If your goal is to just put something out there, and not worry much about anything or learning fancy stuff, I suggest Hugo+Github+Netlify.
Easy to set up, tons of blog posts out there, and all the goodies (CI, SSL, basic theme) come free.
Mine is created like that as well: dorwi.com
Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?
51–60 of 115 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?
#52A 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/
CI/CD pipelines is not exactly complicated, but how do you handle multi-user permissions on a git repository? You sure can with git hooks if you run your own git server, but with an integrated solution like Github it's simply impossible.
Some apps like Netlify (are there others?) presented solutions but are unfortunately to my knowledge not selfhostable.
Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?
#53Jekyll + GitHub Pages = Static blog with free hosting You could substitute Jekyll for other supported frameworks. Pros: * Markdown (so super flexible) * Git as the backbone (free CRM, free history) * Customisable (if you know how to code) * Free templates Cons: * Jekyll is a bit of a pain on Windows but should be fine on Linux/Mac * Images might not load super quick from GitHub's servers * You need to know basic Git
Another con: you depend on Microsoft's good will to serve your blog, as they own Github. That kind of workflow is amazing but you should probably consider going with a non-profit software forge that runs on donations and will protect (y)our interests (like codeberg.org for example).
Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?
#54A while ago I saw Linux kernel people[0] using Writefreely[1] so I tried it and I've been using it ever since.
It's a bit clunky, initial Docker based deployment is not straightforward, but I like it. It's using Markdown, supports ActivityPub out of the box, and has static blog feeling even though it's not.
Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?
#55Devii is an interesting project I contributed to after looking for a solution to the exact same problem a while back.
The owner of the repo seems like a great person and is open for contributions if you want to get involved.
It's based on Next.js, so React/TypeScript, your blog posts are in Markdown and it generates an RSS feed of your posts. Could be a way to get off the ground quickly?
Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?
#56I 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.
Not OP, but maybe the new over-designed/over-engineered Gutenberg UI may feel slow, overkill and may only brings loads of unnecessary complexity, especially for someone who want to keep a simple blog, or is used to write his posts in simple markdown.
Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> just manually I would find this tedious for any number of comments. Is there a better way?
I’ve thought about writing a AWS Lambda that you POST the comment form to which then adds a file to the git repo that then Hugo can grab when Netlify is building the site, but that seems rather complex and I think it’d take me a lot more time than just doing it manually. But I haven’t found a good, lightweight, privacy focussed way to solve this yet.
I'm also interested in this (although not AWS): what would be interesting would be a protocol-first approach where we can come up with several interoperable implementations. i personally would go with a simple PHP script, but i can see reasons for which someone would use another tech that's closer to the rest of their stack.
Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?
#58I am evaluating these options now: - https://github.com/alaq/adrien.sh for NextJS - https://github.com/sw-yx/swyxkit or Svelte - https://github.com/SimeonGriggs/simeonGriggs for Remix All have designs I like. I am only familiar with NextJS and find it a pleasure to work with.
Why all the JS/TS though? Part of what's great about a static site is serving simple HTML/CSS pages that look great, degrade gracefully, and don't hog users CPU/RAM like JS applets do.
With Next/Svelte/Remix you can only ship HTML/CSS if you want. Reason to use those frameworks is that I find their mental model to fit nicely for progressive enhancement. For my blog, I plan to have interactive content via MDX or something similar so there will always be optional JS involved.
Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?
#59A 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 just do git push to post, the site generator does the rest (including diffs and optimized change rendering in my case).
You can git push from anything these days, including an iPad (which is basically what I do).
(edit: why the downvotes?)
Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?
#60The browser is very forgiving at parsing HTML. If you want you can write reaaaally minimal "markdown-like" HTML. Writing a blog post can be as simple as
$ vim hello.html
Hello World
Lorem ipsum