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How to Start Your Blog in 2023

molodtsov.me

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Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#54
post #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…

Exactly my problem. With what you've described, I think Astro + some headless CMS would be the way to go here. I say Astro because having JS is a nice thing and it will let you do things that would require more effort with Jekyll/Hugo. (since you say want to integrate with your existing hobby e-com website)

Plus, it has the added benefit of keeping your front-end skills upto date.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#56

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?

Sure, I've used [tool] successfully in the past. Seriously, just pick one and set it up. People blog on manually edited HTML files, it really doesn't matter.

Yeah, seems like the way to go here. To get something up and running first and then deciding if a different and shiny tool really would make much of a difference.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#57

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?

Honestly, the overwhelming number of tool choices and themes is the biggest hurdle these days. I will shamelessly plug my solution: md2blog. You just plop Markdown files into folders and it does the rest, without letting you get distracted by themes. Edit: addressing the article, md2blog does not support email subscriptions, but it does generate an Atom feed. It also requires using a command line (but the tool is a s…

Looks minimal and cool! Will check it out.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#58

Shameless plug but I built a tiny unopinionated static site generator that is great for blogs. No toolchain or anything fancy, I just added RSS support too :) It would be my pleasure if someone wants to try it https://github.com/donuts-are-good/bearclaw

Just gave it a (very) quick look

> a static site is a site with no fancy clicky things, signups, comments, just plain html

Technically I think you can have comments via some embedded widget. Each page is still static, but there's a script tag in there that embeds a widget into the page that gives you commenting, usually via some SaaS

I think Disqus was the big one for a while. There was one I saw recently that uses github as the auth provider, which was interesting

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#60
Do any of these platforms provide additional discoverability? I occasionally publish articles, usually of the technical "how-to" variety with a focus on areas that aren't already widely documented. To date I have published these on Medium because if you publish via an established publication like Towards Data Science your articles can get decent reach without much effort. I'd ideally like to move away from Medium but as I am not well-known, without an established platform to provide visibility (or a lot of self-promotion) the reality is that no one would read my articles.
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