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Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

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Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#81

Post by bishalb »

johnonolan wrote: post #66
bishalb wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I see you are a founder of Ghost. Maybe I would have given it a shot if I were proficient in Node or JS :) But I remember creating toy blog app that had commenting feature, some years back.

Like the GP, I was also under the impression that Ghost doesn't support commenting by design but you are suggesting otherwise. I find it hard to believe that adding commenting system(something that all major CMSs have had since forever) would be that technically challenging that it hasn't been added even six years after its first release.

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#82

Post by bishalb »

majewsky wrote: post #69
bishalb wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is a good idea but would people really want to leave the site to open their email client and make a comment?

I had once thought about a different approach - Creating a Google form (for each blog post) and then embedding it on the blog post. Then whenever anyone submits a comment via the form, it would get saved to a Google spreadsheet(this needs to be made publicly readable). The unwanted comments can just be deleted from the spreadsheet. The contents of this spreadsheet can then be obtained in a JSON format and displayed on the blog post using Javascript.

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#83

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#84

Post by ggoss »

I also wrote my own static site generator using Python [0] that I use to generate my personal site [2], and that I introduced as a blog post here [1].

Posts are written in Markdown with simple formatting, templates are HTML/CSS with Jinja2 templating, and it includes support for things like automatic table-of-contents generation for posts, blog index pagination, tags, related posts (manually tagged, for now), comments (using utteranc.es and GitHub issues), and automatic image compression/scaling/caching (between builds). Eventually, I intend to add things automated 'related posts' list generation, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

[0]: https://github.com/ggoss/sitegen

[1]: https://garrettgoss.com/blog/2019/05/sitegen.html

[2]: https://garrettgoss.com

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#85

Post by randomsearch »

I’ve spent countless days trying various static site generators and alternatives. I was trying to replace a self host Wordpress site with github pages to save money.

I am now planning to instead build a new wordpress site and self host somewhere cheaper. WP is a PITA from a security point of view, but the alternatives are IMO uniformly terrible. WordPress just works and has a good ecosystem of plugins and themes.

I was really disappointed with the static site generators. I’d love to write one that works as I’d expect - a simple way to turn markdown into a site with a single config file and python command, no complex setup, no using git as a package manager etc. with a ready set of auto-generated based on themes for other packages - but this will be a future project.

It would look something like:

/pages - contains markdown pages /posts - markdown posts /themes - one subdir per theme /output - generated html

To generation html “ssg” in the root dir.

The themes would be anything you like, with very few template tags. The markdown would be translated to simple html and inserted in the files.

  pip install ssg
  create a page in /posts with a title and body
  ssg
  open output/index.html

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#87

Post by michaelanckaert »

majewsky wrote: post #69
bishalb wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm also a fan of the 'email me your comments' approach. The extra effort required acts as an extra filter that is often welcome.

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#88

Post by bovermyer »

PatrolX wrote: post #24

Ghost https://ghost.org/ https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost is best for the need you've described, it's no-nonsense fast as lightning, unlike bloated WordPress.

Hosted Ghost is really expensive.

Self-hosted Ghost is a pain in the ass to maintain.

Disclaimer: the above is my own experience, and not necessarily that of others.

Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

#89

Post by bovermyer »

bishalb wrote: post #50
DoreenMichele wrote: post #4

Humorously, you can (probably) do all that with BlogSpot.

Blogspot is still a very good platform. If I am not hosting it myself, I would choose a Blogspot blog over a GitHub pages one anyday. And blogspot also allows advertisements which is great.

I would argue that advertisements are not, in fact, great.

But Blogspot as a blogging platform is still a viable choice.

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