Ask HN: Do you blog under your own domain? How? I'm put off by increasing centralization (I won't name companies, you know them) and would like to know who still does it "old school", hosting their own blog. I'm especially interested in the technology behind it. E.g. mine is grisha.org and it's hosted on github pages and behind cloudflare which is how I get SSL. Cost: $0. The blog itself is Octopress and it's kind of aging, I might look at Hugo next if/when I have time. |
Like you I don’t want my content locked up a proprietary site or platform like medium.
I run a Ghost installation on a Debian VM, reverse proxied through Nginx and set up with Let's Encrypt.
I used to run Drupal, but it wasn't worth the effort.
- Our site is built using the static site generator Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/docs/). We use the Hydeout theme (https://github.com/fongandrew/hydeout) + some additional CSS styling, but you can really use anything.
- Gitlab pipelines for continuous deployment
- GoDaddy for domain management
- Fast out of the box.
- Simple to get set up (on the order of hours to get production-ready with full CI/CD!)
- Flexible (you can customize Jekyll all you like if you know a modicum of CSS - tons of control).
- Managed and versioned in Github, collaboration and updates are a breeze.
- Free
- You need to be technical, but that's probably not an issue for the HN set.
1. Namecheap DNS registration.
2. Server is an old PC in my basement.
3. Dynamic DNS client running on my OpenWRT router.
4. Code is a homemade blog system. Linux, Java (Servlets + JSP + EJB), Payara, PostgreSQL.
5. Uses a Let's Encrypt certificate.
It's totally old school, but fun to play with, and it serves pages fast.
Personally I've been meaning to start writing for some time now but I keep kicking the can down the road for multiple reasons.
Problem 1: Lack of time, other more important things that I need to take care of and basically life in general - I've had serious time constraints during the last few years. Which I have been able to considerably improve lately. Which is completely unrelated to the lockdown and has more to do with me figuring out how to organize everything and catch up. And ultimately I've been looking into starting again lately.
Problem 2: The absence of a decent platform: I really don't want to deal with maintaining a database or a server for the purpose of serving text and images.
Problem 3: sphinx, hugo, and all other static site generators, while great, are not self-contained and a huge overkill imo for a personal site/blog. Meaning that managing them on the go is still painful - I'd have to setup a ci/cd to manage them, which I feel is the same as having a database and a server somewhere.
So I tried to somewhat fix problem 2 and 3 and built something from scratch myself - a small dartlang-based site(as I've stated a million times, i abhor javascript with a passion and just seeing it makes me vomit), which operates with either html or markdown pages, simple href and routing. The point is that at any given time I can unlock my phone, ssh into any of my servers, add a .md file, add a link, commit and push and forget about it.
I've been meaning to open-soruce the whole thing and if someone's interested they can use it. All in all, the end result is a transpiled js file from dart, which is ~90kb gzipped, an index.html and a yml file which allows you to customize stuff.
If anyone is interested, you can have a look at http://axegon.com.
Back on the topic of blogging, I agree with your points about maintenance. I think if the goal is purely writing and having it be accessible on the internet, html and a minimal amount of css are going to have the lowest overhead, best performance, be portable, and be easiest to maintain, won't it? It depends on if you want extra functionality of course but if the intention really is just to write, html works fine?
> I definitely sacrifice other aspects of life in the name of getting things done.
You kind of nailed it. It's just a question of what kind of sacrifices you're willing to make. In my case, at a young age(20-ish) due to a million and one reasons(parents far away and unable to help, those supposed to be "close" to me stabbing me in the back without any hesitation whatsoever), this became my personal life. It sounds pretty sad that I spent most of my 20's buried in work but long-term, if that hadn't been the case, my mind cannot even begin to imagine how I would have been able to handle everything that came after that. And even till this day, sacrificing my personal life is always the simple and obvious choice, at the expense of some occasional gloomy moods of course. As a side effect, I became very self-sufficient, which does come in handy when someone close to me is facing a problem - I can give a hand. It also pushed me to develop some extreme pedantism which would make the stereotype for German pedantism look like child's play. But one of the most crucial things I do is I spent 30 minutes before bedtime reviewing all my todo's, appointments, arrangements and issues, 15 minutes of which I spend sorting them by priority:
1. Critical - near life and death situations, forget sleeping, eating or showering, tackle as soon as I finish the list.
2. High - Something that needs to be resolved within the next 2 days.
3. Medium - Can hold for a week but get to them asap.
4. Low - Completely trivial but annoying stuff like being out of coffee.
The next 15 minutes I make a plan about each of the things on the list, and set alarms, notes, reminders and routes if that involves going somewhere.
On the subject of notes - English isn't my first language, however unless any of the things on the list are strictly local, all notes are in English, even the coffee shortage: more resources online, easier to search and get informed if needed. I can't tell you how much time that has saved me.
As soon as priorities of type 1 and 2 are clear, life can proceed as normal. Now that you made me think about it, this process might have taught me to build incredibly elaborate and complex plans with little to no effort and being incredibly flexible. I really hadn't thought about it but there might be something to this, who knows... Bottom line is, despite a number of brutal challenges in the last several years, those few simple rules have kept me sane, have helped me solve all of them while staying healthy and fit. And at the moment I can honestly enjoy my weekend.
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As for the blogging, and clean HTML - yes and no. It is definitely the easiest to setup and get running, I agree. But if I'm on the go and the only thing I have on me is my phone, writing HTML over ssh isn't really ideal. Which is why I built this - it renders markdown as HTML out of the box, so adding something is as easy as creating an .md file, adding a link, commit and push. This will take you 10-15 minutes to set-up but it renders well on all devices I've tried, and has absolutely 0 maintenance required afterwards.
I don't have much traffic; the blog and email/etc runs less than $10/mo.
It's possible to lease a bare IP range and set up your own DNS servers, etc. For small amounts of traffic theres no reason you couldn't use a RasPi to serve a blog that way. There's also drawbacks and headaches that make renting someone else's stuff attractive.
Version control: GitHub
Editing: Netlify CMS or nano+git
I started setting this up from scratch using Gatsby, but then realized it would be much better and also easier to use this starter:
https://www.gatsbyjs.org/starters/alxshelepenok/gatsby-start...
It is as easy to set this up, as it is to install LAMP+WordPress on a VPS.
Eleventy is great for me because it's written in Javascript and I use Javascript every day for work. Very fast and capable. Can't say how it compares to other static site generators because it's the first one I've used.
My setup includes nginx and Letsencrypt, and that's pretty much it. The Ghost blog uses a SQLite database.
I wouldn't blog on any third-party service since they could kick me out anytime for any reason. My website is my digital garden. I don't monetize it, don't run ads there, don't sell anything. No reason to run it anywhere but on my own server.
I host my custom HTML and CSS blog there and it’s great! https://www.towardssoftware.com
More importantly it’s all just basic files I can export to another platform if repl.it gets acquired or shuts down. They can host a basic HTML, css and js blog, however I choose to use python flask because I like the templating and simple routing.
There are plugins for every feature you could possibly need.
You admittedly have to put in some time for researching and comparing those and not fall for the temptation to install the first plugin you come across for a particular feature.
Ansible is used to build and maintain both servers, and the actual web content is in Git.
I use `receive.denyCurrentBranch=updateInstead` in the repo config on the servers, so I just do a push to each and the new content goes live instantly.
The reason for doing it this way is that I want to fully own my platform. I have fine-grain control over all of the web server headers, PHP configuration, etc.
The domain is managed via Hover [3].
[1]: https://uberspace.de
The hosting is my local provider, I sent updates via FTP (oldschool huh?) and keep my website behind cloudflare to save some bandwidth.
Some of my subdomains hosted on netlify, because I won’t bother myself installing node.js on my server.
How: github pages. How, you ask? I don’t know. I set it up once, and now when I log in to github it tells me I set it up wrong and I should set it up again correct. I don’t know what I did or how to do it correctly - but visiting my domain works, so I don’t dare to fix what isn’t really broken.
So I guess you don’t need to know what you’re doing to host a static site on your own domain :)
Short is create a CNAME file in your site repo with your custom DNS in it, then add a CNAME in your DNS pointing to the GitHub pages DNS.
I like your blog :) Subscribed in RSS.
OTOH, writing content is a challenge for me. If I try to start writing a tutorial, there seems to exist many others, with some of them being very high quality content. In the end it becomes futile to figure out what to write.
Would appreciate any tips to start writing about something.
This way you don't have to risk it may break and if it is a low traffic site it might be cheaper.
You can check it out at: https://about.houqp.me/posts/
Monthly server cost is $5, Domain cost $15 a year
If you are interested to check it out, https://fluffy.es (iOS development mainly)
I do so for some things.
Gitlab pages with custom domain. Ssl from lets encrypt. Domain managed by cloudflare.
Static site with Hugo and I use asciidoctor for authoring entries
Let's encrypt cert renewal is via a cron job running on rpi in my home network