Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Start Your Blog in 2023

molodtsov.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 257 posts

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#161

Post by guywithahat »

fleddr wrote: post #157

Really weird that a very obvious choice, Medium, did not make the cut. I'm quite aware of how unpopular it is here on HN, but that's mostly a meme. It doesn't cost anything and there's no ads. Even linking your domain to it used to be free (sadly no longer true). It has a very decent writing experience and the out of the box design is simple but effective. It has a reasonable amount of customization. It has wide supp…

It's not even in their list of things on might have done in the past, they seem to not regard anything other than self-hosting as a blog, which seems a bit archaic. Building a blog shouldn't be about learning a new framework it should be about writing

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#162

Post by clintonb »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #152

I almost always use Wordpress for Blogs and sites in general. Reasons: If I leave it for 10 years and come back I will know how to maintain it. The tools will exist (especially if WordPress auto upgrades). If I use some static site gen, I will need to remember all the syntax, use some docker container to run the version I used all that time ago. Even coming back to it after a year can leave me with confusion. Also Wo…

I had this “recall” issue with configuration tools (Salt) that I used a couple times a year. I wrote a README, to resolve the issue.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#163

Post by idlewords »

nordsieck wrote: post #111
lapcat wrote: post #106

I am the "weird dude who writes raw HTML" LOL. I had a self-hosted WordPress blog from 2006-2010, but security updates become a burden, especially since I had to modify the WP source code a little to do exactly what I wanted with the RSS feeds. After a few years of not blogging at all, I decided to use the simplest possible "system", which is writing blog posts in raw HTML in a text editor, as well as writing the RSS…

Not to knock your system since it sounds like it works great, but why not use a static site generator? That seems like it'd do the same thing and just take out some of the drudgery.

He is a static site generator.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#164

Post by riidom »

I'm using https://picocms.org/.

It is PHP based, works on a cheap limited web hoster.

The concept is: Upload a markdown file plus associated media, and it does the rest for you.

For customisation, you can use Twig and CSS, or a predefined theme (I didn't look into these, I wanted a custom appearance).

For feeds there are plugins, for comments I use a "mail me at post023@mydomain.url" approach.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#165

Post by clintonb »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #46
otras wrote: 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 found that Hugo requires a shift in asset organization in the sense that assets are collocated with posts. If your post has three images, those images are in the same directory as the post markdown.

Jekyll keeps assets separated. Your posts live in _posts. Your static assets live together in a different directory.

I briefly experimented with switching from Jekyll to Hugo, but had too much invested—custom plugins and reliance on existing Jekyll plugins—in the Jekyll ecosystem to make the switch worthwhile.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#166

Post by helmholtz »

idlewords wrote: post #159
lapcat wrote: post #106

I am the "weird dude who writes raw HTML" LOL. I had a self-hosted WordPress blog from 2006-2010, but security updates become a burden, especially since I had to modify the WP source code a little to do exactly what I wanted with the RSS feeds. After a few years of not blogging at all, I decided to use the simplest possible "system", which is writing blog posts in raw HTML in a text editor, as well as writing the RSS…

Fellow raw HTML writer chiming in. My hand-built little web app for blogging broke maybe five years ago with some OS X update, and I have been too lazy to fix it.

Man, your website is the shit and one of the better examples of an antidote to the Website Obesity Crisis. Words over hero images.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#167

Post by spc476 »

lapcat wrote: post #106

I am the "weird dude who writes raw HTML" LOL. I had a self-hosted WordPress blog from 2006-2010, but security updates become a burden, especially since I had to modify the WP source code a little to do exactly what I wanted with the RSS feeds. After a few years of not blogging at all, I decided to use the simplest possible "system", which is writing blog posts in raw HTML in a text editor, as well as writing the RSS…

I used to write raw HTML, but have since come up with my own markup system [1]. The posts themselves are still stored in HTML because I don't want to get stuck with a sub-optimal markup language. By storing the rendered HTML, I can change how the markup language works (and I have).

The blog engine itself [2] is one I wrote starting back in 1999, and still in use. It works, does exactly what I want, so there's no reason to change it. And to see it in action: https://boston.conman.org/>.

[1] You can see an example here: https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog/blob/master/NOTES/testmsg>. The markup engine is written in Lua: https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog/blob/master/Lua/format.lu...>.

[2] https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog/>

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#168

Post by quickthrower2 »

worldofmatthew wrote: post #156
quickthrower2 wrote: post #152

I almost always use Wordpress for Blogs and sites in general. Reasons: If I leave it for 10 years and come back I will know how to maintain it. The tools will exist (especially if WordPress auto upgrades). If I use some static site gen, I will need to remember all the syntax, use some docker container to run the version I used all that time ago. Even coming back to it after a year can leave me with confusion. Also Wo…

Why would you need to use docker for a SSG?

For example, could you today run a ruby based SSG from 10 years ago? Let's pretend there is a bit of custom code and time invested in it.

I guess you could install a bunch of old versions on Ruby, gems, etc. on your machine too, but docker, or a VM might be easier.

Or you could go through, remember how all the code works and upgrade it to the latest versions of everything to run it. Assuming the SSG du jour 2013 is still maintained :-).

I tried to resurrect a 2 year old NodeJS project and gave up trying to upgrade it to the latest versions, NodeJS people really love their major version changes, and breaking back compat for no real reason.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#169

Post by pyrolistical »

fleddr wrote: post #157

Really weird that a very obvious choice, Medium, did not make the cut. I'm quite aware of how unpopular it is here on HN, but that's mostly a meme. It doesn't cost anything and there's no ads. Even linking your domain to it used to be free (sadly no longer true). It has a very decent writing experience and the out of the box design is simple but effective. It has a reasonable amount of customization. It has wide supp…

Medium is now dead to me because it prevents the very one thing blogsites must do. Publish the damn blog!

The mandatory (unless are able to join their program to opt-out) paywall reduces the number of people who can even see your blog

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#170

Post by worldofmatthew »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #168
worldofmatthew wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you need to use docker for a SSG?

For example, could you today run a ruby based SSG from 10 years ago? Let's pretend there is a bit of custom code and time invested in it. I guess you could install a bunch of old versions on Ruby, gems, etc. on your machine too, but docker, or a VM might be easier. Or you could go through, remember how all the code works and upgrade it to the latest versions of everything to run it. Assuming the SSG du jour 2013 is s…

You don't need docker for that. Also if you leave a WordPress for years with auto-updates, the plugins will often be abandoned causing your site to be vulnerable.Not to mention any breaking changes that can be introduced.

A SSG generated site will be the same in 10 years as its today, even if you might need to fix some things with your project to make further updates.

Post reply on HN