Ask HN: What do you use for your personal blog?

19 points by canergly 1 year ago | 43 comments

I want to create a simple, SEO friendly personal blog.

Do you have any open source and self-hosted recommendation?

Hugo! Compiles Markdown down to a stack of static HTML files, with a ton of flexibility. Currently i have it powering https://andrew-quinn.me/ , https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/ , and https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/selkouutiset-archive/ , all of which serve different niche purposes.

As for hosting, hosting HTML pages is super easy. The lowest effort for Hugo is GitHub Pages. Netlify is another solid option. https://andrew-quinn.me/ runs on Azure Static Web Apps, but that might take more cloud familiarity than you want to invest in. Or you could just run `hugo` and SCP the resulting directory to a VM!

keraf 1 year ago |

Ghost for my personal blog and also photography portfolio. Been happily using it for years, easy to self host. Quite surprised not to see more mentions of it here.

mmarian 1 year ago |

Astro SSG. Can easily add Tailwind and React, which I use in my day to day. Got a couple of sites ranked in top 3 for the keywords I'm targeting. Hosted on Cloudflare Pages, for free.

indigodaddy 1 year ago | |

Would you mind sharing those sites?

mmarian 1 year ago | | |

Sure, hackernewsalerts.com and https://tiktokexamples.com I also use Astro for https://hextotailwind.com which isn't technically a blog but ranked 2 on Google. I've recently open sourced all of them, check out on https://GitHub.com/mihailthebuilder

senkora 1 year ago |

Use a static site generator that is written in a language that you know well, so that you will be comfortable updating it and installing extensions. I use Pelican because I am comfortable with Python. Many people use Jekyll because they are comfortable with Ruby.

beretguy 1 year ago |

Bear Blog:

https://bearblog.dev/

vunderba 1 year ago |

I swapped away from Wordpress to Pelican, a static site generator written in Python. The theme is a heavily customized version of Octapress - and its really performant with zero third-party dependencies / network requests.

Plus I like that I can literally click a button in Obsidian which formats a note, compresses/optimizes the media, and pushes it up to my website. Frictionless blog posting FTW.

https://github.com/getpelican/pelican

https://mordenstar.com

Though... recently I've been thinking about swapping over to Astro because the grass is always greener.

stevenicr 1 year ago |

Wordpress is nice for many reasons, people will pan it for security and such..

install, add firewall like wordfence, change max failed logins to low number.

turn on auto updates for WP and the plugins and themes.

Pull backups auto and free with updraft plugin.

enjoy the massive amount of themes and support around the www

https://steveiscritical.com uses base WP with default theme, I have several others that mod the themeing more.

bonus - skip tutorials that use page builders like elementor - base gutenberg does most the things out of the box these days, not need for extra bloat to be fancy.

stevenicr 1 year ago | |

I've several learn stuff quick about wordpress things added on this learn page: https://steveiscritical.com/learn-websites-and-coding/

alexander2002 1 year ago |

HI,I made alexy.tech(its a work in progress) using a guide I found online. It uses notion as cms and github pages as host.

Guide Link:https://nerdymomocat.github.io/posts/introducing-webtrotion/

Since I am too lazy,I ony managed to publish one blog https://alexy.tech/posts/the-future-of-the-internet-more-rob...

satvikpendem 1 year ago |

I tried a lot, now it's just pure HTML and CSS.

innertracks 1 year ago |

Racknerd VPS running Caddy serving a Hugo generated static site. Site and content are created/edited in Emacs and rsynced to server. Took the default Hugo generated theme and tweaked it to my tastes. Forget where I sourced the original CSS I used as a starting point.

https://www.hextxt.com

joshcanhelp 1 year ago |

I switched from WordPress to Eleventy in 2020 and never looked back.

https://www.joshcanhelp.com/taking-wordpress-to-eleventy/

I currently host on Netlify because it’s free but you could easily sync the generated HTML files to a box you manage.

abhgh 1 year ago |

I use Jekyll[1]. It's quite popular which implies that it's easy to search for answers online or find steps to some specific customization you might need.

[1] https://blog.quipu-strands.com/jensens_inequality

boricj 1 year ago | |

Same, although I recommend not relying on GitHub pages for generating the site due to the age of the gems available on it. I've initially kept my blog compatible with it even though I'm serving it from my NAS, but I ended up ditching compatibility because of that in order to use more modern versions.

skwee357 1 year ago |

For my 3 blogs (info in my profile), I use Astro with markdown on Netlify, but will move soon to my own VPS.

leros 1 year ago | |

Why would you move from a static host to a VPS for a blog?

skwee357 1 year ago | | |

To clarify, it’s about the server.

It still static, but will be served from my hardware rather than a PaaS.

pdyc 1 year ago |

i use hugo for static site generation and i write blog in emacs org mode. Hosting is on cloudflare pages.

perteraul 1 year ago |

Ghost can be easily spun up as a Docker container, is relatively fast and has a good SEO out-of-the-box.

mattnewport 1 year ago |

I use Zola, a static site generator written in Rust, and Github pages for hosting on my own domain.

RNPL 1 year ago |

Zola!

I'd use plain HTML+CSS, but Zola adds some nice tools (like markdown rendering). It lives in a single binary, so I don't mind it. Hosted on GitHub pages.

https://www.getzola.org/

latchkey 1 year ago |

Not personal, but I've started using bullet.so for my company blog (and website).

I like that I can just write stuff in Notion and have it magically appear on a webpage with decent formatting. Not perfect, but fairly easy to setup, customize and maintain.

ig0r0 1 year ago |

Hugo as a static site generator and hosted on Netlify with a custom domain.

jdevy 1 year ago |

I like Jekyll [1]. It is simple, uses markdown, and open source. I am not sure about the SEO part though.

[1]: https://jekyllrb.com/

cpach 1 year ago |

My advice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41017177 (and there’s lots of other recs in that thread)

pacifika 1 year ago |

I’m working on and using Lamb. You can find it via the github link in my profile.

The usp is friction free super simple blogging, self-hosted.

If you don’t mind using something under construction, I’d love to head any feedback.

canergly 1 year ago | |

I'll have a look at it, thanks.

shoebham 1 year ago |

I used https://leoncvlt.github.io/imml/# for my personal website

billconan 1 year ago |

I implemented my own https://github.com/shi-yan/QuipQuick

hsfzxjy 1 year ago |

Hexo for generation and hosted on Github Pages.

https://i.hsfzxjy.site

taskylizard 1 year ago |

VitePress[0] with a custom theme.

0 - https://vitepress.dev

iamflimflam1 1 year ago |

Still using Jekyll, keep meaning to switch to something else, but it works… www.atomic14.com

rewind94 1 year ago |

Astro with Markdown with a static host. Quite simple and quick to get started.

ramon156 1 year ago |

Zola. Nice defaults, that's it. Also I'm biased towards Rust

Curiositry 1 year ago |

Ghost, self-hosted on Fly.io free tier

gregjor 1 year ago |

github page with a custom domain

canergly 1 year ago | |

I think it is for deployment right? I was also looking for a blogging system / script that I can host anywhere I like.

thesnide 1 year ago | | |

I'm also using github pages. It is limited but boring enables to focus on content instead of trying every fancy tool.

mergisi 1 year ago |

I recently created a blog website using OpenAI o1, and it’s been great for generating content with minimal effort. If you're looking for something self-hosted, you can check out my project on GitHub here: [https://github.com/mergisi/openai-o1-coded-personal-blog . Let me know if you have any questions or need more details!