Ask HN: What stack is your personal blog built on?
I'm curious to know what your current favourite blog stack is - I'm looking for a light stack, clean & simple writing process and easy-to-manage back-end.
I, too, went with WordPress after years of trying to avoid it. After having launched ~30 WP sites in the past ~5 years, it just made sense.
Built using:
- gatsby (static site generator)
- netlify CMS (git-based headless CMS)
- GitHub (git remote for netlify)
It was dead easy to set this up, as someone had already done the work: https://github.com/alxshelepenok/gatsby-starter-lumen
I tried to set up something similar from scratch myself, using Strapi as the CMS, but I found myself re-inventing too many wheels (e.g. how to allow a blog post to include an arbitrary number of inline images).
So when I found this great starter project, I went with it. There's zero maintenance for hosting the site or CMS. But I can still customise whatever I like, and deploy with a simple git push.
I was previously using Jekyll, but moved over to Gatsby a few months ago and have enjoyed the built-in features of Gatsby and it’s surrounding ecosystem so far.
I have also considered integrating a git based CMS like Netlify CMS, but because it’s so easy to make new blog posts with just a git commit and a push I haven’t taken the time to change the workflow.
Links:
- I don't need to think about filenames
- It gives me a nice preview
- I can edit markdown as either plain text or rich text, and switch between them with a toggle
- (Most important) I don't need to worry about whether I've properly filled in the 'frontmatter' section at the top of the file
The format of the frontmatter is indicated to Netlify CMS by the existence of a simple config file in your repo. So it should be easy to give it a try if you want:
https://github.com/alxshelepenok/gatsby-starter-lumen/blob/m...
What I learned from my experience: I should have stuck to Wordpress. SSH'ing into my server, loading the environment variables, and running the generation script was often friction enough for me to file a post under "finish later", from where it never came back. For all its faults, Wordpress made it super easy for me to share an idea right there and then. Technology was not my problem - friction and writer block were.
Ha - I’m exactly the opposite. I put off starting up a blog for years because I didn’t have the patience to learn some blogging “platform” like WordPress. It wasn’t until I “rolled my own” and “invented my own wheel” that it was interesting enough for me to want to focus on it. On the other hand, it’s probably a little more expensive for me to host everything myself (I could blog on Medium for free after all), but it’s interesting to work through all the technical details of things like adding a comment section, adding a captcha to that comment section, standardizing the look and feel, etc.
My course platform uses Next.js for server-side rendering + Firebase. When I launched it, I have written up a longer article about my choices: https://www.robinwieruch.de/how-to-build-your-own-course-pla...
I have built this website with Hugo Static Generator. I found that Hugo has lot more variety of themes to choose and easier to understand the structure. I also like their templating engine. Set up is very easy and building and compiling the site is very fast.
I have also tried Gatsby before finalizing to go with Hugo. IMHO, Gatsby is equally good. However Gatsby is well suited for developers with bit of react knowledge and has limited set of theme selection. For performance, I like the pre-fetch functionality of Gatsby.
Here is my current setup.
1) Hugo Static Site
2) Code repository on Git
3) Automated build and hosted on Netlify (Simple and easy to use)I am using Ghost (running on node.js + MySQL on DigitalOcean $5 server), used the 1-click installer and got it done within 15 mins.
So I opted for Pelican (https://blog.getpelican.com/) which has a plugin for converting Jupyter/IPython notebooks into blog posts. It is hosted in S3. If you are curious, here it is: http://ramondario.com/
I'm using GitHub Pages, so Jekyll is the static site generator. As Jekyll theme, I've picked minimal-mistakes: https://github.com/mmistakes/minimal-mistakes
Then I've customized templates to meet my needs. It was quite easy, considering I've never wrote a line of Ruby.
I guess the "stack" part of that becomes how easy it is to add on bells and whistles which don't come out of the box. I'd chalk that up to "fun to tinker with".
It's my favourite stack because hosting and running a website / blog is neither my core business nor my core expertise.
Last time I checked, WordPress was still easier to use and to maintain than static site generators. The plugin ecosystem is huge and provides ready-to-use solutions for common (and not so common) use cases that I therefore don't have to implement myself.
While that's annoying, the platform supports anything I'd want to do functionally with the site, and it helps that most of my freelance development work is WordPress-related. Like arthev suggested, time spent jacking with the software is time not spent blogging (or something else productive).
It was mostly as a learning exercise, but it's a pretty flexible stack, and I'm a fan of the Wagtail admin panel; didn't really feel the need to customize anything there.
If you're not familiar with Markdown it's probably not the stack for you honestly. But it is my favourite blog stack I've had so far.
Hugo as the static site gen, GitLab as the repo host, Netlify as the web host. Editing wise I usually just use Sublime Text on my desktop or a combo of Working Copy (iOS git app) + Ulysses (Fancypants writing app) on my iPad.
I like the minimalism: I write in a text editor on my own laptop, then push to my server with a single command.
* Just checked and apparently there's a WP integration with Evernote called 'CoSchedule' for publishing posts from notes.
I haven't updated it in a while (I haven't integrated git into my small, informal process).
Also I used Docker for containerizing and Jenkins for Continous Integration but it was only in order to practice DevOps skills.
I also like hugo a lot but never got the time to setup my blog on it.
I'll probably eventually add JavaScript and WebGL and WebAssembly for some specific project pages.
https://joelvalleroy.github.io/
eventually some more content might get added too ;)
Is there any way comments could be shared across LinkedIn, HN, blog, et al, all visible at the blog itself?
And where to find good themes for static site generators. Am willing to pay. Theme for me is just as important as picking up the tech. stack.
Handlebars and Ghost.
The WP ecosystem is broken and Automattic rather cares about pushing out _another_ page builder than fixing the ecosystem and core aspects of WP. They will dig their own grave.
But also use WordPress for several niche blogs.
-Simple
-Integrated SSO
-RBAC for changes
-Easy and quick to make changes
-Responsive out of the box
-Free and 0 time to manage
Hosted on Netlify using their forms and redirects.
Editing in VS Code
Https://patrykkalinowski.com/hn
- NGINX
- jrnl - (static site generator I made that copies the transformed markdown to the NGINX server)
I agree the initial setup is usually easy and fast, but a lot of maintenance overhead to keep running. It's been a long time and maybe things are better since then?
Incredibly lightweight and simple to build! Still a WIP though.
www.slama.dev/
The medium SEO is so much better by default than my gatsby-hosted site with a few hours of work.