Comment by dceddia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dceddia | Hacker News Reader

To avoid updates and viruses, go with a static site.

There are a ton of good static site generators out there. My blog[0] runs on Jekyll[1]. Hugo[2] is a popular option. I've fiddled with Gatsby[3] and heard good things. Eleventy[4] looks as close to Jekyll-but-in-JavaScript as I've seen.

Since you want to be able to customize it, I'd probably take the static site generator's language into account. Do you like...

Ruby? -> Jekyll[1]

Go? -> Hugo[2]

JavaScript? -> Gatsby[3] or Eleventy[4]

Some other language? -> google "[language] static site generator" and see how many GitHub stars it has.

Once you've figured that out, most of the hosts support custom domains. Netlify[5] is free, and works very well. It's what I use currently. I used to host my site on DigitalOcean[6], but Netlify is definitely more painless, especially from a devops/patching standpoint. Plus it has a CDN so your site would be faster.

[0] https://daveceddia.com/

[1] https://jekyllrb.com/

[2] https://gohugo.io/

[3] https://www.gatsbyjs.org/

[4] https://www.11ty.io/

[5] https://www.netlify.com/

[6] https://www.digitalocean.com/

Static blogs are ok until it's a smallish blog with not much content or many visitors. But can't recommend it for a serious blog proect. One would have to jump through the hoops and use hacks for even the basic things like commenting, searching etc. And forget about slightly advanced stuff like popular posts, related posts etc without some Hugo or Jekyll hacking. WordPress has the lowest barrier to entry as most shared hosts offer one click installs, is the most feature rich blogging platform and even for a complete noob, it is much easier to get started and even customize their blog to a great extent with plugins. I would also like to add that virus affecting WordPress is much of a myth now, WordPress has improved greatly in the recent years and if you just stick with the basic install and just install the reputable plugins, you should be fine. The hacking cases related to WordPress are very few and far between.

I agree that getting things like comments and search running on a static site is a lot work. But I’m of the opinion your personal site doesn’t need those things.

Rarely have I seen interesting discussion happen in the comments of a personal blog. All great discussion is held in aggregators like HN.

Similarly search is best left to specialized platforms such as a search engine. Blogging software may have decent search by why recreate a search engine when duckduckgo.com will far exceed capabilities with site: and filetype:?

For me a personal site and blog are mostly single visit kind of stops. I end up on a blog via a link but almost never do I feel the need to read the top 5 best posts of some blog. I got some interesting information from the current article but then I’m of to the next link that shows up in my feed.

In my opinion a website needs readability[0] and an ATOM/RSS feed. All the rest is part ego ("my content is so great people just have to see what else I wrote") and part feature creep.

[0] https://www.sinax.be/blog/general/guidelines-for-spartan-web...

Except if you are ayende.com/blog

Sure, for a personal site or a portfolio site, they are not even needed. I also use Hugo for one of my sites, which is just a 5 page website. It is great for such stuff. But for a personal blog, I think both of those things(commenting and search) are absolutely essential.

>Rarely have I seen interesting discussion happen in the comments of a personal blog.

I disagree with this and even more so if we are talking about programming blogs. A lot of interesting discussions and rebuttals happen in the comment sections.

Regarding outsourcing search to a dedicated search engine, its a mixed bag. 99% of the users don't even know about the `site:` and `filetype:` stuff. You also have the option of embedding Google site search but the first four results are ads which isn't very ideal. Wordpress search is decent out of the box but if you want something advanced, it has some nice plugins that allow advanced searching with fuzzy matches.

> But for a personal blog, I think both of those things(commenting and search) are absolutely essential.

What I've found to work well for commenting is to put an e-mail address on the page where people can send their comments. When there is a good comment, I put an update in the article.

The main advantage of this approach is that it weeds out garbage responses. By making it ever so slightly harder for people to post a comment, they are forced to take an extra few seconds to consider if they really have something meaningful to add.

That is a good idea but would people really want to leave the site to open their email client and make a comment?

I had once thought about a different approach - Creating a Google form (for each blog post) and then embedding it on the blog post. Then whenever anyone submits a comment via the form, it would get saved to a Google spreadsheet(this needs to be made publicly readable). The unwanted comments can just be deleted from the spreadsheet. The contents of this spreadsheet can then be obtained in a JSON format and displayed on the blog post using Javascript.

Or you can just post the blog post to Reddit/HN with a link to those at the end of the article and let your readers comment there.

Yes but again, I prefer not to offload commenting to a third party because they can ban you(reddit can ban your subreddit) or just stop their service(Google Plus comments). If I am to use Reddit, I might as well just use Disqus or Facebook comments that I can embed on the site and my visitors won't even have to leave the site to comment on a post.

Hmm a 1st party commenting service can ban you too? What makes you feel safer w.r.t. getting banned, if you were to use say a service provided by Ghost, instead of e.g. Disqus?

A difference could be that, with a 1st party commenting service, your whole blog might get banned, instead of only the comments. (Depending on how banning gets implemented.)

Yes I agree. That's why I am a proponent of hosting your blog posts and comments yourself using Wordpress or other similar CMS on a VPS or a shared host.

Also, Ghost doesn't even have a commenting service of their own and one would need to rely on Disqus to add comments on a Ghost powered blog :)

> because they can ban you

Anyone can ban you, even your hosting company. In practice banning is pretty rare.

> I might as well just use Disqus or Facebook comments that I can embed on the site

And you will contribute to unethical tracking practices even if your users are not logged in to Facebook or Disqus[1].

[1] https://replyable.com/2017/03/disqus-is-your-data-worth-trad...

Hosting companies banning you is very rare(at least with reputable ones, I am not sure of the cheap VPSs on lowendbox). And you can always download the database and move to another hosting pretty easily. Subreddits getting banned is not so rare. If lets say Disqus (or reddit) bans you, how do you move those comments to another third party lets say facebook comments(or HN)?

>And you will contribute to unethical tracking practices even if your users are not logged in to Facebook or Disqus[1].

I don't care much about that because one way or the other one of the tech giants is going to track us anyway. I would much rather install Google analytics and get a great overview of my visitors. I don't think anyone who is an active user of the tracking behemothos Facebook or Google(which represents most of the internet users) should be concerned about tracking.

But coming to main point, I am actually against Disqus or facebook comments. I prefer plain old self hosted comments(wordpress) for other reasons and this solves your concern as well.

> Subreddits getting banned is not so rare

If you moderate a subreddit it's extremely unlikely a ban would happen since you have control over the content.

But hey, I get it, you like Wordpress.

Hmm interesting approach. What about reply notifications? If Jane replies to Joe's comment? Maybe with Zapier or ifttt it'd be possible to construct automatic reply notifications. ... But then, what about unsubscribe, hmm.

> saved to a Google spreadsheet(this needs to be made publicly readable)

Hmm, then, people's email addresses cannot be remembered, meaning, no reply notifications?

Yeah this is just a hacky solution, not very effective. Forget reply notifications, even replying to a comment in a threaded style would be tricky using this approach :)

> That is a good idea but would people really want to leave the site to open their email client and make a comment?

In most cases this means tapping on the link and typing the response. Mobile OSes make it pretty seamless.

I'm also a fan of the 'email me your comments' approach. The extra effort required acts as an extra filter that is often welcome.

Those issues you mention can be easily solved with Jekyll or any other SSG. You do need a bit of hacking but the zero maintenance and raw speed of static sites is worth it IMO.

I wouldn't go with Wordpress or any other CMS unless I absolutely needed permissions for multiple authors and such or if the author couldn't handle writing markdown and using a terminal command.

I am not sure how hacking Hugo or Jekyll could help me add commenting, searching etc. without using a third party service. Don't get me wrong, I still think they are great for small blogs and I use them myself as well for static sites but for a serious blog project or a money site, I think it is much more practical to go with a full blown solution like Wordpress. Regarding speed, with caching plugins and optionally with CDNs like cloudflare, Wordpress can be pretty fast. And for regular users who aren't tech savvy, hugo or jekyll are almost a no-go.

>if the author couldn't handle writing markdown and using a terminal command.

I would say this represents more than 99% of the bloggers. Even I prefer a WYSIWYG interface to markdown any day even though I consider myself somewhat tech-savvy. I find markdown to be very hacky when its a bit more than just headings and paragraphs(eg. nested lists with ordered list inside unordered list are so hard to do in markdown)

> I am not sure how hacking Hugo or Jekyll could help me add commenting, searching etc.

Searching should be left to Google. I'm skeptical blog users actually search on a site though I admit I've never seen any metrics about that.

If you insist on having comments on your site and force users to sign-in etc this can be easily implemented with an API and some client-side code.

> I would say this represents more than 99% of the bloggers.

This thread is about HN users, not the general population.

> I find markdown to be very hacky when its a bit more than just headings and paragraphs(eg. nested lists with ordered list inside unordered list are so hard to do in markdown)

Well, no wonder you prefer Wordpress.

>Searching should be left to Google. I'm skeptical blog users actually search on a site though I admit I've never seen any metrics about that.

They do, please be assured of that. There is a reason companies like Algolia exist to provide better on-site search.

>If you insist on having comments on your site and force users to sign-in etc this can be easily implemented with an API and some client-side code.

Yes or without signing up and just commenting as guest. Welcome to Wordpress :) (And if I have to build another API just for comments, doesn't it defeat the simplicity of using a static generator like Hugo?)

>This thread is about HN users, not the general population.

I am not sure where you got that from? The author never said he was going to create a blog targeted for the HN crowd or anything like that. Maybe I am missing something?

>Well, no wonder you prefer Wordpress.

At least you acknowledge markdown's inferiority in this case.

> virus affecting WordPress is much of a myth now

There's still few every year https://wordpress.org/news/category/security/

And that's just the core WordPress. Plugins and themes carry their own issues. Reputable or not.

Yes, the website starts to build slower with growing number of pages. I'm using Metalsmith static site generator for https://www.visualwatermark.com/ The website currently have about 400 pages and it takes 60-70 seconds to build it. Part of the problem is Metalsmith itself - the code in some parts is awful. I had to make some changes to make it work faster. Unfortunately, it's impossible to solve the underlying problem - you have to build the whole website at once, while WordPress builds pages on-demand.

Also static generators aren't as convenient as WordPress is. I'm OK working with markdown or hacking the code, but it's too difficult for my wife, for example. So, she's running a WordPress blog.

Commenting is also better on WordPress. She used to use Discuss for commenting and people are more to reluctant leave Discuss comments than to leave WordPress comments. I believe that's because you don't have to register to leave a comment in WordPress - just type your email and you're ready to go.

big props to hugo for using a static binary without some insane dependency chain, i'm really pleased with it. hosting my blog on a $15/y vps with a vanity domain and hugo was one of my first projects to learn to manage a server, and i gave up with jekyll after way too much struggling with ruby.

that said i'm not sure how it fares wrt to plugins, i think it's pretty vanilla in terms of user-facing features (though plenty of very straightforward theme tweaking is possible).

I was balking at $15 (for a static site) until I re-read and got /y right. Who offers that?

i use ramnode but you should check out lowendbox, they aggregate cheap vps services and deals

Specifically I believe you are referring to tinykvm , their 256mb ram tiny vps. I used them when I made my wedding website in flask and was very pleased with their service. Not affiliated with them at all and was a happy customer.

I am wary of the very cheap VPSs. I have seen many complaints about lack of customer support, long downtimes and poor performance for these ultra cheap VPSs on lowendbox. Vultr is generally my goto.

Do people write their own static site generators because they're bored, or because templating is always annoying and it's more fun to write your own than learn a new system?

None of them do anything novel, or particularly better than all the others. They just have some quirk that makes people choose them. "This one is a static binary!" "This one uses a specific programming language!" "This one uses a unique templating language!"

Would having a dedicated, generic standard for templating even be possible? Something with extra standards for specific uses, so you could just learn the extensions that are useful for your particular application? Maybe that would eliminate the need for 1,000 identical-but-incompatible solutions.

After a while, what you actually want is a CMS, but the good ones usually are not free.

> Do people write their own static site generators because they're bored, or because templating is always annoying and it's more fun to write your own than learn a new system?

In my case [0] because I wanted to generate the site from a single Markdown file. I wrote a Perl program to accomplish this. Then I got bored and wrote a Python version as well. And it works, I have kept up posting to my blog [1] for 150+ days since it went live.

[0] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog

[1] http://plurrrr.com/

> In my case [0] because I wanted to generate the site from a single Markdown file.

Did you consider pandoc?

SSGs are great. In Python I like Nikola.

https://getnikola.com/

Pelican is also cool: https://blog.getpelican.com/

We use Netlify and Hugo for our company site, which also shows our 'real-time' inventory. In reality, I have a python script that grabs our inventory from our internal ERP system, generates a hugo site and redeploys to Netlify every 20 minutes.

It's been running like a charm for ~1 year.

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