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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?

#71

Post by rishikeshs »

the-dude wrote: post #32

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.

May be I stated it wrong. But here are some of the problems I face in WP: 1. Sometimes the backend is quite slow. Can be an issue with the hosting. 2. I think there are too many options for me. I want something simple like Hugo! 3. In the past, I have ran wordpress sites and they tend to become slow over time. May be this can be solved with better plugins and hosting!

The point is there are too many things in wordpress that I don't want!

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

#72

Post by drakonka »

I've gone through quite a few frameworks since I started blogging and have settled on Hugo, which I've been running for several years. I have the source in a private GitLab repo with a CI setup to autodeploy to an S3 bucket. Hugo isn't some super special framework with a ton of flashy features: it is simple, and it works. That makes it perfect for my use case.

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

#73

Post by drakonka »

southerntofu wrote: post #52
pxllh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think most people would need multi-user permissions on a git repository for a personal blog, right? In my case, I just push to GitLab and have CI run to deploy to S3 via a GitLab-specific IAM user key/secret set as a repo env variable.

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

#74

Post by fileeditview »

Shameless plug incoming.

A good while ago I created my own "system" Glyph: https://github.com/dbriemann/glyph

It's a static site generator utilizing Github issues and Github pages. If you are interested in how it works see: https://github.com/dbriemann/glyph-zero

As an example you can see a raw blog entry here: https://github.com/dbriemann/blog/issues/7 which results in https://dbriemann.github.io/blog/7-making-a-game-with-go-and... when "compiled".

You basically write your blog posts as github issues and the tool converts them to html which is then published via Github pages.

WARNING: this is not really maintained anymore because I rarely blog. Also it never had an official release .. so it is kinda experimental (but it should work, because it's simple).

EDIT: I submitted this to HN when it was new: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16776047

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

#75

Post by rcarmo »

southerntofu wrote: post #70
rcarmo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, in my personal view (since I joined coming from an OSS environment) you are still hanging on to _very_ ancient history. I won't discuss it further other than point out that the last six years have been completely at odds with that worldview and that software has changed profoundly (I recommend you check out the Azure GitHub org, where a _lot_ of tooling and supporting services are public).

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

#76

Post by southerntofu »

drakonka wrote: post #73
southerntofu wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think most people would need multi-user permissions on a git repository for a personal blog, right? In my case, I just push to GitLab and have CI run to deploy to S3 via a GitLab-specific IAM user key/secret set as a repo env variable.

When i say multi-user i don't necessarily mean human users. Some bots could be pushing content like comments from 3rd party interfaces (email inbox, HN thread, HTTP form) and i wouldn't like them to have write access to content/ or themes/ folder, only to a dedicated folder.

Also interesting to question the whole supply chain security. What is Gitlab gets hacked? Surely you could deploy from/to your own infra using Gitlab as a source of truth by verifying PGP signatures (like with guix git-authenticate), but then how to apply the aforementioned ACLs? If you have resources on that topic, i'm all ears.

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

#78

Post by lewisjoe »

soapdog wrote: 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…

Yeah it's me who made that SaaS but just as a handy tool for me to publish a static blog out of my google docs. It's live at https://hexo.press

P.S had no intention of becoming the next unicorn :)

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

#80

Post by gitgud »

southerntofu wrote: post #76
drakonka wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think most people would need multi-user permissions on a git repository for a personal blog, right? In my case, I just push to GitLab and have CI run to deploy to S3 via a GitLab-specific IAM user key/secret set as a repo env variable.

When i say multi-user i don't necessarily mean human users. Some bots could be pushing content like comments from 3rd party interfaces (email inbox, HN thread, HTTP form) and i wouldn't like them to have write access to content/ or themes/ folder, only to a dedicated folder. Also interesting to question the whole supply chain security. What is Gitlab gets hacked? Surely you could deploy from/to your own infra using G…

> When i say multi-user i don't necessarily mean human users. Some bots could be pushing content like comments from 3rd party interfaces

Could be easier to use either another repository or a 3rd party comment system like Disqus

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