I recommend using Hugo for the site generation (there's lots of themes, it's customizable, you can write in markdown, it has WordPress import and it's very easy to get started) and hosting the files on GitHub pages.
Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?
31–40 of 115 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?
#32I am really interested in the 'buggy'ness of WP. Especially when you basically would be served with a static website, I do wonder which 'bugs' in WP are annoying you so much.
Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?
#33I personally use Hugo + GitHub actions to do the build for a major project of mine that benefits from hugo's taxonomy system. I did this after porting my blog over to Hugo as well.
I personally have avoided Jekyll for the primary reason of "Ruby is a non-starter".
Downside to Hugo is that the Go templating language is... interesting, to say the least.
Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?
#34This sounds like a job for Hugo, GitHub and Netlify. Simple. Easy. Free. You can even set up a form and get comments into your email. (Then just manually copy/paste into the markdown and commit it again and force a rebuild). I use that setup and I love it.
> just manually I would find this tedious for any number of comments. Is there a better way?
Don't host comments. The day when comments tended to have any value on the web passed ages ago. No one blogs anymore, and no one reads blogs anymore, so most of the traffic you get is just going to be bots or cancerous trolls anyway - if you're lucky enough to get any actual human readers at all in the latter case.
Or use a hosted service like Disqus or an alternative if you want comments, but the better solution is not to bother.
Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?
#35You can use GitHub pages with Jekyll. Easy to setup and run, there are a lot of custom Jekyll blog themes available online.
Custom domain with private repo costs few dollars per month.
Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?
#36Write the post in markdown then convert them to HTML with pandoc. Write a bash script which walk into every directory to convert and you have a minimalist blog engine.
This is what I do. Pandoc to convert the markdown files into standalone HTML files. I use a custom HTML template to style the page a bit and add meta tags etc.
Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?
#37Static site using either Jekyll or Hugo (having tried both over years I'd recommend Hugo) and deploy to github/gitlab pages with custom domain.
Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?
#38A key take away from many years of running a blog as a static website is that may add friction to your process. Unless you have some sort of CI/CD going on, the chances are that one can only post from their own computer, while using something like Wordpress allows them to post from anywhere — including their mobile devices — which leads to a ton of serendipity. You might want to evaluate if posting from multiple devi…
I think the rise of static site generators has pretty much gotten rid of this as a problem.
Regarding posting only from your computer, you can just use a git repo that triggers builds on push.
You can see many options for them here https://jamstack.org/generators/
Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?
#39I made a minimal Jekyll theme. No advanced CSS or extra JS, and super light weight so any page loads quickly
Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?
#40I wrote my own a while back.
https://github.com/johan-bolmsjo/blog_of_markdown
It's built using make, small bash scripts and two Go support programs. I think there are tons of similar generators out there as writing one is pretty easy. Probably more sensible to look into using something like Hugo. For me it was easier to write the minimal generator than figuring out how to configure Hugo as I like it.