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Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform
111–120 of 133 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 de…
Or you can just post the blog post to Reddit/HN with a link to those at the end of the article and let your readers comment there.
Yes but again, I prefer not to offload commenting to a third party because they can ban you(reddit can ban your subreddit) or just stop their service(Google Plus comments). If I am to use Reddit, I might as well just use Disqus or Facebook comments that I can embed on the site and my visitors won't even have to leave the site to comment on a post.
Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform
#113Earlier 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…
Those issues you mention can be easily solved with Jekyll or any other SSG. You do need a bit of hacking but the zero maintenance and raw speed of static sites is worth it IMO. I wouldn't go with Wordpress or any other CMS unless I absolutely needed permissions for multiple authors and such or if the author couldn't handle writing markdown and using a terminal command.
I am not sure how hacking Hugo or Jekyll could help me add commenting, searching etc. without using a third party service. Don't get me wrong, I still think they are great for small blogs and I use them myself as well for static sites but for a serious blog project or a money site, I think it is much more practical to go with a full blown solution like Wordpress. Regarding speed, with caching plugins and optionally with CDNs like cloudflare, Wordpress can be pretty fast. And for regular users who aren't tech savvy, hugo or jekyll are almost a no-go.
>if the author couldn't handle writing markdown and using a terminal command.
I would say this represents more than 99% of the bloggers. Even I prefer a WYSIWYG interface to markdown any day even though I consider myself somewhat tech-savvy. I find markdown to be very hacky when its a bit more than just headings and paragraphs(eg. nested lists with ordered list inside unordered list are so hard to do in markdown)
Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or you can just post the blog post to Reddit/HN with a link to those at the end of the article and let your readers comment there.
Yes but again, I prefer not to offload commenting to a third party because they can ban you(reddit can ban your subreddit) or just stop their service(Google Plus comments). If I am to use Reddit, I might as well just use Disqus or Facebook comments that I can embed on the site and my visitors won't even have to leave the site to comment on a post.
Hmm a 1st party commenting service can ban you too? What makes you feel safer w.r.t. getting banned, if you were to use say a service provided by Ghost, instead of e.g. Disqus?
A difference could be that, with a 1st party commenting service, your whole blog might get banned, instead of only the comments. (Depending on how banning gets implemented.)
Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 de…
Hmm interesting approach. What about reply notifications? If Jane replies to Joe's comment? Maybe with Zapier or ifttt it'd be possible to construct automatic reply notifications. ... But then, what about unsubscribe, hmm.
> saved to a Google spreadsheet(this needs to be made publicly readable)
Hmm, then, people's email addresses cannot be remembered, meaning, no reply notifications?
Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform
#116There's Zola, a bit like Hugo but written in Rust,
https://github.com/getzola/zola,
and, looking at the readme, a bit more features than Hugo, e.g. built in search (how does that work?).
Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes but again, I prefer not to offload commenting to a third party because they can ban you(reddit can ban your subreddit) or just stop their service(Google Plus comments). If I am to use Reddit, I might as well just use Disqus or Facebook comments that I can embed on the site and my visitors won't even have to leave the site to comment on a post.
Hmm a 1st party commenting service can ban you too? What makes you feel safer w.r.t. getting banned, if you were to use say a service provided by Ghost, instead of e.g. Disqus? A difference could be that, with a 1st party commenting service, your whole blog might get banned, instead of only the comments. (Depending on how banning gets implemented.)
Yes I agree. That's why I am a proponent of hosting your blog posts and comments yourself using Wordpress or other similar CMS on a VPS or a shared host.
Also, Ghost doesn't even have a commenting service of their own and one would need to rely on Disqus to add comments on a Ghost powered blog :)
Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was balking at $15 (for a static site) until I re-read and got /y right. Who offers that?
i use ramnode but you should check out lowendbox, they aggregate cheap vps services and deals
I am wary of the very cheap VPSs. I have seen many complaints about lack of customer support, long downtimes and poor performance for these ultra cheap VPSs on lowendbox. Vultr is generally my goto.
Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform
#119I 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.
I was also impressed by Netlify. I tried multiple other solutions to host my website but Netlify was my favorite at the end. Easy to setup, free and fast. I configured my account, access to Github, deployment, custom domain and SSL in 5 minutes.
Re: Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform
#120To 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…
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…
> virus affecting WordPress is much of a myth now
There's still few every year https://wordpress.org/news/category/security/
And that's just the core WordPress. Plugins and themes carry their own issues. Reputable or not.