Ask HN: What is your blogging stack?
I am thinking about starting a new blog, as a dev my heart says to go with making one from scratch but my mind says to rely on ghost / substack.. What do you guys use ?
Both are built with Ursus, a static site generator I created from scratch.
https://github.com/nicbou/ursus/
It has been rock solid since January, and a significant improvement over Craft CMS. I wrote about my use case and why I solved it this way:
https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/ursus
The general idea (generating a website from content + templates) is fantastic, especially if you do it all day long. Text files are much easier to work with than database records.
For editing, I use Sublime Text with MarkdownEditing and a slightly customised colour scheme. It was stupid fast, even on a 12" Macbook from 2017. I use Sublime Merge to verify what I'm committing.
- Astro without any Frontend framework (crazy, right?)
- Neovim for content writing from PC. GitJournal for writing content from mobile
- Deployed on Netlify (I'm in a process of moving to a self hosted, netlify-like ci-cd pipeline)
[1] https://www.yieldcode.blog/
https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-s...
A couple of weeks ago I built a static site generator using Go, Templ and Goldmark so now I can write my articles directly in markdown. The HTML pages and CSS files are still served by Caddy.
I’m also still using Notion to write the articles but this time exporting to markdown.
IMO, any stack that lets you write articles in markdown is enough for a blog.
- most simple: just use markdown
- more advanced: supports anything quarto and jupyter notebooks support
- - quarto supports a lot of stuff (like embedded runnable code if im not mistake), seems pretty simple, and the defaults render very polished outputs
- - jupyter notebooks support so much it's hard to say which goodies are cool - embeddable widgets, embeddable interpreters, a huge community library of widgets and custom features etc.
- very customizable
- - since it supports jupyter you can code a particular post however you like. You could even embed a whole runtime runnable in the browser (eg jupyterlite)
- - you (probably?) can use any language with a jupyter kernel, eg c++ with xcling, haskell, js, etc
- builtin support for github actions to publish to gh pages on commitBefore that I used Windows Notepad and edited HTML by hand.
If I had to start now, I'd likely use a locally run Wiki with an export to a static web site, and completely ditch the idea of comments. I'd then post links to those articles widely across the social media, and let them deal with comments.
So you have
posts\
+|---LK-99-superconductor.md
+|---twitter-rebrands-to-x.md
This means that:
1. You write directly md, no compilation/transpilation needed.
2. There is no database, posts are stored directly as files.
3. You can edit the files directly on the server (or FTP upload them) and the changes are visible instantly
4. You can customize the PHP rendering the blog post page HTML to your liking using whatever front-end HTML/CSS/JS you want.Great way to have full control over your stack/content.
You can see how it works here:
If you start from scratch, you're building it the way you like, but you aren't spending enough time on actually using it. However, you are able to get more creative with it. I built my blog up for over 10 years... just keeping true to its purpose.
As for using Substack or Ghost...
Ghost: "Ghost is a powerful solution for modern creators who want to publish content on a domain they own and generate revenue through paid memberships. Built-in features like native SEO, email newsletters and paid subscriptions means you don't have to spend time or money on additional tools."
Substack: "Most Substack writers earn money by offering paid email newsletter subscriptions. Writers can set 3 pricing tiers for paid publications: monthly, annual, and founding member tiers. The tiers start as low as $5.00 per month. As of 2023, Substack has over 2 million paid subscriptions."
Both allow you to monetize your blog, taking care of focusing on "how it looks" and more on what you are writing for an audience. If you start from scratch or use WordPress, you have more freedom to change the look and feel. You just have to keep up to date with the hosting. You ask yourself: free vs. paid membership.
You are supporting the Ghost and Substack projects and keeping them running by subscribing, ultimately supoprting them to receive more support. Depending on what you want to do with it and how you plan to use it ultimately depends on it running.
You decide to open up your blog up and let other people write to it too. So you need those features addressed. Substack and Ghost have their pros and cons. And so does having your own website sitting on your own server, giving you the most privacy, but also likely to disappear when you do.
If you are looking to get a blog up fast and monetize it, you could pay for hosting.. and do all the coding, or use existing.. build an audience who reads it, looks at it, and actually subscribes.
You also have to consider the SEO... substack, ghost, medium... all somewhat monetizable, but you still have to attract an audeince from there.. at least they have one to offer.. to help you build even more.
Blogging has been fun for me this past decade... I was about to quit a few years ago, just typing on it, but I've kept it going. Just as I was about to quit, I checked my email and got people interested in publishing articles on it. Traffic keeps it going. Emails keep me going. Enough about me... its up to you now to decide your likeness. Almost 2 million visits per month.. https://confessionsoftheprofessions.com
I'd suggest; start [all] of them at the same time. For seo reasons, write different content for [all]. see which monetizes the best or attracts the biggest audience (the fastest) while you do your own research on it. Different blogs for different topics.