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Comment by jdnordy | Hacker News Reader

This is a good post and it came at a perfect time. I am currently developing my own personal website. The aesthetic of this one is in the ballpark of what I am shooting for. I am also planning on including a section for writing.

I am curious thought, how do people suggest I create new articles and upload them to the webpage? Do I just write the article in html? Or should I create a form that I can submit posts through? Also, how should I store them? Should I store them as an html file or txt file in s3? I'm not too familiar with storage for blog posts. If anyone has some good site recommendations or references, I would appreciate it!

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A highly relevant thing for your search is something known as the Jamstack [1].

People typically use "Static Site Generators" to create blogs which relies more on content than on fancy login flows or database connection flows. Those flows are still possible but Jamstack allows for a low bar high ceiling scenario when you are starting to build your own blog.

To compare the endless list of static site generators, what they are and how you write posts, go to StaticGen [2]. My recommendation: - Pick "Hugo" for a great out-of-the-box experience with fair flexibility. - Pick "Gatsby" for virtually unlimited flexibility with React-based generator.

[1]: https://jamstack.org [2]: https://www.staticgen.com

I second Hugo. It builds my personal site in 71ms. Coming from JS-land, it was so fast I thought it was broken.

Having gone through this whole process myself last year, I would definitely recommend a static site generator. My site [1] is built on Jekyll [2], stored in a Github private repository and is hosted by Netlify [3] for free. The only running cost is the domain name.

Personally I didn't really enjoy setting up Jekyll since I'm not all that at home with Ruby so I would recommend looking at alternatives. Once it's set up though, it's very convenient to work with.

The Github repo is cloned locally, I write posts in markdown and then simply push to the repository. Netlify watches the repository for changes and automatically deploys whenever there's changes. It's very convenient. The compilation cost is paid upfront so the page is very fast as well. Last I checked, it scored 98-100 on all metrics in Lighthouse.

[1] https://www.karltarvas.com/blog/

[2] https://jekyllrb.com/

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

For my low-aesthetic zine (https://freezine.xyz), I just have a git repo full of html and css files i edit by hand. it's not that hard. most of the new pages start out like this:

    !doctype html
    <meta charset='utf-8'/>
    <title> the page </title>
    <style> h1 { font-weight: bold } </style>
    <h1> Hello, world </h1>
    <p> here's some body text </p>

I do all the writing in html, it's really not that bad. I'd start simple and only add more complicated steps if you want to. It's not that hard to add a python or node or Makefile or whatever script that takes a folder full of markdown files and creates another folder full of html files.

I should say, you probably have different goals than me, but as a full time engineer I wanted to make this site as easy as possible to work on and not get stuck fiddling around with configuration or other bullshit timewasting stuff that doesn't actually help me get my ideas out. It's extremely refreshing to work this way :)

Have a look at static site generators. I‘ve used both Hugo and Nextjs and can recommend them.

Also there is nothing wrong with just editing html directly. It is a very good starting point for many projects like personal sites and other small projects.

I'm working with nextjs... mostly out of a desire to learn it because I've heard so much about it.

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