27
votes
What software or service do you use for blogging?
If you have a blog, what service do you use? Are you happy with it, or would you recommend looking elsewhere?
If you have a blog, what service do you use? Are you happy with it, or would you recommend looking elsewhere?
https://ghost.org/
Can't recommend it enough. It's open source, self hostable, excellent quality, great to share access with non techies unlike git based solutions...
Do you have a resource that you would recommend for getting started with Ghost? Are the official docs a good place to start? I'm always looking for alternative CMS's and site generators. I like to weigh my options.
I believe their hosted plan has a free 2 week trial. I'd recommend giving it a shot and if you like it, set up your own instance with a digitalocean droplet (they have a two-click ghost setup)
After digging through the endless list of SSG’s, ghost was at the top of my list. I decided to wing it with Gatsby. It really seems like they all offer their view of the “best” solution. Curious why there is so much praise for Ghost, versus the other options out there.
I also wonder about the longevity of these projects. It’s entirely plausible that some orgs jumped on the bandwagon and developed a SSG solution because there is a market, vs there being a need for another solution.
I’m not by any means set on Gatsby. It was a literal flip of a coin that lead me to diving into this one first, so there’s no real attachment at the moment.
I've thought about various static site generators. Although I'm a programmer and know HTML, CSS, and so on, I am looking to avoid coding since it's a distraction from writing. I'd also like it to be easy as posting to Tildes. Another thing that holds me back is I want a nice theme and also don't want to work for it. I guess I should have asked for recommendations on themes?
I use Hugo and Github pages, with the "Mediumish" theme. It's a really nice, simple theme, and whilst the minimal amount of 'coding' is there as part of the writing, it only really tops and tails it as you generate a new post with a command, write your article, and then generate the static site and push it to Github.
https://madsky.co.uk <-- link so you can see it in action, not for promotion (since I haven't wrote for a few months now!)
I just stared playing with Lektor and the in-browser editing is super handy. Even though I like editing text in the commandline, it's even better to see it within the context of the sample site layout at the same time.
Because I'm interested in all things ActivityPub and federated services I used write.as a couple of times for some non-technical short-stories.
I have an ancient blog I haven't posted to in almost a decade, using a static blog generator called PyBlosxom. I'm somehow reluctant to revive it, so I'm thinking of starting a new blog and I'd like to use a service that makes it easy. I'd also like to make sure it's something that's low-maintenance and will last, since I plan to use it to document my accordion synth project and I would be sad if it somehow disappeared.
For the minimal amount of blogging I do, I use the feels engine (https://github.com/modgethanc/ttbp). I sync those across to thunix.net, tilde.club, and tilde.team.
For articles that aren't really blog entries, but articles discussing something technical, I just use wiki.php (https://tildegit.org/ubergeek/wiki.php) for my cms.
I've run a WordPress instance for a very long time and I have no desire to change it. It's only gotten easier to use and admin.
Pelican, replacing a custom static generator I'd written myself. I wrote about the experience of porting to it, and a couple of thoughts on it (in summary, mostly positive).
Hosting is extremely straightforward: nginx on a Debian VPS, just serving the generated content out of
/srv, and using certbot to keep the LetsEncrypt SSL certs renewed.I just read the write-up you did (per your blog post) about your pelican migration; thanks for sharing! I also recently moved to pelican - from hugo. While hugo seemed to be fine, i didn't really benefit much from some of its features. One example: hugo supposedly is very performant at generating/re-generating content...So, if one has lots of content, hugo should be really helpful. Well, i happen to not have much content to begin with...so super performance is not super essential for me, at least now for now. One downside with hugo - at least for me - was playing with the templates. Ugh, what an annoyance, and timesink. But again, i don't want to knock hugo; simply that it was overkill for what i needed. Now that i switched to pelican, i can at least leverage jinja template knowledge both for my static site blog as well for any other projects in the python arena (that might need templating, etc.). As a side note, i should state that i am trying to play more and more with python, so it also made sense to use a platform that has python underneath it. (One could also argue that if i stayed with hugo, maybe i could learn more Go...but that isn't my goal.)
For others that have noted Lektor, that is an awesome platform. Similar to pelican it uses jinja, and also based on python. I didn't use it recently only because I don't need a UI (that it uses via local/temp. web browser, etc.), and all my content I typically draft in simple (markdown) text files - either on desktop or command line, etc. However if anyone ever needs to provide a static site generator for a non-technical user (someone who might want to draft their content via a web GUI), but with a user-friendly UI, then i would highly recommend having them use Lektor for sure! (Although a tech savvy person might have to set everything all up for the non-tech user. ;-)
I don't really use it as a blog, but for my website, I use Hugo with a custom theme. I'm quite happy with it; Hugo has its quirks, but so did every other static site generator I looked at.
I bought a Wordpress theme some time ago. The author gave me support and I was able to put the website up with zero coding. Wordpress is not hip but it was good enough for me.
Do any of you have any experience with Pico/Mezzanine?
I made my own to learn more about awk. It works quite well, considering it was hacked together with pure bash+awk in one night! It powers my website and it works quite well. Now I'm just looking for good syntax highlighting solution, the one I wrote (and is disabled by default) is buggy and not ready to be put into production.
But so far, I'm really satisfied with what I turned it into. It handles everything for me, I just write markdown and that's it. I can tag it, and the tags are searchable. Plus I don't need to run real server (just plain html files) and everything (except tag search) is JS-free.
Updates are just
git pulland everything works out of the box. I don't need to install any dependencies, all the tools are already installed on almost all unix distributions. It's lightweight and the CSS isn't bad either. It even supports light/dark theme based on OS preferences.What I'm ... not actually using yet though am slowly progressing toward, is a static-site generator on a Git-managed site. In my case, Pelican and GitLab, though there are other options (Hugo, Jekyl, and others, on the SSG side).
Advantages:
Downsides:
I'm not very hipster about my blogging platforms. Mostly wordpress.com/.org, and Google's blogspot. They get the job done and I like their interfaces.