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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?

#81

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).

You don't depend on Microsoft: Static sites can be moved easily to another provider if anything bad happens - there is no "vendor lock-in".

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

#83

Org mode and html export. If you want to be fancier, there is this: http://ahungry.com/blog/2013-04-01-blogging-with-org-mode.ht... There might be other stuff like that as well. I just use org directly, though I guess in a "blog-like" manner rather than as a true blog.

If anyone already has a Hugo setup, I really recommend org-mode -> ox-hugo[0] -> Hugo. Works great.

[0] - https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/

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

#84
post #9

I 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.

Take a look at nextjs it serves plain HTML and CSS then hydrates it with JavaScript interactive-ness

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

#88

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…

I think this might be over-complicating it a bit for a personal blog. There are comment systems like Commento, Disqus, Hyvor, etc that let you just embed a JS snippet into your layout for comments (if one even wants to support blog comments at all).

Regarding GitLab getting hacked, while it is of course a concern I'm not sure it's any more of a concern compared to using any other hosted blog service. You'd have to consider how secure any hosting solution is, whether it's Wordpress, GitLab/AWS, Medium, or anything else. As a benefit, GitLab (unlike many other blog hosting services) supports U2F MFA.

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

#90
Depends on what functionality you'd like to add as you go. I recently built my site from scratch (with no prior experience) using NextJS, MDX and mdx-bundler [1]. Having the ability to add custom components, or statically generate a related posts matrix are all super useful.

1: https://github.com/kentcdodds/mdx-bundler

https://olickel.com

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