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 ?
24 comments
I run a content website for a living, and I have a personal blog.
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.
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.
I run 3 blogs: a tech oriented[1], a micro-blog (which get's reposted to twitter and mastodon)[2], and general blog[3]
- 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/
[2] https://www.kudmitry.com/blog/
[3] https://www.jikokaizen.blog/
- 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/
[2] https://www.kudmitry.com/blog/
[3] https://www.jikokaizen.blog/
No need to over engineer it, Jekyll on GitHub pages for me.
https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-s...
https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-s...
For quite some time I used plain HTML and CSS to build both my website and blog, served directly by Caddy on a cheap VPS.
I wrote the articles on Notion and exported them to HTML, then made some tweaks before publishing them.
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.
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.
I am not currently blogging, but the last stack I used was markdown files, transformed into HTML snippets with Pandoc. I used Nginx server side includes to insert the snippets into the website.
I used this approach as well for my personal site. I made a shell script to build out the complete HTML files which can be served as static content using a no-server host of choice. Currently I'm using GitHub Pages behind CloudFlare for TLS.
I use a simple nushell script which generates HTML from markdown, hosted on GitHub pages. I use a free service for newsletter. You can use it if you want: https://github.com/alexmingoia/alexmingoia.com/blob/main/bui...
nb_dev might be interesting to you - new blog post == just make a folder containing a jupyter notebook (or just a quarto flavored markdown file - index.qmd)
- 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 commitI still use blogger/blogspot. Of course it could vanish at any second.
Before 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.
Before 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.
I created my own basic PHP/markdown "blog": https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-blog
To add more details: it's just a .htaccess file with Parsedown (PHP Markdown parsing library) and a few helper functions that make it so any .md file in the "posts" folder can be accessed via the file name as the URL.
So you have
This means that:
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.I have a fairly complex infra under my blog (just for the sake of it), but I am fine with self-hosting a minimalistic one with Hugo.
Great way to have full control over your stack/content.
Great way to have full control over your stack/content.
I use Hugo on AWS Amplify. Very convenient. I’m just push to a private repo on Github, Amplify takes care of the rest. No server maintenance to worry about.
Which theme are you using on Hugo?
No theme at all. Just did some very simple template logic and used water.css for styling.
You can see how it works here:
https://github.com/cpach/piper
https://hsm.tunnel53.net/
You can see how it works here:
https://github.com/cpach/piper
https://hsm.tunnel53.net/
I use pandoc. Write in markdown and then convert it to HTML (standalone mode) using the cli.
LAMP + Wordpress, works fine for me.
What a great question.. You want to judge based on something you want to spend more time on.
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.
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.
Thanks for the detailed answer.
i use jekyll with my own theme that looks simalar to my website
Posthaven.