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Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

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Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#31

Post by nstart »

Highly recommend the ghost platform. It gets out of your way and lets you focus on writing. Nothing else. You can customize it as much as you want but it's primary focus is getting you to writing first.

This is assuming you are willing to pay for at least your own server. Their hosted option is also great and highly recommended if you want to just start writing before thinking of customizations.

I find static site generators to be awesome but generally a hindrance to the flow of wanting to start writing spontaneously. More often than not, more time goes into figuring out the perfect workflow for the blog system rather than writing. Caveats, YMMV etc apply :)

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#32

Post by dceddia »

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...

Ruby? -> Jekyll[1]

Go? -> Hugo[2]

JavaScript? -> Gatsby[3] or Eleventy[4]

Some other language? -> google "[language] static site generator" and see how many GitHub stars it has.

Once you've figured that out, most of the hosts support custom domains. Netlify[5] is free, and works very well. It's what I use currently. I used to host my site on DigitalOcean[6], but Netlify is definitely more painless, especially from a devops/patching standpoint. Plus it has a CDN so your site would be faster.

[0] https://daveceddia.com/

[1] https://jekyllrb.com/

[2] https://gohugo.io/

[3] https://www.gatsbyjs.org/

[4] https://www.11ty.io/

[5] https://www.netlify.com/

[6] https://www.digitalocean.com/

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#33

Post by chipotle_coyote »

mraudiobook_com wrote: post #23
jamesponddotco wrote: post #5

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?

The OP's footnote for WordPress linked to wordpress.org, which suggests they meant the self-hostable software.

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#34

Post by susam »

If you like writing Python code, I recommend https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite (makesite.py). As the README says, it is a simple, lightweight, and magic-free static blog generator. The entire static blog generator code is in a single file named makesite.py.

Add your content to the `content` directory. Then run `python3 makesite.py` to generate the static blog. It writes the generated blog to the `_site` directory. Finally copy this directory to wherever you want to serve your blog from, e.g., GitHub repo with GitHub pages enabled, virtual private server, cloud storage, etc.

It works pretty well out of the box and it is highly customizable too because doing so involves just modifying the existing Python code or writing your own Python code.

Disclaimer: This project has been written by my wife. I use it myself to render my static blog at https://susam.in/.

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#35

Post by imwally »

I've been using pelican [1] with S3 for my blog [2]. It comes with a nice makefile that handles the generation (markdown -> HTML), dev server (localhost:8000 that regenerates files upon modification) and deployment to S3 (uses s3cmd along with API keys to upload to a designated bucket). It offers GitHub, ftp, ssh, and dropbox options for deployment as well, but I've never tried them.

[1] https://blog.getpelican.com

[2] http://nil.wallyjones.com

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#36

Post by nyolfen »

dceddia wrote: post #32

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 plenty of very straightforward theme tweaking is possible).

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#37

Post by rukshn »

Sadly even though it is not popular in HN WordPress is the best for you.

Easy to set up and try and you can customize it as well. With lots of plugins for everything.

You can go with the paid WordPress.com and they will handle all the updates for you.

Static sites are good but when it is time for SEO and customisation you will realize that it can get really painful in a static site generator.

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#39

Post by gexla »

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 generator. Then you don't finish over the weekend and have to screw with it the following weekend as well. Then you finally publish the thing with "good enough but not quite what you wanted" functionality and let it sit there for weeks. Then you come back to it and scratch your head trying to remember how to publish / build / deploy it (or you cycle through your shell history hoping the commands are still in there.) One day you decide that you want to add that functionality you left out the first time and find that you have to relearn everything you had to learn to build the thing in the first place. Sure, you vaguely remember the easy stuff, but you have to refresh on the easy stuff to get back to the harder stuff which you never had time to figure out from the beginning.

Anyone been there? ;) In this case, I'm thinking of Hugo, but I imagine it's much the same for all the others.

With Wordpress you get enough balance of customization and ease of use that you can just get on with it. If you need a bit of help, then get on Fiverr or similar and have someone throw you pointers (or just do it for you) to save you time in getting past tricky parts.

There's a reason loads of sites on the internet are using WP. People use it to GTD and move on to something else.

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#40

Post by edude03 »

pknopf wrote: post #19
save_ferris wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I hate to be negative about products others have built as I tend to believe that if it "sucks" it's because I'm not the target audience.

That said, I am happy to hear I'm not the only one with this sentiment.

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