AskBeehaw @beehaw.org silentdanni @beehaw.org 1y ago

What stack is your personal blog built on?

Time appropriate greetings, folks!

I have finally put an end to my procrastination and finally wrote my first blog post. Thing is, I still have nowhere to publish it. What stack are you all using for your personal pages, folks? I don't really want to spend a whole lot of time tinkering, but I still want some wiggle room to do so in case I change my mind down the line.

Thanks!

19 comments

I got tired of maintaining WordPress and PHP and so on for mine when I rarely use it, so I moved it all to Jekyll and I've been very happy with it. Jekyll is a static site generator, so I write content in Markdown and then generate the site and deploy it by copying it to the server. It's all static content so not only is it super fast, it's a lot less to worry about, security-wise.
SSG (Hugo) and send it to Codeberg. I did a tiny bit of tinkering, but I like to keep things simple. I actually don't understand how a lot of it works but I haven't broke it yet.
- If you want a place to pit your blog you can use GitHub pages, Codeberg or even Sourcehut. Neocities is also an option.
Digital Ocean Droplet, Wordpress (with Generate Press block theme), Self-hosted Plausible Analytics for traffic stats.
- I was considering this. How much does it set you back? Do you just use the £5 servers?
  
  The basic $6/month option should work. You could probably run several sites on one.
I like writing in markdown so I use Hugo, and when I do a git push it gets sent to github pages (which is free as long as the repo and website is public!) There's a lot of themes so you don't have to tinker around much if you don't want to. But it's pretty easy to make some css changes / additions.
- Same here, but I use EleventyJS as the Markdown to HTML step.
I currently use Hugo and publish with Sourcehut. I've been thinking of changing my stack but I've not settled on anything and I'm not sure if changing is necessarily a good idea. One thing I'd like to be able to use by switching is Tailwind.

That said, I recommend using whatever is simplest for you to use. It's easy to make your blog an experiment instead of using it as a writing tool.
Zola and Netlify. Highly suggest Zola! Gives me a lot more flexibility than Hugo which I enjoy a whole lot.
I currently use nextjs and prismic for my CMS - while there are some nextjs themes and starters, it’ll probably require some coding (which I enjoy!). A benefit of next is that it has incremental static regeneration, so can update pages without having to rebuild the whole site.

I’ve also used Sanity on pretty much every other site I’ve built and it’s fantastic!

I’m looking at rebuilding my blog from scratch at the moment - I kind of have a whole different purpose for it now. I’m looking at Astro instead of Next, and thinking about TinaCMS over sanity - partly to try something new, partly because the speed and simplicity of Astro with a visual builder writing markdown is exciting to me!
- Ohh I just looked up Astro and it looks really cool. I’ll give it a go tomorrow!
Wow things have moved on a lot since I had a blog on Blogspot by the sounds of it!
When I rolled my own blog software I wasn’t spending my time writing. Switched to static blog software a few years ago, namely Hexo, because I wanted my articles in markdown. Now I have to troubleshoot someone else’s code occasionally.

I strongly dislike JS. But I have a lot of old school HTML/CSS experience so I don’t mind creating my own layout. It’s mostly the lack of sufficient documentation and how upgrades can break without a hint to what changed. Ug
Hugo. https://gohugo.io/ No need for any moving parts. Write your blog post in MD, commit to git, git hooks will do the rest, build the site and if you are using GitHub or GitLab, even host your blog for free with their static site system. It's amazing. I highly recommend Hugo. I also highly recommend static sites for a blog. Your blog doesn't need to be a dynamic mess of potentially hackable code. Just keep it simple and fast. My website loads up faster and is more dynamic than my old WordPress site. Fewer security risks too.
Does anyone know of a static site generator where I can write in Markdown and make my links to other local Markdown documents using their local file extension and the generator will translate it to the proper thing in the end? This feels like it would be the most obvious thing but neither Jekyll nor Eleventy support it. I'm getting annoyed of setting them up just to test it.

[Foo](Foo.md)

That should link to the Foo.html once generated. Not Foo.md.
- Would this plug-in work for you? https://github.com/benbalter/jekyll-relative-links
  
  Thanks, that looks very promising. For folks following in my footsteps your next question may be how to remove front matter. Here is another plug-in.
  
  GitHub Pages is one of those terms that is very overloaded and because of that it is super hard to find what you're looking for. I could've sworn using the old school "black box" GitHub Pages did this and it turns out it does. It has both the relative link plugin and the optional front matter pkugin.
  
  The link above mentioned the GutHub Pages dependency list which then mentioned the github-pages gem which has all of them together. So finally I searched for "GitHub Pages docker" instead of "Jekyll docker" and lo and behold, here it is. The most recent commit is three weeks ago so it seems maintained. So finally I have a way to just simply get HTML files from some Markdown files in a simple way all in a container so I don't have to worry about how Jekyll doesn't technically support Windows.
My blog is a custom Golang program for creating static HTML from markdown. Yes, there are many projects out there that already do such, but I wrote it for a few reasons. To learn more about Golang and handling HTTP connections, and parsing files to output compliant HTML. Also made it work with a Git hook for creating and updating the static website after the repo is pushed to on master. Fits my purposes :)

19 comments