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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

I have thought about moving my personal blog onto something that isn't someone else's service. But every time I think about running my own blog server, stories like this come along.

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This is 100% possible without a server. Your repo can be your database if you run it statically with something like Hugo (a single binary with no dependencies). Store your content in your own repo in Markdown files (or something similar, like MDX) and host it on Netlify, Vercel, AWS, etc.

If your site has 10K posts and you don’t want to deal with long build times, use Next.js with ISR (make some high traffic pages static, others dynamic (server side rendered)).

As the founder of Forestry.io and Tina.io, I’m biased about a content editing UI, but there are many options if you want a GUI on top of your content files.

You got this.

Agreed! I’ve used Hugo + Netlify for the last few years, really like it. I’m not a big blogger, but it would be easy to run a blog with this setup.

You don't need Netlify for this; all you need is a git repo somewhere and CI.

CI can do the build, and the last step of CI can be ftp, rsync, scp, or whatever. It's just static files, normal hosting anywhere is fine.

There's usually a huge difference in access latency though. The usual cheap ftp hosting means a choice of whether you want to be 200ms away from the US or from Australia.

As others have said, static site generators are super easy to set up, and for a blog you'd be able to do basically everything in Markdown. You can also very easily include Netlify CMS or similar for a GUI editor (which will make commits directly to your repo).

I'd recommend at that point just using GitLab or GitHub pages as others have suggested, but if you do want to move completely off of other people's services, it's much simpler to set up nginx or Apache to serve static files than it is to safely host a WordPress instance.

SSGs are not "super easy" for non-devs. What's super easy is things like https://www.silex.me/ or, with more functionality, https://pinegrow.com/

Hugo or Jekyll should be super easy for anyone who's seriously considered hosting their own WordPress instance, like OP is. If setting up a static site generator is too difficult, they definitely shouldn't be running WordPress themselves.

The easy Hugo or Jekyll setups do not match the features of WordPress. So they are not easy.

What features are the main considerations?

Doing everything in a web browser without editing local files, mostly. "Open a text editor" or "git commit" are enough to put off people who don't think of themselves as computer people even though complexity wise they are no different than WP, simply because you gotta leave the browser.

Netlify CMS is pretty easy to set up and has all of the basic features that you need for a simple blog.

And again, I would never recommend a static site generator to someone who doesn't think of themselves as a computer person. The context in which this conversation started was someone who was seriously considering hosting their own WordPress instance. I dearly hope that they think of themselves as a computer person.

I am a programmer, but I don't have patience to read through SSG documentation to setup a basic website.

Like setup categories and tags, themes, url structure, etc. without needing to read the documentation?

I'd count all of those in the "easy for developers" category, as long as you're willing to read documentation. It's 1-2 lines of config for any one of those, and the config in question is at the very front of the doc pages.

If you're unwilling to read documentation, then yes, you're probably better off sticking to Squarespace or WordPress.com

It's been a wee bit since I last looked, but for me I want these "out of the box":

- Good support for posting source code from various languages, both inline and in blocks, with syntax highlighting.

- Zero-effort image posting ala WordPress, ie with automatic down-sizing of the inline image if needed (in these days ideally multi-resolution).

I imagined these were quite basic needs, but I've been disappointed each time I've gone looking. Been a year since last time though.

Hugo, at least, has built-in syntax highlighting (both block and inline) and at a glance it looks like Jekyll does, too.

Netlify CMS has zero-effort image posting (saves to your repo's static folder). I'll grant that it doesn't do automatic downsizing, though Netlify as a CDN does.

You're assuming that the person running the instance and writing content is the same. There are WP instances backing up serious business where people who don't know what CMS even means successfully edit content every day.

Context matters. I recommended a static site generator to a very specific person. Here's the comment I initially replied to:

> I have thought about moving my personal blog onto something that isn't someone else's service. But every time I think about running my own blog server, stories like this come along.

So... yes. I was assuming that OP was going to both be the person running their personal blog and writing on it, and I was assuming that OP is pretty technically competent if they were seriously considering running their own blog server.

https://getpublii.com/ comes to mind too.

Or you can use any CMS or blogging software and just use Cloudflare, add a rule to cache everything. Done.

I use Ghost + Cloudflare.

That's a pretty good option, as long as your CMS is thoroughly firewalled and only accessible from your computer and Cloudflare. If you can reach the admin console from the wider internet then you haven't solved the real problem with WordPress, which is security not speed.

Good point. Cloudflare tunnel or Strict Origin-CA on Cloudflare proxy settings. It will require setting up SSL on the host though.

It is not for security but for occasional spikes of traffic. Nothing says we can't use static-site-generator + Cloudflare. Even better.

Why not move your personal blog to a static site generator?

Not OP, but one thing that gets in the way for me is user comments.

Check out https://utteranc.es/

Disqus exists for this reason.

https://wp2static.com/ or https://www.strattic.com/

You don't need to use WordPress where themes can apparently run server code. Plenty of simpler solutions like Gatsby and others.

A theme is server code :) Since WordPress is PHP, rendering the front end is done in PHP on the server. A theme writes PHP to render custom templates, which (on top of styles) is a large part of what themes do in WordPress.

This is changing to an extent with the Full Site Editing project, but themes and plugins are both very powerful and flexible in WordPress, which has in part led to its massive success.

Setup your blog in Github pages with Jekyll[0]

[0] https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-s...

Github is not their own server.

For all the Hugo and Jekyll and other static site generators mentioned, you can run Wordpress locally and have it generate static output. Granted, it would be with a plug-in, but presumably not accessible from the outside world.

You can use php-fpm and nginx’s built-in fpm cache. No plugin required.

Anything that can be written to and executed from the Internet will be a security issue. The only thing your public facing web server should be able to write to is the log file.

Why do you not want to use somebody else's service?

For me, mostly control. I've been writing my blog in Markdown for ages, but Blogger only natively supports its bad WYSIWYG editor or pasting raw html. I've decided the friction in pipeline is enough that I kinda want to cut it out of the loop.

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