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Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

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Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#61

Post by tehlike »

michaelanckaert wrote: post #53
bishalb wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Static blogs are ok until it's a smallish blog with not much content or many visitors. But can't recommend it for a serious blog proect. One would have to jump through the hoops and use hacks for even the basic things like commenting, searching etc. And forget about slightly advanced stuff like popular posts, related posts etc without some Hugo or Jekyll hacking. WordPress has the lowest barrier to entry as most shar…

I agree that getting things like comments and search running on a static site is a lot work. But I’m of the opinion your personal site doesn’t need those things. Rarely have I seen interesting discussion happen in the comments of a personal blog. All great discussion is held in aggregators like HN. Similarly search is best left to specialized platforms such as a search engine. Blogging software may have decent search…

Except if you are ayende.com/blog

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#62

Post by nstart »

bishalb wrote: post #47
nstart wrote: post #31

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 ge…

Does Ghost support commenting yet? Can't imagine a blog without a commenting feature.

Ghost itself chose to not solve commenting. They give you flexibility to install commenting via js or however else you see fit by allowing editing of templates.

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#63

Post by [deleted] »

bishalb wrote: post #47
nstart wrote: post #31

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 ge…

Does Ghost support commenting yet? Can't imagine a blog without a commenting feature.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#64

Post by bishalb »

DavidDarnes wrote: post #59
bishalb wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Ghost support commenting yet? Can't imagine a blog without a commenting feature.

There's several comment integrations you can choose from https://ghost.org/integrations/community/

That is exactly my point. With Ghost, I would have to resort to a third party service to have something so essential as a commenting system for a blog. Comments are a part of your blog's content and it is necessary to have your own control over it, as these third party providers can shut down or just ban your site for any reason(take Google Plus comments for instance which many blogs were using as a commenting platform for their blogs). Relying on a third party provider for comments should be a choice, not a compulsion.

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#65

Post by bishalb »

nstart wrote: post #62
bishalb wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Ghost support commenting yet? Can't imagine a blog without a commenting feature.

Ghost itself chose to not solve commenting. They give you flexibility to install commenting via js or however else you see fit by allowing editing of templates.

I wonder what the motivation for that would have been. There seem to be many users of Ghost who are asking for this functionality and I don't think it's a big deal for the Ghost team to implement that. I think it is not a good idea to rely on a third party for commenting especially if you have a thriving blog. They could ban you or just shut down services(Google Plus comments), some insert their own ads(Disqus) and so on.

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#66

Post by johnonolan »

bishalb wrote: post #65
nstart wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ghost itself chose to not solve commenting. They give you flexibility to install commenting via js or however else you see fit by allowing editing of templates.

I wonder what the motivation for that would have been. There seem to be many users of Ghost who are asking for this functionality and I don't think it's a big deal for the Ghost team to implement that. I think it is not a good idea to rely on a third party for commenting especially if you have a thriving blog. They could ban you or just shut down services(Google Plus comments), some insert their own ads(Disqus) and s…

Glad to hear it's no big deal to solve it :) https://github.com/tryghost - looking forward to your PR!

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#67

Post by DavidDarnes »

bishalb wrote: post #64
DavidDarnes wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's several comment integrations you can choose from https://ghost.org/integrations/community/

That is exactly my point. With Ghost, I would have to resort to a third party service to have something so essential as a commenting system for a blog. Comments are a part of your blog's content and it is necessary to have your own control over it, as these third party providers can shut down or just ban your site for any reason(take Google Plus comments for instance which many blogs were using as a commenting platfo…

Aren't comments a response to your blog content and not part of the content itself? Having the option to use a multitude of commenting services seems like lots of control surely?

If you look at the various options being suggested in the comments here you'll see many of them don't come with comments out of the box. Jekyll, Gatsby, Hugo, 11ty all require you to use a third party service or roll your own.

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#68

Post by bishalb »

michaelanckaert wrote: post #53
bishalb wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Static blogs are ok until it's a smallish blog with not much content or many visitors. But can't recommend it for a serious blog proect. One would have to jump through the hoops and use hacks for even the basic things like commenting, searching etc. And forget about slightly advanced stuff like popular posts, related posts etc without some Hugo or Jekyll hacking. WordPress has the lowest barrier to entry as most shar…

I agree that getting things like comments and search running on a static site is a lot work. But I’m of the opinion your personal site doesn’t need those things. Rarely have I seen interesting discussion happen in the comments of a personal blog. All great discussion is held in aggregators like HN. Similarly search is best left to specialized platforms such as a search engine. Blogging software may have decent search…

Sure, for a personal site or a portfolio site, they are not even needed. I also use Hugo for one of my sites, which is just a 5 page website. It is great for such stuff. But for a personal blog, I think both of those things(commenting and search) are absolutely essential.

>Rarely have I seen interesting discussion happen in the comments of a personal blog.

I disagree with this and even more so if we are talking about programming blogs. A lot of interesting discussions and rebuttals happen in the comment sections.

Regarding outsourcing search to a dedicated search engine, its a mixed bag. 99% of the users don't even know about the `site:` and `filetype:` stuff. You also have the option of embedding Google site search but the first four results are ads which isn't very ideal. Wordpress search is decent out of the box but if you want something advanced, it has some nice plugins that allow advanced searching with fuzzy matches.

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#69

Post by majewsky »

bishalb wrote: post #68
michaelanckaert wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that getting things like comments and search running on a static site is a lot work. But I’m of the opinion your personal site doesn’t need those things. Rarely have I seen interesting discussion happen in the comments of a personal blog. All great discussion is held in aggregators like HN. Similarly search is best left to specialized platforms such as a search engine. Blogging software may have decent search…

Sure, for a personal site or a portfolio site, they are not even needed. I also use Hugo for one of my sites, which is just a 5 page website. It is great for such stuff. But for a personal blog, I think both of those things(commenting and search) are absolutely essential. >Rarely have I seen interesting discussion happen in the comments of a personal blog. I disagree with this and even more so if we are talking about…

> But for a personal blog, I think both of those things(commenting and search) are absolutely essential.

What I've found to work well for commenting is to put an e-mail address on the page where people can send their comments. When there is a good comment, I put an update in the article.

The main advantage of this approach is that it weeds out garbage responses. By making it ever so slightly harder for people to post a comment, they are forced to take an extra few seconds to consider if they really have something meaningful to add.

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#70

Post by majewsky »

susam wrote: post #34

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` director…

FYI: That's a disclosure, not a disclaimer. A disclaimer would be something like "This project has been written by my wife, so I don't take any responsibility for its quality", which is clearly not your intention.
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