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Ask HN: What's your favorite flat file blog?

13 points by hahamrfunnyguy ↗ HN
A few years ago, I started a blog and decided to use flat files. I used Node/Gulp to create a simple system that used the directory structure and JSON files to create the post structure. It worked OK, but I haven't updated the blog in a while and moved to a new computer, and now nothing builds. I now want to start a different blog and would like to go with a similar approach.

Ideally, I would like the following: - A flat file blog that I can maintain on my desktop and publish to Github, maybe support comments via a service Disqus. - Pick between Markdown, HTML or a WSYWYG editor to update posts. - Prefrably not PHP based.

17 comments

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fumplethumb
I know you might be looking for something more DIY, but this simple service has been really refreshing to me: https://bearblog.dev/

It’s so simple and easy. If you want to focus on content instead of tinkering with your blog endlessly (like I have done several times), this is a great option.

hahamrfunnyguy
I've seen a few different Bear Blog blogs, and I think the feature-set would be sufficient. One unlisted requirement of mine is to be able to use a custom domain. GitHub makes this easy, so that's one reason I selected GitHub for the other blog.

Not seeing an option right off bat to do this with Bear Blog, but I will poke around. Thanks!

bravetraveler
Very limited experience in this space, but I've used Nikola and had no serious complaints
hahamrfunnyguy
Care you share your blog site?
bravetraveler
Sadly it's not up anymore!

It turns out I was more interested in researching the options / playing with them than actually writing

httpsterio
I've been using Eleventy and Netlify CMS for the psdt two years and I've been extremely happy. Eleventy has a ton of simple starter projects if you don't want to start from absolute 0 and integrating eleventy with Netlify CMS is also rsther simple so you have a WYSIWYG editor as well then.
kactus
I use Hugo for my blog and keep it NPM-free. I try to be careful with my dependencies (currently 3; 2 of which I maintain), which I manage using Hugo's modules feature and keep local copies using the `hugo mod vendor` command.

My posts are in Markdown files, and I write them using either my text editor or Typora, which is a little more WYSIWYG and makes adding images so much easier.

Hugo's archetypes feature is great: running `hugo new posts/title.md` quickly scaffolds a new post based on a template from a Markdown file, with frontmatter entered already, and then opens that Markdown file in Typora, ready to start writing (you can add your editor in Hugo's config). While it wouldn't be too difficult to make a script that does this, I loved having this out of the box.

tedyoung
After a long time trying out different static-site generators (Gridsome, Hugo, Jekyll, etc.), I finally settled on 11ty (and TailwindCSS). Mainly because I could understand almost everything it does. I did find that I needed to start from scratch, so I could see what every plugin, filter, etc. affected the site. I would read other templates and how they did things, and then slowly add them to my configuration.

You can see it at https://Ted.dev, though I still have lots of work to do to make it more than just a list of articles.

genmud
Hugo has treated me really well.