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Comment by dietrichepp | Hacker News Reader

Personal websites are great and I’ve been trying to put more content on my own personal website (I made nine decent-size posts this month, and I’m happy with that). HOWEVER,

Running a personal website is a time sink and it can become a real pain as time goes on. It’s not a problem to create a personal website and shove a few HTML files on there, or set up a Wordpress installation, or create something with Jekyll. That’s easy enough.

The problem is that 10 years later, your HTML files are sprawling, or you rely on Wordpress plugins that are no longer maintained, or you’re fighting against your generator for whatever reason.

I’ve somehow managed to get my personal website into a state where posting a new article is little more than adding a file to a Git repo and then running a command to deploy it, but I always feel like I need to modify the scripts, and I always want to revisit choices I made when building the website.

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After moving my blog to Hugo and a custom CI/CD pipeline for it (that is in serious need of refactoring, but it works), writing and publishing new blog posts with SEO is very, very easy. Writing the damn thing is the hardest part of publishing now. All I have to do is commit and push, and now that CloudFront updates your local POP super quickly, new articles usually appear within minutes.

I used to host my blog on Wordpress, and I agree; massive timesink.

My website is getting a bit big to shove the entire thing into a Git repo, unfortunately. At the very least I would want to have sparse checkouts.

I’ve thought about Hugo but it might require a serious migration effort. My current website is written in Go templates so I can do something like:

    {{.SrcFile "_src.c"}}

And it will read _src.c and set it up to be highlighted using C syntax rules. Leading underscore just means that the file doesn’t get deployed. This is just one example, there are a number of different things I’ve added to my website like this over the years.

Things would be different if I had chosen a static website generator from the start rather than letting things evolve naturally from hand-written HTML files. Currently, what I want to do is get rid of the templating and use DOM manipulation, so I’d write the above like

    <src-file src="_src.c" />

Just because it would make editing the files more convenient. Putting something like C source code directly in an HTML file is too much of a bother, and I put a lot of source code in my website, so anything I can do to save time here means I can write more articles. Markdown makes it easier to embed source code but it’s just not good enough to replace HTML for my use case.

You can also just not use a generator at all. Just publish markdown files directly on Github or similar, or convert to html with pandoc and be done with it.

Congrats on creating content on your personal website. I am trying with my own but I still dont have a good habit in place to write.

I agree that running a personal website is a time sink.

But there are many other options like: Github/Gitlab Pages, Medium ....

Persoanlly, I prefer simple HTML pages or Markdown. Plain HTML will render easy many years from now. They are easy to transfer and hard to get lost between migrations.

GitHub pages is really just a hosting service for Jekyll. My website is getting close to the maximum size for GitHub pages anyway (the limit is only 1 GB). Medium is unworkable for too many reasons.

I started out writing my webpage in HTML, and if you dig around you can find my old GeoCities page, but plain HTML suffers from some problems that make it high-friction for posting frequent updates. So you start adding a simple templating system. Maybe at first it’s just a header and footer you stick on to every page. Then you start adding indexes so you don’t have to update index.html every time you write a blog post. Your plain HTML starts getting more and more complicated, and it starts relying on some kind of library of scripts which you are now maintaining.

That’s what happens if you dive straight into it and use whatever technology is simplest to understand. I think most people would be better off picking a static website generator, to be honest.

(Also: When I started posting content to my website, Jekyll didn’t exist.)

Is it 1GB of text + source code? I can't imagine that much plaintext from one person unless binaries, images music, or video is involved. Github Pages is probably fine for most people even with the 1GB limit.

Btw, cool website. I didn't realize there's an N64 homebrew game development scene until looking at your blog.

I'm with you on this, and I started using https://dev.to/ instead of wasting my time maintaining my own personal website that nobody reads anyway in the hope that maybe, someday people will start reading it.

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