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Ask HN: What's your blog / portfolio stack?

28 points by etlaM ↗ HN
Many people here post in some frequencies on their sites. I wonder what kind of frameworks you are using and what you can recommend.

In a shared web hosting environment I'm building a React site myself, but found myself not updating it as much as I can't build on the go and am thinking about returning to a classic CMS solution. Even though I dislike all the clutter WordPress comes with, I'm used to it after all these years.

48 comments

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_mitterpach
It really depends on how deep you want to go, but the usual answer would be writing in Markdown and using Jekyll in combination with GitHub pages to present. This gives you a large amount of control and can be basically hosted for free, maybe the price of a domain. You can really get a lot out of this simple stack.
quintes
Jekyl, git repo, branch on commit will build and deploy to AWS S3 cloudfront
[dead] ip7e
[dead]
CER10TY
SvelteKit + Netlify. The editing workflow for my blog is slightly cumbersome, because I write locally in Obsidian (just in case I ever redesign my website again, nothing is lost) and then copy/paste into VSCode, then publish.

Once it's published, Brevo automatically picks up the RSS Feed to send out my daily newsletter, since I switched from long-form sporadic blog posts to a shorter-form daily newsletter.

I've used Hugo/Jekyll in the past and liked it, but I'm used to SvelteKit now so I just stick with it, plus I could always hook up a Headless CMS still if necessary.

boricj
It's a static website built with Jekyll. I'm serving it with NGINX from a DMZ container on a Proxmox instance located inside my apartment.

I might migrate to Hugo or another static site generator at some point because I'm too lazy to commit the Ruby/Gem stuff to long-term memory and I'm not using it for anything else.

chistev
https://rxjourney.com.ng

A personal blog.

Stack is Django server and Sveltekit for the frontend.

I could have just used Django for everything, but I initially had bigger plans for the blog with lots of interactivity, I ended up just keeping it simple.

junto
Astro SSG deployed on git commit trigger to CloudFlare Pages. I write my content in markdown and commit to GitHub. Astro does the work on generating the static site. 100 score on PageSpeed Insights.

And apart from the domain, it’s free.

skwee357
I run multiple blogs, although post somewhat actively in one [0].

It uses Astro SSG, deployed to netlify. I want to eventually move to deploy on Hetzner VPS via GitLab CI/CD.

[0] https://yieldcode.blog/

donatj
I am on a very strange php sort-of-cms framework I built originally for a long out of business medical freelancer website like fifteen years ago. If I am remembering correctly I sort of built both at the same time.

It's not anything anyone would build today, and I would not recommend it to anyone, but it does have some very interesting properties that make some things that are often difficult very easy. Embedding dynamic content mid-article for instance is very easy because of a processing pass before a page gets handed to the view. It has a concept of ordered content filters, so by post I can declare what filters get applied and in what order. Filters include markdown parsing, as well as a syntax for injecting dynamic elements.

It's kind of my Frankenstein's monster at this point, but as an tinkerer I enjoy maintaining it. If I didn't enjoy it, I would have switched to something sane years ago.

https://donatstudios.com/

hiAndrewQuinn
Hugo! I stick with Hugo for all things SSG these days. I like how it's a single binary, runs uber-fast, and compiles down to a nice clean set of HTML, CSS, and JS (if needed - for my needs it usually isn't).

My one mark against it is the learning curve is sharp. That's okay for me, since I plan to use it to the end of my days, and so I can amortize the cost of learning it once against many decades of productivity. I have an old GitHub page for people struggling to get to base camp on its learning curve: https://github.com/Siilikuin/minimum-viable-hugo

And here are some sites I run in it:

https://andrew-quinn.me/, my barebones personal blog.

https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/, my much more frequently updated TILs. Think of this as halfway between a blog and Twitter.

https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/selkouutiset-archive/, a daily updating news archive for the Simple Finnish broadcast, happily running since 2023. The pipeline for this one is interesting, since it uses not only Hugo but Git submodules under the hood. One Git repo exists purely to curl the page I'm watching every night, and I try to mess with that one as little as possible because messing up might mean a night goes unarchived. An intermediate one submodules repo #1 and cleans up the HTML to Hugo-friendly Markdown with pandoc and sed. The final one imports this slimmed down, Markdownified version directly into its content/ directory as a Git submodule and redeploys the whole shebang every night. So far we're up to over a thousand unique HTML pages and this refinery has continued to work with only minimal changes, because we've stuck with such reliable and slow-changing tooling.

JohnScolaro
Next.js on Vercel. I don't get enough hits to take me out of the free tier, so I'm fine staying here for now. If it became absurdly expensive, I'd try to either self-host, or move to something else.

All the blog posts are just written in markdown and would be easy to migrate, but some of the fancier stuff would be harder.

Luckily if you just write drivel like me, the free tier lasts a long time

https://johnscolaro.xyz

GunjanWalecha
Design Engineer Portfolio: Design: Figma, Excalidraw, Procreate Development: Svelte, Typescript Deployment: CF pages
whoami_nr
Github pages + Jekyll for the main blog. All the subdomains(mostly side projects which I have put the effort to deploy) are hosted on Replit.

Blog: rnikhil.com

wjgilmore
NextJS + Tailwind CSS and the TailwindUI (apparently now Tailwind Plus) Spotlight template. Code managed on GitHub and auto-deployed to Netlify free tier.

No database, nothing to manage. Just write, commit, and push to deploy.

https://wjgilmore.com

andyg_blog
Markdown that is then unceremoniously shoveled to WordPress with some finagling of the images. I'm not trying to experiment with fancy tech when I write, just trying to get the words out of my head.

If something gets mathy I'll use LaTex.

andyg_blog
You can downvote me all you want. I'm not claiming any kind of superiority of WordPress but merely answering the question in the OP. I've had this blog for 15 years now, long before WordPress was so reviled. It just works and I'm still on their free tier.
QuadmasterXLII
SSG and github actions/github pages is the way to go in my opinion, I can edit posts from my phone using the github website. However, I’m not tied to github by this approach, I can build it on my desktop and can host the generated files anywhere. I use a julia based ssg, franklin, largely for the memes. I’m sure there are more polished/effective options out there.
the_alphalaser
Used a simple monospace template for my portfolio that renders Semantic HTML from markdown using Pandoc.

Usually Sveltekit + Vercel for blogs and bigger projects.

gls2ro
I use the following two options:

- Jekyll => which generates static pages -> amazing to deploy it on Github Pages or any web server

- Rails 8 with Sitepress => for when I want to have some extra dynamic functionality. With Rails 8 running with defaults like SQLite and import maps there is little to be done for server config/installation

I prefer Markdown syntax for blogposts. It is the most "transferrable" way for blog content. Multiple other blog engines are supporting it, so if you want just to use something else, you can just take the MD files and put them there.

SamPatt
My site is a React front end hosted on Netlify, and the blog entries are markdown files I write in Obsidian.

I also use Listmonk for my newsletter and Umami for analytics, both open source and easy to run from Pikapods.

I wrote about my publishing process here:

https://sampatt.com/blog/2025-02-18-Listmonk