Ask HN: For a Personal Blog in 2020, Medium, GitHub Pages or Dev.to? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: For a Personal Blog in 2020, Medium, GitHub Pages or Dev.to?

12 pointsfaizshah18 comments

Hugo, jekyll or any static gen?

You could host them using zeit, render or netlify

I hugo on S3. With CloudFront it has never cost me more than $1.73.

I use Hugo with Netlify but feel guilty if I put in too many photos or other large files. I will probably move to S3/CloudFront or something similar soon.

I'm trying out GitBook.com. Not interested so much in custom themes and such--just want professional style organization. I found it from reading some API docs that were published with it.

Im doing a site for my consultancy at the moment on self-hosted wordpress. Its interesting as Ive not set up a WP site in a while, and WP has moved to site builders which strangely makes more work

My view is see how it goes, and if I dont like it I'll move to a static builder. Gatsby seems to be getting the recommendations - but I think themes are better on hugo and jekyll at present

If you don't go with a static site generator (like Hugo), make sure you stay on top of security updates.

Even if you go with a static generator, don't forget to harden your droplet and set up automatic system security updates.

When picking a theme, check for maintenance. I've found most to be abandoned, and that can hurt when your website building software updates to a new major version.

wordpress.com

Yeah its a non HN answer but that is what the general population uses in 2020 for a personal blog. If your blog gets traction or you want to expand into a full website, then you can think about changing that.

Honest advice, roll your own. You can use wordpress or some static site generator as you wish. But host it on your own servers. A 5$ droplet would be more than enough for anything.

I would say Medium and Ghost. Based on my research, Medium tends to get quick traction if you post quality content. Many tend to branch off once they build a reasonable readership.

VuePress and GitHub Pages. Uses markdown and is pretty fast. https://vuepress.vuejs.org/

Gatsby with mdxjs on GitHub pages built using GitHub actions is a pretty good.

A simpler mdxjs based alternative to Gatsby would be even better but I haven't seen one yet.

Self-hosted WP is what I use for https://codedirty.com/

HTML... http://html.energy

Open notepad, type <HTML> and keep going. Save and deploy via netlify or whatever.

Not even considering Wordpress?

Medium or dev.to don't allow you to use your own domain, so neither of them.

Not even considering self hosting?

Why not considering following :-

- Wordpress.com

- Blogspot.com

- FreelancerCV.com

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