Ask HN: Looking for lightweight personal blogging platform

Sounds like any static site generator supporting Markdown will do.

- Jekyll: the OG, but requires a ruby toolchain.

- Hugo: compiles to a single static binary, but you may have to get used to its (Go text/html) templating.

- Zola: also compiles to a single static binary, but uses Jinja-like templating.

- Gozer [^1]: my own, like Hugo, but 1000x simpler. I rolled my own because I wanted something that didn't move under me in the next 10 years and just because it was fun and easy enough to build.

[1]: https://github.com/dannyvankooten/gozer

pmontra · 2 years ago

I run Jekyll in its own official docker container. You just need to mount the directory with the md files and it autogenerates new htmls whenever an md is updated. No need for Ruby.

I'm on my phone now and I can't check what I used to run it but all the details are at https://github.com/envygeeks/jekyll-docker/blob/master/READM...

Then HTMLs can be deployed to the public facing server.

redman25 · 2 years ago

I've hosted jekyll sites for a number of years. It's simple and gets the job done. The documentation is good, there are a lot of plugins written for it, and it's pretty configurable.

I have been using Pelican with a modified new.css theme. Recently migrated from hosting on a DO instance with Nginx to Github Pages.

What I'd love to do is totally remove the SSG from this pipeline and replace it with a WYSIWYG editor (blasphemy, I know). Or at least something that I could just drag and drop images to so I don't have to manually link them in the .md files.

I'd also like to totally remove the CSS from my site and just link to an existing theme served by a CDN somewhere, like if there was a "standard" simple theme with same defaults and platform-specific font choices etc. (ie. how it was supposed to be near the beginning where users would get served markup (via HTML) and then be able to theme it as they desire (obviously still possible but very few people do this).

Micro.blog looks interesting but the themes aren't quite as minimal as what I prefer.

egberts1 · 2 years ago

I have all the settings documented for Pelican.

And hOWTOs for code syntax highlighting too.

Under "Pelican" tag on this Pelican blog of mine:

https://egbert.net/blog/tags/pelican.html

jurassicfoxy · 2 years ago

Nice work! I love underground documentation. Dubious font color choice ;)

m-i-l · 2 years ago

As per many other comments, it sounds like a static site generator like Hugo (https://gohugo.io/) or Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/), hosted on GitHub Pages (https://pages.github.com/) or GitLab Pages (https://about.gitlab.com/stages-devops-lifecycle/pages/), would be a good match. If you set up GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD to do the build and deploy (see e.g. https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/), your normal workflow will simply be to edit your markdown and do a git add/commit/push to make your changes live. There are a number of pre-built themes (e.g. https://themes.gohugo.io/) you can use, and these are relatively straightforward to tweak to your requirements. In theory, since the content (markdown) is separate from the presentation (theme), you can change design relatively easily (although in practice there's often theme specific config).

marosgrego · 2 years ago

Or Blades (https://getblades.org)

cruano · 2 years ago

There's also hexo [1]. I saw that on Matt Klein's website [2] and the theme looked pretty clean.

[1] https://hexo.io

[2] https://mattklein123.dev/2020/03/08/2020-03-07-new-website/

trashtestcrash · 2 years ago

I love the simple design, I feel this may be what I'm after, will give it a shot! Thank you!

xz18r · 2 years ago

Many of the recommendations in this thread are great. Go with a SSG; almost all of the bigger players will be able to do everything you list and (a lot) more. Personally a big fan of Astro[1] but Hugo, Jekyll, 11ty, etc. will do the job just fine and there's imo no reason to pick one over the other in your case apart from working with a framework in a language you're comfortable with.

If you're looking to get started right away and don't care about having it hosted by someone else there's also bearblog[2] which I can recommend btw.

[1] https://astro.build/ [2] https://bearblog.dev/

Geste · 2 years ago

Been procrastinating starting a blog for several weeks. I know a bit of code, but I was bothered about using github or the t e r m i n a l to write silly stuff online.

Thanks to your post about bearblog, I now have a blog. A tiny website exactly like I wanted. With really nice themes (that I can customise since I know a bit of code !) all for a fraction of Squarespace asked me. And apparently I have anlaytics also ? Can't wait to use those.

So far, this is the tits. Would be happy with more products looking like this !

readscore · 2 years ago

If you don't need tagging (as http://danluu.com/ doesn't, for example), you can use my "no workflow" solution:

* draft in markdown

* render in HTML (using any Markdown to HTML tool, e.g. pandoc)

* link your CSS in the HTML file.

* push to your preferred serving platform

This has the advantage of getting you started as quick as you can open an editor.

If after 5 posts you are wanting a tool, pick whichever (Hugo).

thatgurjot · 2 years ago

I like this as a starting point, gonna recommend it from now on!

Although the benefit of using a static site generator like Hugo is the ability to short codes to reuse code snippets (like embedding videos or images). But that can wait - getting five posts out first is important!

coxley · 2 years ago

This puts the focus on writing content vs. spending unlimited time in the setup.

dvko · 2 years ago

LaundroMat · 2 years ago

No love for Astro[1]? I've been using it and like its easy setup and extensibility.

(I host it on Netlify with a custom domain for free and Netlify builds a new release every time I push to main).

https://astro.build/

poetril · 2 years ago

+1 for Astro. Super easy, with great documentation and dev ex.

schleck8 · 2 years ago

Has a great template repo too

https://astro.build/themes/

hiAndrewQuinn · 2 years ago

I like Hugo a lot, personally.

If you want to go as minimal as possible, my https://github.com/Siilikuin/minimum-viable-hugo gets you set up with a single no-CSS, no-JS HTML page. I found this pretty ideal for staying to learn the platform.

If you really, really like minimalism, you could also try pandoc-server to dynamically serve HTML files from your Markdown as people visit the page, just like PHP does: https://pandoc.org/pandoc-server.html

jonpurdy · 2 years ago

matricaria · 2 years ago

I think this is what your looking for: https://jamstack.org/

I use Hugo with a theme called Congo. https://gohugo.io/https://github.com/jpanther/congo

rijavecb · 2 years ago

Thank you for mentioning Congo! I was thinking to make a personal blog using Astro, but since Congo looks great I might as well go with it and Hugo.