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How to Start Your Blog in 2023

molodtsov.me

31–40 of 257 posts

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#31

I've been running a blog since '99. Started on phpslash, then slashcode, then Drupal for a loonnnnng time. I just recently moved everything to WordPress and I'm finding it mostly ok. It's not designed to do small, simple, easy, plain, but it gets the job done. I agree with this "The most popular CMS in the world, and yet I just can’t stand its admin page." There are some things in there I can't stand, but I said the…

These days, the WordPress power-users are all doing headless via the API, so there's little push for a better admin UI.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#32

I want to start my own blog but the vast number of choices overwhelms me. Deciding between Astro/Hugo/Jekyll right now. Can anyone share their experiences if they have built their blogs using these tools?

I haven't tried Astro, but I moved my blog from Jekyll to Hugo.

I did it because I remember having issues with jekyll installation from time to time, like it suddenly broke out of nowhere, and trying to fix it became a pain.

Then I looked for alternatives and found Hugo, changed the template and installed in all my systems (Windows, Linux, macOS) and it has worked like a charm. Also, the speed boost was super noticeable, like, several times faster.

So if I were to choose again between Jekyll and Hugo, I'd go with Hugo.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#34

> Running your own blog in 2023 is still needlessly complicated, especially if you have any kind of taste. Aside from taste being subjective, most of the tools mentioned are customizable. That is, you can tweak the markup and CSS to your own taste. The post starts being concerned about aesthetics but then finishes with: "Having the right tool certainly helps, but at the end of the day, what matters is what you write…

Many people (including me) use static generation with a fancy build process because we find it fun, not to save time or money. I honestly find it more fun to setup my blog than writing content for it... Which might be a problem. (And also explain all the blog posts describing a complex setup).

> Many people (including me) use static generation with a fancy build process because we find it fun, not to save time or money.

Some people do this and won't admit it!

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#35

I want to start my own blog but the vast number of choices overwhelms me. Deciding between Astro/Hugo/Jekyll right now. Can anyone share their experiences if they have built their blogs using these tools?

I want to do the same and integrate it with my existing hobby e-com website. I was thinking of finding something that just turns markdown into HTML and using that. On the other-hand, a wysiwyg editor would be nice. I have no desire to use something heavy like wordpress or anything that requires a database. My little e-com website has no database backend which i'm kind of proud of :)

edit: on the third hand... i need a place to practice and stay in shape with full stack dev as i'm more of a manager/therapist these days. So maybe something from the ground up is in my future

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#37
post #3

Totally agree on the seemingly unnecessary overhead. Just recently I was looking into platforms for starting a blog and was overwhelmed with the choices of which none really had a complete set of offerings. Having a feature comparison table or a guide for choosing the best service/platform for individual use cases would be nice. In the end, I chose Ghost's lowest tier. While it is limited regarding the theme choices,…

Ghost is also what I always recommend. With WordPress and Jekyll/Hugo, you'll fuck around with site setup way more than actually writing. Ghost is basically only good for actually writing. Pick a theme (plenty of them for ~$50, write. That's it.

Customizing themes is also super simple in my opinion, though I've never tried their shared hosting and am unfamiliar with limitations that come from that.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#40
post #33

Probably the same way you start a blog in 2022, 2021, or 2020. I know there are ways around it, but does HN have filters for headlines ending in "in "?

uBlock can do this. Addons -> uBlock Preferences -> My Filters

    # top (title / url)
    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing span.titleline > a:has-text(/(GPT|blockchain|202[3-9]$)/):upward(tr)
    # bottom (stats / comments)
    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing span.titleline > a:has-text(/(GPT|blockchain|202[3-9]$)/):upward(tr) + *
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