How to Start Your Blog in 2023 • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#81

Post by ymolodtsov » Mon, Feb 20, 2023, 5:18 PM UTC

onli wrote: post #7

I honestly think starting a blog in 2023 is exactly as easy as it was 2004 (the year he references), if you take the easiest route: 1. You pick a cheap shared hoster 2. You buy a domain and connect it 3. You download a PHP blog system, like Wordpress 4. You unpack the files into the webroot, configure the database (or use a blog system that supports sqlite, like Serendipity [which I develop for]) 5. Pick a theme, ins…

The process you described is so much more complicated than signing up for Twitter or Medium though.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#82

Post by ymolodtsov » Mon, Feb 20, 2023, 5:20 PM UTC

input_sh wrote: post #37

josters wrote: 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.

I think the problem with customizing Ghost themes is that you actually have to tinker with their code, most don't really have settings at the scale WordPress themes used to have.

But yeah, that's why I said that if you're OK with the workflow Ghost provides and at least one theme you should probably use it.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#83

Post by ymolodtsov » Mon, Feb 20, 2023, 5:21 PM UTC

akshayrajp wrote: post #25

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?

Jekyll is more oldschool. For me, Hugo seems to have a more active community and gets a lot of points for being a static binary (basically never fails and compiles very quickly). Haven't used Astro.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#84

Post by ymolodtsov » Mon, Feb 20, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

geekrax wrote: post #21

Is Medium not considered a good option anymore?

You never know where they'd go with their business model, how will they gate your content and what they will bundle it with.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#85

Post by ymolodtsov » Mon, Feb 20, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

chiefalchemist wrote: post #4

> 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…

But fine-tuning these blogs or themes is actually the complicated part. That's what I had to do. But I know a bit of coding and wanted to try. Not a great option for regular people.

And it'd foolish not to say that at the end of the day writing is more important than having a blog that's just beautiful.

There's one niche option I haven't covered there called [Aegea](https://blogengine.me/), which looks good out of the box, but I can't really recommend it based on the way the author develops it: no roadmap, no community feedback, basically no support, yet has paid features.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#86

Post by ymolodtsov » Mon, Feb 20, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

eloisant wrote: post #12

chiefalchemist wrote: post #4

> 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).

Yep, so many blogs with a few posts where one of them explains their entire SSG set up and that's it.

Re: How to Start Your Blog in 2023

#87

Post by onli » Mon, Feb 20, 2023, 5:29 PM UTC

ymolodtsov wrote: post #81

onli wrote: post #7

I honestly think starting a blog in 2023 is exactly as easy as it was 2004 (the year he references), if you take the easiest route: 1. You pick a cheap shared hoster 2. You buy a domain and connect it 3. You download a PHP blog system, like Wordpress 4. You unpack the files into the webroot, configure the database (or use a blog system that supports sqlite, like Serendipity [which I develop for]) 5. Pick a theme, ins…

The process you described is so much more complicated than signing up for Twitter or Medium though.

Twitter is no blog. And with both you then later have to fight with the login/paywall. That's exactly what I meant: Looks easier in the beginning, but isn't after the very start.