, I'd recommend Ghost.[2]. If you're building a small blog just for fun you should definitely go static and scratch your hacker's itch. [1] https://www.11ty.io [2] h…

I feel...... spuriously invoked
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