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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?

#101

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 prope…

I also use water.css for my blogs. Incredibly convenient.

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

#102
I feel like there are two camps of SSG’ers. One camp who chooses an SSG to offset their reliance on big tech, and the other who see big tech reliance as an acceptable means of publishing. Not sure which is right, but my personal inclination is to steer away from this reliance.

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

#103
I have found Eleventy lovely to use after being one WordPress for a decade. It can be as simple as you need it to be and grows with you. I’ve been able to accomplish everything I need with it. Currently replying from GitHub to Netlify automatically but could just as easily build locally and rsync or FTP somewhere.

https://www.joshcanhelp.com/taking-wordpress-to-eleventy/

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

#104
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…

> 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.

There's a plug-in(s) for WP that allows you to have the GUI for convenience, but then generate a static site:

* https://wp2static.com

* https://www.wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/

* https://www.wpexplorer.com/static-website-wordpress/

Either serve the static area directly, or use some scripting to update where your public web server lives.

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

#105
I look at it from the deployment solution backwards. I’ve run some pretty intense (for a blog) CI/CD pipelines in the past. But now there are Netlify, Vercel, and others that support a few static site generators. I use Netlify (paying customer) for all my sites now and my SSG of choice is Hugo because it is a single binary that cranks out a full blown static site in less than a second.

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

#107
It depends on how lightweight you want it.

I'm hosting mine as an S3 static website, with CloudFront as a CDN and for the domain name linking. Works pretty well. I also have some sort of CI/CD, what I mean is that all my code is on GitHub and whenever there's new code to main, a GitHub action is fired that syncs the branch with the S3 bucket.

I've even managed to remove all the JavaScript from the site :D Works neatly! Let me know if you (or anyone) wants more info ^_^

Edit: Forgot to mention, it's also almost free! I'm paying for the domain names and around 0.1$ / month to AWS.

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

#108

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 wordpre…

your WP concerns sound similar to mine. I ran a WP site for years locked it down server ran fine but upgrades and maintenance required setting up a local dev environment etc not always possible when I don't always have a personal machine to work on. I found the perfect solution in something like WPEngine you literally just worry about the wp-content folder and thats it - but it comes at a cost and a cost I'm not willing to pay for a personal site that is updated once every few months and visited even less!

I ended up moving from wordpress to static (eleventy) on netlify and now I'm looking to go back to wordpress! I tried the blogging from markdown files on my phone/tablet but I miss a good old (non gutenberg) CMS! (plus shortcodes are super handy and theres plugins and code for everything!)

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

#109
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Is Secure Boot ancient history? TPM 2.0 requirement? The quasi-requirement of a Microsoft account to use Windows? Ubiquitous telemetry that's impossible to disable? Cortana that cannot be removed and employs precarious workers without a confidentiality contract to transcribe everything people say and have no idea Cortana is recording? Blocking standards-compliant mail servers silently?

Microsoft is still a strong force for evil in this day and age. I only wish they were disbanded during the antitrust investigations of the 90s instead of putting Apple on life-support: the world of computing would be such a better place without both Apple and Microsoft to shit their monopoly on our faces.

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

#110
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Is Secure Boot ancient history? TPM 2.0 requirement? The quasi-requirement of a Microsoft account to use Windows? Ubiquitous telemetry that's impossible to disable? Cortana that cannot be removed and employs precarious workers without a confidentiality contract to transcribe everything people say and have no idea Cortana is recording? Blocking standards-compliant mail servers silently? Microsoft is still a strong for…

As a Mac user working at Microsoft on Linux workloads, I definitely do not identify with that viewpoint.
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