I'm curious to know what your current favourite blog stack is - I'm looking for a light stack, clean & simple writing process and easy-to-manage back-end.
Mine was written using Bash and Unix utils, because I wanted to see if I could. I then migrated most of it to Perl once it became too complicated to keep track of which variable was supposed to be escaped how.
What I learned from my experience: I should have stuck to Wordpress. SSH'ing into my server, loading the environment variables, and running the generation script was often friction enough for me to file a post under "finish later", from where it never came back. For all its faults, Wordpress made it super easy for me to share an idea right there and then. Technology was not my problem - friction and writer block were.
Ha - I’m exactly the opposite. I put off starting up a blog for years because I didn’t have the patience to learn some blogging “platform” like WordPress. It wasn’t until I “rolled my own” and “invented my own wheel” that it was interesting enough for me to want to focus on it. On the other hand, it’s probably a little more expensive for me to host everything myself (I could blog on Medium for free after all), but it’s interesting to work through all the technical details of things like adding a comment section, adding a captcha to that comment section, standardizing the look and feel, etc.
I created my blog few years ago and it is written in Spring on backend and AngularJS on frontend. Relational DB is MySQL.
If I created it again, all I would change is newer version of Angular.
Also I used Docker for containerizing and Jenkins for Continous Integration but it was only in order to practice DevOps skills.
I went with Wordpress after a blogging guide suggested to minimize time spent messing with the blogging software, because messing with blogging software isn't blogging.
True that, but it's good fun anyway ;-) Plus, I'd rather spend two days setting up a usable, solid stack than be annoyed with WordPress every time I load their web interface...
It's good fun to do once or twice, but eventually, like the parent poster states, you eventually find yourself having spent more time tinkering with the stack than actually writing.
I, too, went with WordPress after years of trying to avoid it. After having launched ~30 WP sites in the past ~5 years, it just made sense.
Once you are forced to use WordPress for a few projects you realize how powerful and easy it is to extend. If you can deal with PHP it will serve you well.
If you don't use Wordpress, what do you use to write posts on your blogs? Are there any other good solutions for typing up a post with formatting and multimedia? And do you this in an admin page or something else? Been thinking about creating a blog from more or less scratch, so I'm really curious to see how other people are doing it.
I would actually love to be able to publish a blog from Evernote - so my notes and research are on one place while getting the benefit of a WYSIWYG editor.
* Just checked and apparently there's a WP integration with Evernote called 'CoSchedule' for publishing posts from notes.
I tried to set up something similar from scratch myself, using Strapi as the CMS, but I found myself re-inventing too many wheels (e.g. how to allow a blog post to include an arbitrary number of inline images).
So when I found this great starter project, I went with it. There's zero maintenance for hosting the site or CMS. But I can still customise whatever I like, and deploy with a simple git push.
I have an identical setup to this, painless to deploy updates/blog posts and zero cost.
I was previously using Jekyll, but moved over to Gatsby a few months ago and have enjoyed the built-in features of Gatsby and it’s surrounding ecosystem so far.
I have also considered integrating a git based CMS like Netlify CMS, but because it’s so easy to make new blog posts with just a git commit and a push I haven’t taken the time to change the workflow.
- I can edit markdown as either plain text or rich text, and switch between them with a toggle
- (Most important) I don't need to worry about whether I've properly filled in the 'frontmatter' section at the top of the file
The format of the frontmatter is indicated to Netlify CMS by the existence of a simple config file in your repo. So it should be easy to give it a try if you want:
My blog is part of my business website, which runs on WordPress (hosted, not WordPress.com).
It's my favourite stack because hosting and running a website / blog is neither my core business nor my core expertise.
Last time I checked, WordPress was still easier to use and to maintain than static site generators. The plugin ecosystem is huge and provides ready-to-use solutions for common (and not so common) use cases that I therefore don't have to implement myself.
I use a static-site generator.
It can be fun to tinker around with (it's a personal blog, I don't need to develop to some deadline), the friction of "generate, upload" isn't that high, and it's easy to find free hosting for the static content.
I guess the "stack" part of that becomes how easy it is to add on bells and whistles which don't come out of the box. I'd chalk that up to "fun to tinker with".
I use a very simple Hugo and GitHub Pages setup. I wanted to keep it as simple as possible, because for me it's very easy to tinker instead of writing.
I'm using WordPress, but they've recently changed their UI to be fairly terrible, necessitating another plugin to revert the writing interface.
While that's annoying, the platform supports anything I'd want to do functionally with the site, and it helps that most of my freelance development work is WordPress-related. Like arthev suggested, time spent jacking with the software is time not spent blogging (or something else productive).
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadWhat I learned from my experience: I should have stuck to Wordpress. SSH'ing into my server, loading the environment variables, and running the generation script was often friction enough for me to file a post under "finish later", from where it never came back. For all its faults, Wordpress made it super easy for me to share an idea right there and then. Technology was not my problem - friction and writer block were.
Ha - I’m exactly the opposite. I put off starting up a blog for years because I didn’t have the patience to learn some blogging “platform” like WordPress. It wasn’t until I “rolled my own” and “invented my own wheel” that it was interesting enough for me to want to focus on it. On the other hand, it’s probably a little more expensive for me to host everything myself (I could blog on Medium for free after all), but it’s interesting to work through all the technical details of things like adding a comment section, adding a captcha to that comment section, standardizing the look and feel, etc.
Also I used Docker for containerizing and Jenkins for Continous Integration but it was only in order to practice DevOps skills.
I, too, went with WordPress after years of trying to avoid it. After having launched ~30 WP sites in the past ~5 years, it just made sense.
* Just checked and apparently there's a WP integration with Evernote called 'CoSchedule' for publishing posts from notes.
Built using:
- gatsby (static site generator)
- netlify CMS (git-based headless CMS)
- GitHub (git remote for netlify)
It was dead easy to set this up, as someone had already done the work: https://github.com/alxshelepenok/gatsby-starter-lumen
I tried to set up something similar from scratch myself, using Strapi as the CMS, but I found myself re-inventing too many wheels (e.g. how to allow a blog post to include an arbitrary number of inline images).
So when I found this great starter project, I went with it. There's zero maintenance for hosting the site or CMS. But I can still customise whatever I like, and deploy with a simple git push.
I was previously using Jekyll, but moved over to Gatsby a few months ago and have enjoyed the built-in features of Gatsby and it’s surrounding ecosystem so far.
I have also considered integrating a git based CMS like Netlify CMS, but because it’s so easy to make new blog posts with just a git commit and a push I haven’t taken the time to change the workflow.
Links:
https://mitchellcash.com/
https://github.com/MitchellCash/MitchellCash.com
- I don't need to think about filenames
- It gives me a nice preview
- I can edit markdown as either plain text or rich text, and switch between them with a toggle
- (Most important) I don't need to worry about whether I've properly filled in the 'frontmatter' section at the top of the file
The format of the frontmatter is indicated to Netlify CMS by the existence of a simple config file in your repo. So it should be easy to give it a try if you want:
https://github.com/alxshelepenok/gatsby-starter-lumen/blob/m...
It's my favourite stack because hosting and running a website / blog is neither my core business nor my core expertise.
Last time I checked, WordPress was still easier to use and to maintain than static site generators. The plugin ecosystem is huge and provides ready-to-use solutions for common (and not so common) use cases that I therefore don't have to implement myself.
My course platform uses Next.js for server-side rendering + Firebase. When I launched it, I have written up a longer article about my choices: https://www.robinwieruch.de/how-to-build-your-own-course-pla...
I guess the "stack" part of that becomes how easy it is to add on bells and whistles which don't come out of the box. I'd chalk that up to "fun to tinker with".
Is there any way comments could be shared across LinkedIn, HN, blog, et al, all visible at the blog itself?
And where to find good themes for static site generators. Am willing to pay. Theme for me is just as important as picking up the tech. stack.
-Simple
-Integrated SSO
-RBAC for changes
-Easy and quick to make changes
-Responsive out of the box
-Free and 0 time to manage
https://sites.google.com/new
While that's annoying, the platform supports anything I'd want to do functionally with the site, and it helps that most of my freelance development work is WordPress-related. Like arthev suggested, time spent jacking with the software is time not spent blogging (or something else productive).
The medium SEO is so much better by default than my gatsby-hosted site with a few hours of work.