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Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?

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Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?

#61
I have started using vite, quick example of what I built - this is really just a document site but uses markdown and can be far more complex if needed - it is static though

https://pioneer.mymailbox.site/

Link to vite

https://vitepress.vuejs.org/

The deployment can be as simple as one command, in my case

npm run docs:build && scp -r docs/.vitepress/dist/* dev://var/www/pioneer.mymailbox.site/web

Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?

#62
post #34
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

As someone who has a public email written on their blog, i've found the signal/noise ratio in the emails i reply to be very good. Of course, if you have a public HTTP form you're gonna have more SPAM, but most SPAM is fully automated and will not pass a simple "what's 2 + 2" CAPTCHA.

If you need better vetting, consider using webmention/ActivityPub federation and allowlisting individual hosts for automatic approval. There is definitely spam on such protocols too, but they tend to come from the same domain/IP so denylisting is very efficient in dealing with it.

Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?

#63

Jekyll + 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).

GitHub sites were in place long before the acquisition. (I'm an MS FTE now, but have been using GitHub since the beginning and am a bit weirded out by this perception that corporate ownership is a taint of some kind.)

Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?

#64
post #59
post #19

A 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?)

Yes, that is what I said. It can be done, but it is not as trivial as posting on a wordpress-based blog. You have to setup some sort of CI/CD workflow and be able to do git stuff from other devices. It is up to the OP if they want to go through that route.

Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?

#65
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the clear answer. I've previously heard of server-side rendering for JS frameworks but i was certainly not aware that several frameworks supported it, and that some people like you actually cared :)

Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?

#66

I use Zola[1]. Single binary, simple structure, minimal frontmatter. 1. https://getzola.org

zola is great! Some caveats: full translations still require workarounds, and nested macros are not a thing. But it's making great progress and certainly tera templates (jinja-like) are much easier to deal with than go templates.

Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?

#67
I used multiple static site generators and in 2021 I stumbled upon Zola [1] (written in Rust) and it worked really nicely. One neat little feature I like is that you could have the theme separated or as part of your site. For the theme I made a very simple html template that relies on default browser styling as much as possible. Feel free to check it out [2]

1: https://www.getzola.org/

2: https://log.beshr.com/thelog/

Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?

#68

I 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.

The old UI is still available and there are plugins which hide the whole of Gutenberg.

I don't use Gutenberg but I don't think it is over-engineered, I think a block-based approach is a sensible way forward.

Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?

#69
I've written my own theme for getzola.org SSG based on water.css. It doesn't have all the widgets you can think of (though it could be extended easily), but it's got fair documentation [0] and is flexible enough to provide for my personal blog (staticadventures.netlib.re) and two collective sites (fr.tild3.org, joinjabber.org).

I'm not exactly recommending to use it as i make no guarantees (yet) about keeping a proper changelog and maintaining backwards-compatibility, but if someone's feeling hacky i would certainly love for other people to try it and expand it or just give feedback.

[0] https://tildegit.org/southerntofu/zola-water

Re: Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?

#70
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

GitHub sites were in place long before the acquisition. (I'm an MS FTE now, but have been using GitHub since the beginning and am a bit weirded out by this perception that corporate ownership is a taint of some kind.)

In my personal views, corporate ownership is mostly a bad thing. Although i can see how some corporations are very user-friendly and will go to great length to service their users. But i can't say Microsoft, who's always been engaged in very user-hostile practices, has a good track record.

Microsoft famously tried to outcompete the Internet via their existing monopoly on Windows with MSN (not just the messenger) back in the day, and have always been super hostile to free-software. They have also, like any corporation, stopped to maintain several services over the years and the fact that beyond their public image they don't have any incentive to keep Github Pages going doesn't inspire me confidence.

The fact that Github Pages were up and running before Microsoft's acquisition of Github is a reason to be worried. There's no money flowing in from that service and it probably costs a fair amount. Despite their "we love open source" statements, i've yet to see Microsoft open-sourcing any significant product (including Github) and specifying/standardizing existing stuff like Github Actions.

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