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? I run allaboutberlin.com for a living. I switched from Craft CMS to a homebrew static site generator (Markdown + Jekyll) and it was a game changer. Static 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. All about Berlin is beautiful. I felt nice to know about the simple but powerful setup. I was all after CloudFlare pages with all the options a few years back and I experienced downtimes. I don't remember a single downtime in the last year or so with GitHub Pages. Of course, I use CloudFlare on top to greet the visitors. Cloudflare has been really solid for me back in the CMS days. Now it's a little overkill on top of a static site, but it does speed up page load times for distant visitors. I tried Github Pages for another project and it's brilliant too. Cloudflare Pages Is? Mind sharing the alternative? Thanks in advance. Just had a peek at allaboutberlin.com. Pretty, thankfully slim and what I've seen (just glanced over the housing section) solid advice. You deserve some price for that. Thank you! It took years of snall edits with help from a lot of knowledgeable people. The effort especially shows in Ausländerbehörde and Bürgeramt guides. The official website is pretty bad. thank you for making this site!
i'm planning on moving to germany after i'm done with my studies and this will be pretty helpful
do you have any other resources helpful for expats? (perhaps something more like adjusting to the social life, meeting people, etc) would sure be helpful to put it there Everything I know, I put on the website. I never focused on the fun things, but I at least link to some of them in the "How to move to Berlin" guide. 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. Why not roll your own? Sure, you have to build it and maintain it, but isn’t that in the spirit of programming? It’s fun. If you do it for the love of the game, definitely. It's a fun little project. 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/ Let's rewrite the OS while we're at it since that's in the spirit of programming! :) Just use the nice tools available unless your goal is to rebuild the stack. Or if you can find one that's close to your exact needs, use that and submit patches and pull requests upstream, or fork and maintain your fork if your changes aren't appropriate or acceptable for upstream. Easier than rolling your own if you just don't feel like going to that extreme, and still helps the ecosystem grow and thrive. Assuming that the purpose of the blog is to write/publish, then all of that is distraction from actually writing. Blogging about creating a custom static site generator for the blog is the most common first (and last) post. Use a Static Site Generator like [Hugo](https://gohugo.io) and use GitHub pages or even Netlify which allows for CI/CD + Custom Domain with HTTPS/SSL certificates. 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 am using a simple Jekyll theme minimal-mistakes[0] which I customized to suit my needs. 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/ My lack of knowledge has led me to only have heard of WordPress, but it feels cumbersome to operate, so I've been writing some 'draft' blogs locally. Thank you for letting me know about this solution; I've already started my first blog. That's awesome! I am glad I helped. If you have any questions about the setup, please feel free to reach out. Also, when you get your blog up and running, let me know, I would like to check it out. I use Astro + Cloudflare Pages for my website [1]. I document the key bits of my stack here [2] for completeness. 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 I am very happy with Zola. Every SSG has its own shortcomings, for Zola I was initially bothered by lack of 'proper' footnotes and the insistence on having to have frontmatter, but I've yet to feel that I cannot do something really. The docs can be a touch confusing imo, but they're written with care. Proper footnotes have now landed! https://github.com/getzola/zola/commit/6a2b890545398bb21cab5... oh sick, thanks for letting me know I can only recommend Zola as well. I’ve been using it for past 4 years or so and it’s been very stable. Like you, I feel the docs could be a bit more deeper (+more examples) but I’ve always managed to figure out what I need to do. I'd suggest Astro (https://astro.build/) Astro is awesome. It’s easy enough to get started with a template for a static site and flexible enough to build dynamic web apps. 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. 1+ Astro. 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... Haven’t tried Astro myself, but AFAICT it’s compatible with AWS Amplify – which in my book is a huge plus. The Amplify hosting platform is very easy to get started with. I use it with Hugo, it’s super-convenient, IMO. How much are you getting charged each month for Amplify? My traffic is minuscule, so for two Hugo blogs it’s something like $1/month. Astro is really good for this use case. Also easy to host on platforms like Netlify. I'm a happy (albeit) infrequent user of https://mataroa.blog/ Some alternative solutions that I haven't seen mentioned here are: Write.as (or it's open source code WriteFreely if one wants to self host) and Memos (which can be self hosted, or you can use a platform such as pikapods to host it for you 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. Can you please share your Astro + Netlify blog's URL? usememos.com? Not sure which one’s the ideal tool but I’m slowly collecting them all here: https://manuelmoreale.com/blog-platforms I don't want to cramp your style, but displaying those in a table would really improve readability I know but I don’t want to mess with the site css since that’s literally the only table I have used in 7 years ahah I do want to make a better page for that list though so I appreciate you nudging me. Could you just use a markdown table and have it generate from a csv of all your tools? Many ssgs will go this. I could yes but when I added that page my site was as simple as it gets and it wasn’t worth the hassle to add a bunch of stuff for literally one table in a post out of almost 500 posts on the site. two options: link to an external google sheet as well, or add the table as an image Both not very appealing. Don't want to direct people towards a google site and I don't want to keep re-making an image every time I add an entry to the table. I see what you did there This list is great. Thank you for compiling it! My pleasure. It keeps growing constantly, there are so many platforms out there. Whatever way you choose, don’t forget to include an RSS feed for your blog. I am just happy with self-hosted Wordpress. Lots of interesting plugins, once you get the hang of it, you can write your own plugins (as I did). Can take moderate load (say, 30 visitors a minute) just fine. 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. If you want simple, free and flexible you can build a static site blog with Hugo and host on GitHub Pages. I love Quarto [0] and use GitHub pages for hosting. 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’ve been using Quarto for a few months now and it’s been great to be able to turn Jupyter notebooks into blog posts with not extra work. Eleventy. It’s a static site generator that’s super stable, they take backwards compatibility very seriously so you can count on it for a long time. It’s lightweight so you don’t have to install a million dependencies to get it working, and it’s the only one of the big SSG projects that’s independently funded so they’re not chasing VC-backed hyper growth. In 2024 the ONLY reasonable way to keep a blog is your own personal site. EVERYTHING else will eventually get sold or turn to crap when they need to monetize. I use Hashnode[0] for my main technical blog[1] as they support custom domain and all posts can be automatically saved to Github as markdown. 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'm biased because I wrote this blog tool, so take my comments with the appropriate skepticism) 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. You could probably get far with Wordpress. Why? Because if you're technical you can navigate the tricky setup well, and it's made in a way to support a lot of things for non-technical people. 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 run a Wordpress instance on my home server. An extract job regularly exports a static version of the site. I host it on a DO droplet with a bunch of other static websites. This is really an underrated option. WordPress is amazingly powerful, and if you don't have any interest in coding the layout and stuff yourself, there is an abundance of pre-written stuff that you can buy for cheap, and there's plenty of options that are free as well. 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 What's a good way to extract a static version? I currently use a plug-in that claims to create static pages, but the management is still on Wordpress. Is that good enough? Would the static pages extracted support commenting? Thanks. I‘m using WP2Static, a Wordpress plugin. But you can script up something yourself with wget/curl, too. Comments won’t work. You need a backend and database for that. WP2Static seems nice. Thanks! I have 3 blogs [0][1][2] and they all use Astro [3] with a variation of the same theme. The content is written in Markdown, and I'm in the process of moving them all from Netlify to self hosted Coolify [4]. [0] https://yieldcode.blog
[1] https://thesolopreneur.blog
[2] https://jikokaizen.blog
[3] https://astro.build/
[4] https://coolify.io/ If you don’t want to self-host then Ghost or wordpress.com might be worth checking out. Ghost has a solid self hosting story as well. Upgrading is easy, changing and updating themes isn’t hard, and you don’t need many resources to run it. Out of curiosity, is there any specific hosting provider you would recommend for Ghost? For example, would DigitalOcean suffice? Absolutely. I run Ghost on a *.small instance in AWS. 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. I like using my blog to experiment with technology. I used to use GitHub pages and wrote some tips about using it with custom domains: https://igor.moomers.org/posts/github-pages-proxying-and-red... 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 I used to just use GitHub Pages but not really satisfied with the existing templates that the generators (Jekyll, Hugo etc.) have on GitHub. I now just started using self-hosted Ghost and absolutely loving it. It has a really nice CMS, and beautifully designed templates. I developed my personal site - https://vladislavsorokin.com (not much content there though) with NextJS typescript markdown blog template https://github.com/vercel/next.js/tree/canary/examples/blog-... 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. Use whatever static site generator you like (*kyll, hugo, etc) and host it on a free static web hosting (netlify, github pages and others). Depends a bit on what you want to accomplish. 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. Bear blog hosts a bunch of technical blogs, is markdown based, and open-source. You should mention you're the creator. I do a flavor of this. I use Hugo as my blog system and plugged in the bearblog template to it. Right now I host on GitHub pages with my own custom domain. Works well! I can recommend you a simple and backwards compatible hosting http://web1.0hosting.net/ 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. Blogger is still around. Themes look very old fashioned but I think overall it's good enough to publish. This blog https://www.filfre.net/2024/07/the-later-years-of-douglas-ad... was on first page on HN a couple of days ago and it is blogger. Jekyll is easy to use and you can write posts using markdown. There are several themes available out there, but it's also easy to work with the back end to customize. I've used Jekyll with Gitub pages for several years with no issues [0]. Plus, hosting is free on Github! My personal blog/website (and a lot of my other small websites) are hosted on Github. Jekyll, the OG of SSG, manages them. Github also has a built-in editor that you can write directly in the browser. If you are starting from scratch, it should be pretty straight forward and easy. 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... Had the same grip as you, so I set out to fix it. 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. Just put it on WordPress or Wix if you don't mind paying. If you don't want to pay, use Astro and put it on Vercel or Cloudflare Pages. I like to keep things as simple as possible. I just write my blog posts directly as HTML, using Svelte+Kit as my technology stack, hosted on a cheap Hetzner VPS. I didn't want to learn or build a static site generator, and my articles mostly consists of a header and a bunch of <p>-s anyway. Jekyll, hosted on github pages is what I use 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 wrote a very simple python script to crush markdown into HTML in the right way. Maybe 200 lines. 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. I use NuxtJS + Netlify + Cloudflare (DNS). Recently Nuxt released https://nuxt.studio making it more easier for me to edit contents. My sites are pretty small. The only thing I pay for now is the domain which is around $9 to $15 per year/domain. self-host gives you flavor though (your own domain, absolute choice in what you can use, and of course 'meta content' (this is how i host this blog, vs github pages, vs medium 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 By far the easiest if you just want to go from markdown to online blog would be a static site on Github pages. I use Hugo [0] with a custom theme but there are even easier options if you don't even care about style. In particular, I have used Grip [1], which can generate HTML from markdown. I run one blog on Jekyll[0], another on Hugo[1]. I must admit, Hugo somehow feels much more flexible and fast. - [0] https://jekyllrb.com/
- [1] https://gohugo.io/ blog running on hugo: https://hackerstations.com/ I recommend Ghost. You can self host it or use their hosting service. I’ve been happy with it for around 8 years. It only gets better. I use https://www.bridgetownrb.com/ and it works pretty well. Very easy to use and deploy. Blog posts are listing line by line, like "index". I didn't customize much from the generated code(only logo and header). You can take a look: ruzig.com WordPress tbh. I've been running a setup that uses Hugo[0] + GitLab CI + S3 for years and it's worked really well for my blog[1]. Very low hassle. - [0] https://gohugo.io/ - [1] https://liza.io Have a look at Prose from pico.sh . Like Planet
https://github.com/Planetable/Planet I switched back and forth between Astro and Hugo. 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 use substack thinkingthrough.substack.com 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 Have you considered not having Comments? That would completely eliminate spam and ~100% of your troubles. yeah I thought about it but then it defeated the purpose of comments i.e. engagement and perspective of reader. Substack does a good job at it Interestingly, Notion has just announced today the ability to publish from their tool: https://www.notion.so/help/public-pages-and-web-publishing notion urls are so long Who cares? Do judge stories posted on Hacker News (or elsewhere) by how pretty their URL is? I meant it is too ugly to share the urls.I do know there are some ways to change that but its not by default Besides those large installations there are still some classics like https://www.dreamwidth.org/ where one can publish a journal (aka blog). https://jamstack.org/generators/ has a list of static site generators (I think you can ignore the "for jamstack" part). I've been a fan of using Netlify and Netlify-CMS (Decap now) with 11ty template. Write in markdown, transfer it with rsync to a server running hugo or jekyll? If you don’t want to maintain the infrastructure, you can also just commit to git and push to GitHub, and there have CI build the Hugo/Jekyll website and host it using GitHub pages. You can easily have your own domain connected to it and GitHub will provide an SSL certificate. If you don't want to maintain infrastructure, don't adopt the kinds of software stacks created by the kinds of people who have only ever shown a giddiness for producing devops shovelware that assumes/requires maintenance. 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...> Github pages + HTML/CSS. Maybe with a markdown converter. Something static on a cdn Use a static site. Compress your pages. Easy way to make it fast. A static site generator is probably best, but the best one for you comes down to preference. I like SvelteKit + mdsvex, which is built on top of remark. You can generate a static site with the static adapter. Text and imagery? Html is made for this. You mean to code it by yourself? Nah, I, like most people interested in blogging, will pass. Why so against it though? HTML isn't hard to understand. Like I said you can set it up in an afternoon. With any tool you have to learn how to use it. You use some website builder you aren't going to know what all of their gui functions do off the bat either, you will have to read up how to do what you want in their way. Might as well learn to use the right tool for the job which in this case is probably the easiest programming language there is. You basically write paragraphs of text and put in links to where the image files are and some tags and that's it. It's so easy. 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. It's easy to understand, but modern tools are much more convenient for multimedia posts. I want to put an image in my post. I find the jpeg/png I want, (s)cp it over to the exacty right location, and then figure out how to inline or link to it in the assets folder as a separate thing. Compare that to the much smoother workflow with a platform like facebook. i will extend the questions with: is there anything like github|gitlab|etc pages, which allow full access to access logs? (because git* pages is the near perfect solution, if they gave access to access logs) What about Substack and just keeping it free? I’m more curious more than convinced… Bear or pika. Do not use eleventy, their cli bugs out very frequently
Hugo is underpowered Pandoc! I write markdown and generate HTML pretty straightforwardly. Follow up, what is the best way to author blogs for the next decade? How about github gists? It has comment support built in Whatever your templating library of choice is. I'd suggest github pages or substack plain html with htmx and zero-md and symlinks, no generator. Great now I have analysis paralysis with all these options. Just make a static html page and be done with it after an afternoon. Stylistic note, you can use `random.choice()`. If you aren't generating an encryption key, you probably don't need `SystemRandom`. True. It’s an idée fixe of mine. Doesn’t really cost anything extra though. zsh: command not found: import /s Try this one: GOLANG, TAILWIND, and HTMX
import random
platform = random.SystemRandom().choice(["Astro", "Blogger", "Hugo", "WordPress", "Ghost"])
print(platform)
echo -e "Astro\nBlogger\nHugo\nWordPress\nGhost" | shuf | head -n 1