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Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

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21–30 of 133 posts

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#23

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…

What is the benefit of wordpress over hosting yourself?

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#25
We’re working on a security focused managed Wordpress hosting platform with custom email and templates included. If you’d like to beta test it email admin@ sitebay.org and we’ll put you up for however long you need free. Thanks to YC summer startup school for hooking us up with some compute credits.

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#26

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?

Only to have a reusable header and footer.

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#27
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…

You can also combine the two and use a Ghost back end with an Eleventy front-end, fwiw: https://ghost.org/docs/api/v2/eleventy/

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#28
Static is great: more secure, stands up to very high loads, minimal maintenance.

I'd actually recommend writing in plain html+css at first, and then moving over to a static site generator once you have ~10 posts. You'll have a much better idea about what makes a good system at that point.

(I wrote my own static site generator after ~100 posts, which is longer than I'd recommend going!)

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#29
If you like writing some code, want full control (i.e. payload size, extensibility, theming, etc) with some OOTB features (i.e. zero setup, server rendering, static exporting, etc), and don't mind react or markdown, I'd recommend nextjs + netlify.

I find Gatsby and Hugo very powerful; but miss the simplicity of Jykell. Even if you don't think nextjs is great for blogging, it's still worth checking out! Their docs + getting started guide are some of the best.

For example; writing up a small MVP site to test out a business idea (https://www.hiredsomehelp.com/), it's in progress, but even still, only took about 15 minutes to push up via netlify.

That being said, I feel like all these new static site generators are terrific; a real sweet spot in web development in my opinion :)

Stay the hell away from Wordpress. It. Will. Get. You. When you least expect it ️

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#30
I used Wordpress for years. It was such a hassle constantly getting emails about patching. In the end I got fed up and moved to hugo hosted on netlify. Fantastic. Zero maintenance.
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