Ask HN: What is the best way to author blogs in 2024? I want to share technical blog content but I want to author it as I am developing the content easily, screenshots and markdown would be ideal and I don't want to self host things. What is the ideal tool to help create quality content? |
Web 1.0 Hosting - is an advanced static hosting with some predefined most necessary ready-made scripts, a smallweb project that makes it possible to access static websites from old devices such as retro computers, old operating systems, palmtops, and cellular phones as part of an initiative to save the old web and support the smallweb movement. Hosting of modern websites and the use of modern technologies are also permitted. There is also a search engine, web mail and web chat, working on both modern and legacy systems.
I wrote an article on how I moved to this much simpler setup from WordPress after 15+ years https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/
You focus on the content, let Github take care of the tooling.
- https://docs.github.com/en/codespaces/the-githubdev-web-base...
I found solutions out there were either full fledged cms which are cumbersome to setup and honestly distracting.
I was looking for something that was easy to work with like medium or notion, supports markdown syntax, and is fully headless because I like tinkering with the other frontend stuffs. If you have similar issues, check out wisp: https://wisp.blog/.
You can even try out the editor before signing up for anything: https://www.wisp.blog/try-editor
Also if you are looking to have a blog template to just kickstart the process, you can get everything wired up in the next 20 mins with this: https://github.com/Wisp-CMS/nextjs-blog-cms-wisp
Disclaimer: I'm the builder for wisp and have 200+ happy users now.
If you don't want to pay, use Astro and put it on Vercel or Cloudflare Pages.
Currently using a theme from here https://jekyll-themes.com/free
When I'm travelling I could just edit the markdown/upload photos on the phone browser
I think the writing effort was about similar to the effort it would take to learn some other guy's system, adapting it to my particular requirements.
My sites are pretty small. The only thing I pay for now is the domain which is around $9 to $15 per year/domain.
as for the quality of the content, it is usually a mix of personal experience (e.g. https://jvns.ca/blog/, https://folklore.org/0-index.html, https://www.filfre.net/ ) and number of hours to write.it
- [0] https://jekyllrb.com/ - [1] https://gohugo.io/
blog running on hugo: https://hackerstations.com/
- [0] https://gohugo.io/
- [1] https://liza.io
I ended up staying with Hugo because I post loads of photos and image optimisation, or responsive images, was much easier to implement in Hugo.
I heard Astro now has better image processing, so I might give it another try as migrating templates and posts between Hugo and Astro was actually pretty easy.
I have hosted many in the past. Self hosted, wordpress, and a php version (I forgot what it was called)
The biggest problem with all those was dealing in spam comments and bad cross links.
Then I tried medium but it didn’t use to share subscriber emails.
Ended up migrating to Substack and been very happy with it for past 3 years
That would completely eliminate spam and ~100% of your troubles.
You can easily have your own domain connected to it and GitHub will provide an SSL certificate.
Even ignoring that, you run into stuff like this:
> the first wall I hit [trying to update the website] was that I: Forgot [...] the esoteric Hugo conventions (has documentation, but it's not easy to parse at a glance) [...] not sure how I could have remembered all of the Hugo-isms, especially since I don't update this site very often and don't do static site generator work outside of this.
Nothing about this sort of thing is unforeseeable. Don't choose these options.
<http://web.archive.org/web/20210331182731/https://corytheboy...>
A static site generator is probably best, but the best one for you comes down to preference.
Or you can just not approach it, that's fine too, I don't care what you do. I'm only trying to be helpful.
(because git* pages is the near perfect solution, if they gave access to access logs)
echo -e "Astro\nBlogger\nHugo\nWordPress\nGhost" | shuf | head -n 1Static sites are almost maintenance-free. They cost pennies to host. You work on your content using the tools that you love, if necessary offline. There are many excellent markdown editors and no CMS comes close. Everything is under source control and deploys with a push.
If you're used to text files and command line utilities, static site generators are a no-brainer. You probably shouldn't roll your own though.
Try following a few newsletters. I like that Berlin Events Weekly creates a Telegram channel so people can meet and attend events.
For things to do, Mit Vergnügen is pretty good.
I rolled my own because I wanted to use Jinja inside Markdown. This lets me include widgets in the content, and use Python-based constants in the text. For example, when the German minimum wage changes, I change one constant and it triggers a bunch of updates across the website.
I also wanted to control the content-to-website pipeline a little better. The SSG builds pages, but also generates text-to-speech audio for glossary terms, makes some typographic changes, and lints the Markdown for site-specific issues.
I wrote a bit about it here: https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/ursus
The code is here: https://github.com/All-About-Berlin/ursus/
I've been using Hugo + Netlify combination for more than 4 years now and It's a breeze.
If you want to go with a full no-code solution, I'd recommend [feather.so](https://feather.so/) (I haven't used personally but heard good things about it in the past)
I'm hosting my blog[1] on GitHub Pages, the repo[2] is public so you can take a look and fork it if you find it interesting.
The setup is really simple, straightforward, and no-cost.
[0] - https://github.com/mmistakes/minimal-mistakes
[1] - https://www.vladsiv.com/
I've been very happy with Astro because it is a good example of low floor and high ceiling software. I can start with plain HTML, make it more flexible with Astro language (still very close to HTML), make authoring easier with Markdown (+ lifestyle extensions from Remark/Rehype), and extend to frameworks like React on a need basis (which I use for some pages where I use maps).
[1]: https://sanyamkapoor.com [2]: https://sanyamkapoor.com/kb/the-stack
My static personal site is Astro hosted on cloudflare pages https://github.com/ShaunLawrie/shaunlawrie.com
And I used their documentation template https://starlight.astro.build/ for my autogenerated docs on https://pwshspectreconsole.com/
I love having the ability to focus on the content and never having any blockers if I want to do something weird like embed a prebuilt react component for some edge cases.
I actually built a low-code blog template using Astro for my partner and friends [1].
I set it up so you can publish a github pages site from your browser (using a dev container), or you can just drop in markdown files into vscode. It's not quite no-code, but I think if I could add a simple UI it in theory could be.
[1] https://github.com/easy-astro-blog-creator/easy-astro-blog-c...
The Amplify hosting platform is very easy to get started with. I use it with Hugo, it’s super-convenient, IMO.
Personally I settled on Astro + Netlify for my technical blog. I can write in Markdown, push to GitHub, and it automatically gets compiled and hosted by Netlify for free.
However for non programmers friends and family, I've setup a few blogs with Memos and they all love it.
I do want to make a better page for that list though so I appreciate you nudging me.
1000 a minute would be bad, but that's not a typical load for a blog, unless something you wrote goes completely viral. Happened precisely once to me in 8 years of writing.
Quarto works nicely with several IDEs, and works out of the box with both Python, R, and Observable JS. Typst support was also just added, but I haven’t explored that yet.
The documentation is also extensive. Here is the link to setting up a blog [1].
I also use for manually saving some comments/replies I post on social media Scribbles - a simple blog engine. I publish them on a subdomain[3] in case you want to see how it looks like.
Here are some things I would look for when choosing a platform:
1. Bring your own domain - this is very important because it allows flexibility to switch to any other platform while keeping your audience/place
2. Export as markdown - while markdown is not the best format, still exporting to it makes the possibility to migrate easier.
3. Have support for RSS - I use RSS to track a big number of technical blog and consider it important
4. Have support to display author name and date of publishing. This is important for technical topics to allow proper citation and to put the knowledge in context.
- [0] https://hashnode.com
- [1] https://allaboutcoding.ghinda.com
- [2] https://scribbles.page
- [3] https://notes.ghinda.com
I recommend Svekyll (https://extrastatic.dev/svekyll/svekyll-cli). Svekyll combines the simplicity of Jekyll with the power of Svelte.
This is a post I made recently:
https://webiphany.com/2024-04-29-distance-sean-shawn
That post uses Svelte to build interesting animations, includes a AI embedding model right inside the post and runs in your browser.
And, if you want to hack the entire post yourself, scroll to the bottom, click the view source button and then click download. That will download a zip file which can build that post independently by just running "npm i && npm run build". That command generates a single HTML file with everything inlined so you can take that and put it on any static website.
Svekyll posts are just markdown, but you can add anything like vanilla js and Svelte components, and tailwind is included automatically.
I don't see anything else out there that is as simple or expressive as Svekyll. And 99% of that is just that I don't see anything out there that is as simple or expressive as Svelte.
Of course you gotta get it running (or pay people like WP Engine), but you're going to end up with a thing that will work.
That or dev.to is a good spot I think.
I definitely wouldn't use WordPress to serve the site permanently though. It is just a lot of maintenance, a huge security footprint, and overall something that you have to routinely think about.
Where The Sweet spot is, is using WordPress to manage the content and define the layout and everything, but then exporting the site into a static form which you can then host with nginx or something similar. This is really a killer setup that is underrated.
Note: do as I say, not as I do. I did this setup for one site, but I don't do it anymore and won't, mainly for probably silly reasons: I really dislike the WordPress ecosystem, and while there are phenomenal developers who are involved in WordPress and who work on it, the vast majority produce hacked together code that barely works. Everyone is trying to make a business out of it, so it's the most highly commercialized framework I've ever seen. That sort of thing really repulses me, which is why I don't use it. Technically, it is the most capable and mature solution. Fortunately, when it comes to personal projects and sites, I can be petty and impractical about what technologies I choose :-D
Would the static pages extracted support commenting?
Thanks.
[0] https://yieldcode.blog [1] https://thesolopreneur.blog [2] https://jikokaizen.blog [3] https://astro.build/ [4] https://coolify.io/
But then I wanted to play with nextjs + typescript, have total control over how everything works, and host it myself in a container so I wrote a little static generator with next: https://github.com/igor47/blog
I think there are many ways to generate a site from images and markdown and the "best" depends on what you're trying to achieve
Now I am thinking about markdown editor, because writing content in VSCode, well, its ok, especially if you copy-paste from GPT, but ideally I would like to write it on the page itself so you see immediately what you get and you don't need to run the localhost etc. I think its not really that hard to make it.
I use Jekyll/Minimal Mistakes/Github pages for product blogs, where I just want to broadcast information or have it available for people to find through search, and where I need to own and brand the domain name itself.
I use Substack for a few projects where I want a stronger relationship with the audience - commenting, automatic email list building and distribution, and easy/attractive formatting. I just keep the Substack free, and don't worry about the domain name (x.substack.com) is fine.
The one caveat with Ghost is that it only works with Mailgun for drop-in support of sending newsletters: https://ghost.org/docs/faq/mailgun-newsletters/
It was the one thing that gave me pause before taking the leap. At least they're being transparent about what and why even if I disagree with some of their reasoning. I have sent newsletters successfully via a self-hosted SMTP server to thousands of readers for years. I mean, I wouldn't recommend anyone doing that if they value their sanity, but I also think self-hosters should be free to experiment.
Comments won’t work. You need a backend and database for that.