I'm curious to know what your current favourite blog stack is - I'm looking for a light stack, clean & simple writing process and easy-to-manage back-end.
I went with Wordpress after a blogging guide suggested to minimize time spent messing with the blogging software, because messing with blogging software isn't blogging.
True that, but it's good fun anyway ;-) Plus, I'd rather spend two days setting up a usable, solid stack than be annoyed with WordPress every time I load their web interface...
It's good fun to do once or twice, but eventually, like the parent poster states, you eventually find yourself having spent more time tinkering with the stack than actually writing.
I, too, went with WordPress after years of trying to avoid it. After having launched ~30 WP sites in the past ~5 years, it just made sense.
Once you are forced to use WordPress for a few projects you realize how powerful and easy it is to extend. If you can deal with PHP it will serve you well.
I tried to set up something similar from scratch myself, using Strapi as the CMS, but I found myself re-inventing too many wheels (e.g. how to allow a blog post to include an arbitrary number of inline images).
So when I found this great starter project, I went with it. There's zero maintenance for hosting the site or CMS. But I can still customise whatever I like, and deploy with a simple git push.
I have an identical setup to this, painless to deploy updates/blog posts and zero cost.
I was previously using Jekyll, but moved over to Gatsby a few months ago and have enjoyed the built-in features of Gatsby and it’s surrounding ecosystem so far.
I have also considered integrating a git based CMS like Netlify CMS, but because it’s so easy to make new blog posts with just a git commit and a push I haven’t taken the time to change the workflow.
- I can edit markdown as either plain text or rich text, and switch between them with a toggle
- (Most important) I don't need to worry about whether I've properly filled in the 'frontmatter' section at the top of the file
The format of the frontmatter is indicated to Netlify CMS by the existence of a simple config file in your repo. So it should be easy to give it a try if you want:
Mine was written using Bash and Unix utils, because I wanted to see if I could. I then migrated most of it to Perl once it became too complicated to keep track of which variable was supposed to be escaped how.
What I learned from my experience: I should have stuck to Wordpress. SSH'ing into my server, loading the environment variables, and running the generation script was often friction enough for me to file a post under "finish later", from where it never came back. For all its faults, Wordpress made it super easy for me to share an idea right there and then. Technology was not my problem - friction and writer block were.
Ha - I’m exactly the opposite. I put off starting up a blog for years because I didn’t have the patience to learn some blogging “platform” like WordPress. It wasn’t until I “rolled my own” and “invented my own wheel” that it was interesting enough for me to want to focus on it. On the other hand, it’s probably a little more expensive for me to host everything myself (I could blog on Medium for free after all), but it’s interesting to work through all the technical details of things like adding a comment section, adding a captcha to that comment section, standardizing the look and feel, etc.
Blogger/Blogspot. Yes, it’s super-basic and frozen, but it’s also rock-solid. I’ve tried self-hosting and self-coding several things through the years, and almost all of that has been lost one way or the other... whereas good ol’ B still happily shows my posts from 2002, with zero effort on my part to keep it secure or up to date, and gets preferential seo treatment from Google.
I have built this website with Hugo Static Generator. I found that Hugo has lot more variety of themes to choose and easier to understand the structure. I also like their templating engine. Set up is very easy and building and compiling the site is very fast.
I have also tried Gatsby before finalizing to go with Hugo. IMHO, Gatsby is equally good. However Gatsby is well suited for developers with bit of react knowledge and has limited set of theme selection. For performance, I like the pre-fetch functionality of Gatsby.
Here is my current setup.
1) Hugo Static Site
2) Code repository on Git
3) Automated build and hosted on Netlify (Simple and easy to use)
I wanted something that i) is simple to host and edit, ii) did not require me maintaining a server somewhere, and iii) it was easy to go from Jupyter notebooks to a post.
So I opted for Pelican (https://blog.getpelican.com/) which has a plugin for converting Jupyter/IPython notebooks into blog posts. It is hosted in S3. If you are curious, here it is: http://ramondario.com/
I'm interested in hosting a static site on s3 but worry that some
smartass could rent a botnet and hammer the bucket just for lulz. It
might only take a minute for the charges to bankrupt me, and I can't
find any failsafe solution in the AWS documentation. I know I could
make a billing alarm trigger a lambda function to disable public
access, but it might not be instantaneous. Is there any reliable
information to be had about the financial risks?
I use a static-site generator.
It can be fun to tinker around with (it's a personal blog, I don't need to develop to some deadline), the friction of "generate, upload" isn't that high, and it's easy to find free hosting for the static content.
I guess the "stack" part of that becomes how easy it is to add on bells and whistles which don't come out of the box. I'd chalk that up to "fun to tinker with".
My blog is part of my business website, which runs on WordPress (hosted, not WordPress.com).
It's my favourite stack because hosting and running a website / blog is neither my core business nor my core expertise.
Last time I checked, WordPress was still easier to use and to maintain than static site generators. The plugin ecosystem is huge and provides ready-to-use solutions for common (and not so common) use cases that I therefore don't have to implement myself.
I'm using WordPress, but they've recently changed their UI to be fairly terrible, necessitating another plugin to revert the writing interface.
While that's annoying, the platform supports anything I'd want to do functionally with the site, and it helps that most of my freelance development work is WordPress-related. Like arthev suggested, time spent jacking with the software is time not spent blogging (or something else productive).
Running my girlfriend's recipe blog on Python + Django + Wagtail CMS on a Heroku server, wired up to Google cloud storage. It ends up being completely free with the dev tier Heroku server and staying within the free tier of Google's cloud storage.
It was mostly as a learning exercise, but it's a pretty flexible stack, and I'm a fan of the Wagtail admin panel; didn't really feel the need to customize anything there.
Usually 10s or so. Not a great user experience, but she mostly uses it to share recipes with friends or relatives. Once it's awake, it's pretty quick, faster than Google's App Engine free tier in my experience. If she wanted to generate traffic I'd have no problem paying the $5/month to keep the lights on, and Heroku's pricing seems reasonable as you scale up.
If you're not familiar with Markdown it's probably not the stack for you honestly. But it is my favourite blog stack I've had so far.
Hugo as the static site gen, GitLab as the repo host, Netlify as the web host. Editing wise I usually just use Sublime Text on my desktop or a combo of Working Copy (iOS git app) + Ulysses (Fancypants writing app) on my iPad.
If you don't use Wordpress, what do you use to write posts on your blogs? Are there any other good solutions for typing up a post with formatting and multimedia? And do you this in an admin page or something else? Been thinking about creating a blog from more or less scratch, so I'm really curious to see how other people are doing it.
I would actually love to be able to publish a blog from Evernote - so my notes and research are on one place while getting the benefit of a WYSIWYG editor.
* Just checked and apparently there's a WP integration with Evernote called 'CoSchedule' for publishing posts from notes.
Back in college, I started using what I knew for what I wanted to do. I ended up with a blog using Java EE and Postgres. Total overkill (it's FAST!), but it's been fun over the years to toy with not just blog things (like implementing Markdown, full text search, and backup/restore), but HTTP things (like SRI and CSP).
Mainly as a learning exercise, I wrote my blog from scratch. The back-end is written in Go, mainly communicates with S3 for storage of photo assets and blog posts and serves static pages using HTML templates. I have a front-end written in React for admin views, including blog post editing and photo uploading.
I created my blog few years ago and it is written in Spring on backend and AngularJS on frontend. Relational DB is MySQL.
If I created it again, all I would change is newer version of Angular.
Also I used Docker for containerizing and Jenkins for Continous Integration but it was only in order to practice DevOps skills.
Wordpress with a very simple theme and hardly any plugins. Put it behind free cloudflare account, setup caching/minification and it works like a charm. I self host so little bit of VPS setup knowledge is useful (Nginx with PHP-FPM).
I also like hugo a lot but never got the time to setup my blog on it.
Using Grav CMS [0] from my SaaS side projects blog. Pretty much what you've described. Light, clean and simple, easy to manage back end (PHP). So far so good!
Initially used Express, Pug, and some Markdown libraries to build an automated blog system. There were several issues with reliability, so I switched to:
Have been using WordPress for 13 years but switched to Hugo last year.
The WP ecosystem is broken and Automattic rather cares about pushing out _another_ page builder than fixing the ecosystem and core aspects of WP. They will dig their own grave.
My site www.lessboring.com is running on Pelican, a Python static site generator. It's great for writing in a text editor and deploying with Git. Fairly easy to hack custom functionality, and no backend to get hacked.
Bare HTML/CSS/JS. I did move to Netlify from Github Pages for privacy reasons (and Github Pages for private repos costs money). Works on every device as well!
I use a very simple Hugo and GitHub Pages setup. I wanted to keep it as simple as possible, because for me it's very easy to tinker instead of writing.
Is it light in terms of dev time nowadays? 10+ years ago I had a self-managed Wordpress instance and it was just getting hacked left and right and I had to constantly be applying the latest updates/patches to be safe. 5+ years ago I was in a startup with a self-hosted company blog using Wordpress, this time I remember updates being easier to apply (1 click from the admin UI) but the cheap server we ran it on constantly ran into resource issues.
I agree the initial setup is usually easy and fast, but a lot of maintenance overhead to keep running. It's been a long time and maybe things are better since then?
