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How do people run their personal blog?
As a sort of follow-up to my last post, I wonder how you run your blog(s)? Are you using write.as, a Static Site Generator, Ghost, Wordpress or something slightly different like ox-hugo?
I use my own static site generator, heavily customized. I've used hakyll in the past and it's pretty great, but I wanted to do some weird stuff that hakyll made more complicated.
I use a Makefile, but it really just calls the bash script (unk) for most of the work. I keep meaning to make it more Make-y, for parallel building and only updating what needs to be. But this works well enough.
As far as hosting, I upload everything to NearlyFreeSpeech.net, which has PHP -- so I have one page with a script, but that's it. I'm thinking of moving to a full-fledged VPS to do some more complex server stuff.
My technical blog is on PHP, I built it myself to fit my needs.
My personal blog is fully static, and built with a small 50-line Bash4 script, which perfectly does the job, including for RSS!
Right now I'm using Saber as my site generator, but eventually I want to switch to a Knowledge Base.
I really like the concept of a knowledge base instead of a blog. In a blog you mostly have articles with dates. In knowledge base, knowledge is organized as nodes that can form a network. (You can still write articles.)
I use Hugo to generate my site. I am really not attached to Hugo and did think about switching to something else (because their theme documentation is awful IMO), but I've always been lazy enough to ignore that.
On top of Hugo, I have a few Python scripts to convert my posts' Markdown to
text/gemini1, so my blog is also available through Gemini (Though I am not sure if anyone reads it from there)For actually uploading, I use a modified version of my old Nginx config (the major change being it no longer uses Docker), where builds.sr.ht can just git push some files (like this) and have the site just work. Link if anyone's interested
1: Is there any agreement on a final name for this format?
I've never heard of Gemini until now. Thanks for sharing; TIL!
I'm definitely going to look into your workflow, and also gemini is awesome! What's your capsule? (I agree, the format name is wild lol)
If you run into anything, feel free to PM me here or over on IRC (I'm in #gemini, same nick)
Same URL, just replace https with gemini :)
So, there still isn't any name for it, gotcha.
I use a site hosted on Neocities, where I directly edit the html. Each new post is a new anchor on the same page. Simple.
It works perfectly for my needs, except that I don’t know how to get an RSS feed for that.
You can always hand-write RSS :P
I assume this advice was sarcastic due to the emoticon, but it's actually fairly tractable. Tacking another article onto the head of an existing RSS XML file is no more difficult than hand-editing the HTML that actually makes up the article. The W3C provides a feed validator that can easily be used to check your work.
Yep! It was jokingly put, since I figured @Whom might've known they could hand-write the RSS, but yes...
Now I'm thinking about re-writing my personal website by hand...
I actually didn’t realize that was doable, I might have to look into that. Thanks!
Oh yes, I wrote mine (which is generated, bit with a script of my own demising) just by looking at the Wikipedia page for RSS/Atom.
I'm working on a static site generator right now (who hasn't written one these days) and I'm currently up to the feed generation stage. It's not as complex as I thought, though the choice of date format is pretty perplexing.
What, a date format with a 50 page spec isn't clear to you? https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2822#section-2
/s god the world would be a better place if everyone used Unix timestamps.
I wrote about making it on my blog
https://stu2b50.dev/posts/rust-is-surpris76171
tl:dr I wrote it from scratch as a weekend (or 1.5 weekend) project. It's running on a VPS from Digital Ocean and Nginx is reverse proxying traffic to rocket, and also serving the static files like css and images.
Jekyll with Github Pages and a git hook that does a decent impression of last_modified_at (since Github Pages doesn't have that plugin).
I'm using Wordepress for my blog. It has basic html layout, nothing fancy.
I used Wordpress for years, hosted on a Linode VPS, but I've never been a fan of PHP and grew tired of plugins breaking with upgrades. Also realizing that I really had no need of most of the advanced features, I opted to migrate to a static site generator. The real impetus was the demise of Google+ where I'd first post my content, which was subsequently pulled by and republished on my own blog site.
Owing to an interest in the Rust programming language, I selected the Zola static site engine, which uses Markdown similar to Hugo. I must admit, though, that I really haven't done anything with it.
FWIW, I also have a static site on github.io based on Sphinx, a Python-based generator, using the more powerful ReStructuredText format, rather than Markdown. It's not a blog site but I later found ABlog,
a Sphinx-based blog site static generator that is quite nice.
I had a Wordpress but I want to transfer it to something free like Hugo on something like Github Pages.
My site do not yet have a blog but I'm on the static site generation train with eleventy, I must say it it very plesant to work with !
I take this as an '"exercice" to make a site that comply with today expectations (:
I use Publish, a static site generator written in Swift. I have some issues with its RSS generator (e.g. doesn't support Atom) but have not yet gotten around to customizing that part