This is nice advice. I ended up with choice paralysis even deciding how to set up and publish blog posts. Static site generators with deployment pipelines? Something more traditional like Wordpress? Other?
IMO, it's perfect:
- it's the default GitHub blogging platform and well documented, the static generation is handled by GitHub.
- I can run a local generator on my laptop and see how the content will look like before pushing content to the site.
- free
- no hassle with domain names. The thing is automatically linked to your github.com account.
- git revision control out of the box. I have 80+ branches with blog posts in various state of completion.
- markdown to write the content
- people can clone my blog if they want to, for their own use, or to fix things and submit PRs. (It has happened a few times.)
- longevity: I think github.com to exist longer than most other blogging platforms, and that it might very well outlast me.
- Instead of https://tomverbeure.github.io, I could change the URL to my own domain, one doesn't have a github.io suffix, but why would I?
It's fun to set up static site generators but I think it's better to pick something you can start writing in immediately instead of spending time thinking about what to use.
If you end up enjoying blogging you can switch to different software later if you like. But don't let that stop you from starting to write now.
All the replies to my comment have been super helpful but the mindset to write immediately is important. I'm grateful for the suggestions and one of the other replies also sound positive for bearblog - it could work out well and I'm going to check it out :-)
It’s been years now. And Ghost’s internationalisation support is still a joke.
Personally, wanting to build more things, I’m moving away from blog management systems, towards content management.
#!/bin/sh
for p in *.html; do
cat .head >out/$p
txt2tags $p >>out/$p
cat .footer >>out/$p
done
Sometimes programmers can get all hung up on the tooling: "I want to do X", "Oh, I need to find or write software to do X", spends more time tinkering with or writing software for X instead of doing X.
As for me I use 11ty [1] for my blog [2]. I quite like 11ty as I just write markdown files and it gets converted to static content. I'm also testing the grounds on using it for an online magazine, basically want to do some css garden tricks for different types of content. Seems to work quite well for this as I want as little JS being sent as possible.
1) WP: You start with promising yourself to never touch any PHP and will still end up in this mess. I always regretted setting up WP few days/weeks after.
2) Gatsby/Next: I'm saying this as one of those frontend hipsters: For a personal blog, just don't. The npm ecosystem imho got so messy that it always added more pain to actually start writing.
3) Hugo: just do it. It's small, fast, nice and once you wrapped your head around their taxonomy and theme model, it's really nice and easy to extend and fun to actually blog.
My 2 cents. Your mileage may vary.
If you want it done: pay somebody a small amount to do the things. Sometimes it's even free.
If you like tinkering: pick a static site generator. Whichever one you pick will be wrong, but the process of setting it up and getting the first entries through will be a learning experience. In a bit you will have an opinion on what went well and what didn't, and be able to learn from others.
(I use Pelican with a bunch of plugins and a repeatedly abused CSS file. It's not right for everyone, but I like it.)