HN Explorer

Ask HN: What's Your Personal Website Stack?

21 points by Jormundir ↗ HN
Hello Hackers,

After reading hacker news for awhile, I've seen plenty of nice blogs, often on peoples' personal websites.

I would like to make a personal website for my resume, portfolio, and also to write blog posts.

In googling what tools / platforms to use, you get loads of advertisements and unhelpful articles.

So how have you set up your personal website? How do you host it? Do you use wordpress or other types of content generators? (I'd like to keep a separation of my tech blog posts and my rants, do any tools out there give you a nice blog platform with organization, maybe tags or something?)

26 comments

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fookyong
Jekyll. Running on Heroku. Gets the job done and because everything is static, it's blazing fast. I love managing my blog via CLI/git too.

Before that, Wordpress / Tumblr / Posterous (RIP) / etc etc.

Nothing is quite as elegant as Jekyll. It's not for everyone though.

joshguthrie
Seconded, static is definitely the way you want to go.

Hexo (http://zespia.tw/hexo/) is nice too if you're more of a node.js guy and want to hack your way in/out.

imwhimsical
While I use Jekyllfor my own blog, im thinking of switching to cactus. How good of a decision would that be?
fakeer
I like Jekyll. The look of it. But I do not want to get into Ruby. I tried to Jekyll for a few months(and then I stopped blogging, planning to take up again). That comes down to Python and Java(yes, Java!).

For Python I have listed some Pelican, Hyde and Blogofile etc. Have not been able to decide which one to pick(Anything in Java?)

I am looking for:

1. Minimal but looks good(clean and simple)

2. Lightweight(will be on base Webfaction package)

3. Better docs and tutorials available.

4. Active development

5. Templating shouldn't be complex and rigid

6. Tag based RSS feeds supported

7. External comment system support e.g. Disqus, LiveFyre, IntenseDebate etc.

8. Should support import/export from and to other blogging systems

Would be nice to hear pitfalls and goods.

kristianp
Sounds like something I've used WordPress for in the past, hosted on a VPS that already had a rails app running on it.
pkhamre
Octopress to compile a static set of pages served by nginx.
yolesaber
I'm not much of a designer myself (although I am working on it, heh) so my personal site is run using Logr, a static site generator written in Python (uses Flask) with Bootstrap on the front-end. I'm hosting it on EC2 and its served by Apache.

I wrote an article about how to set it all up.

http://tangents.co/b/Get-Your-Flask-Apps-Up-And-Running-Fast...

rachelbythebay
Dedicated server at ServerBeach. Linux. Apache. "Baked" pages (the /w/ ones, at least). Baked with what? Something I wrote called "publog". Written in? C++. It's just a bunch of flat files (both input and output).

No tags, no database. Just static data.

csixty4
Hosted on a $10/month DigitalOcean VPS.

Debian, Nginx W/SPDY patch, Percona, PHP-FPM, APC, WordPress, mysqltuner

WordPress Plugins: Quick Cache, Better WordPress Minify, Lazy Load, WP-HTML-Compression, WP-Optimize, Types, WP-Paginate, Google Analyticator, Formidable, Force Regenerate Thumbnails, WordPress SEO (Yoast)

Front-End Development: CodeKit (Sass, Compass), ImageOptim (raster image compressor), Scour (SVG image compressor)

I think those are the major infrastructural pieces & performance tools. Survived being on the front page of HN with the server 90% idle.

adlpz
Two sites, one a simple CV/Bio thingie written in Python running on Google's App Engine. The other a blog written in Node + Express on a shitty $5/month VPS. On Apache for statics, btw.
fla
vps + debian + nginx + node.js + mongodb
Madre
Nikola and i just upload the posts to webfaction.
cryptos
I'm using a Python script that watches file changes in a directory, and renders changed text files with templates to html files. The output is then uploaded to the server.
Benferhat
I'd just host it on Google AppEngine for free and forget about it. You won't see enough traffic to go over the free quota.
gatesphere
My personal blog stack is toto + heroku (for free!) with karakuri. I host downloads and code snippets in a github repo... it works wonders.

For my personal portfolio site, I use a custom written static site generator in python (called ptah, it's on github), and I host it on a low-powered plug server. I do some dev work on a raspberry pi with python and sqlite.

praveenyadav
Jekyll is best option if you want to serve your content fast. Github provide option to host jekyll static page. I also have my blog and personal site on github using jekyll.

Here it is - http://pyadav.github.com/

nayefc
Gave Jekyll-Bootstrap a shot. It's very hard to customize the theme. Last night, I switched to Middleman. If you know Ruby and want to customize your theme, I highly recommend it.

Still haven't deployed yet but would probably go with Heroku or S3.

jonascopenhagen
Shared hosting account with a home-made simple PHP blog system that writes static files to disk. Even though I use shared hosting my site easily survived several hours as #1 on the HN front page, simply because I use static files.
whostolemyhat
I'm using Django on Webfaction, and built a basic blog system in it to learn how to use Django.
brent_noorda
I've tried a bunch of zero-budget options. The weirdest (and the one where I've put most of my static stuff) is just to drop files into my dropbox/Public. The resulting URL is real weird, but it's free and I have complete control of the files.
buttscicles
Nginx in front of Gunicorn + Flask fetching data from Postgres, which is populated by an hourly cronjob. It's on a small ovh dedicated server, along with other things.