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How to Start Your Blog in 2023

molodtsov.me

61–70 of 257 posts

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#62
post #45

A lot of expected pessimistic HN comments that seem to miss the point here. I think SSG's are pretty damn good, I use Astro. People seem to think that SSG's forces you to use markdown or something, they don't. It's literally a mechanism where content from somewhere is turned into static pages. You can even use Wordpress and it's API as the source of the content for a SSG. In my case I use MDX, which is Markdown that…

Is there a way for SSGs to support viewer comments?

With something like Astro you can use React (or others, even vanilla) components that can either be fully server rendered, or sent to the client. With that you can allow people to post comments. As for how to render them, depends a bit on what you decide. You can either have comments displayed the next time the site is built, or you could have a posted comment trigger a build, or some other similar idea.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#67
post #19

There’s also the option to ask someone with skills and expertise to set something up for you. Which is almost never taken into consideration as an option in this kind of posts. I don’t think it’s hard to start a blog in 2023. It’s hard to start a blog if you have very strict requirements AND you want to do everything on your own without being a developer/designer.

There’s also the option to ask someone with skills and expertise to set something up for you. It's an option, but it's a bad option. Setting up and running a blog is not a one off process. For things like Wordpress there are literally security patches. For most other platforms there are updates. Wordpress has auto-update but it can be flaky, especially if the site owner tinkers with things. If you get someone else to…

Well yes and there's also countless other options that are not wordpress that require very little maintenance.

And you can also simply ask someone every year or so to perform some basic maintenance on your site like we already do for countless other things in our lives.

> you'll be pestering them to update it for you.

Am I pestering my mechanic to perform maintenance on my car every year? No it's called work. It's his job.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#69
post #16

For the combination of Hugo and GitHub Pages, images are pretty effortless as well. For example, for a post with a path of `content/posts/post-title.md`: 1. Add the image at `content/posts/post-title/image-name.png` 2. Add markdown that references it, like `![alt-text](image-name.png)` 3. Build and push to main, and then the image is available in minutes at ` /posts/post-title/image-name.png" rel="nofollow">https://…

Is Hugo significantly different from Jekyll?

I'm not familiar with Jekyll, but if I recall correctly it's very, very similar. I just happened to pick Hugo at the start and haven't revisited the decision since, as it's tangential to the actual writing.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#70
post #45

A lot of expected pessimistic HN comments that seem to miss the point here. I think SSG's are pretty damn good, I use Astro. People seem to think that SSG's forces you to use markdown or something, they don't. It's literally a mechanism where content from somewhere is turned into static pages. You can even use Wordpress and it's API as the source of the content for a SSG. In my case I use MDX, which is Markdown that…

Is there a way for SSGs to support viewer comments?

There's a good resource of available commenting systems for static sites here (not mine): https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/
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