
Ask HN: What stack is your personal blog built on? - jacobedawson
I&#x27;m curious to know what your current favourite blog stack is - I&#x27;m looking for a light stack, clean &amp; simple writing process and easy-to-manage back-end.
======
arthev
I went with Wordpress after a blogging guide suggested to minimize time spent
messing with the blogging software, because messing with blogging software
isn't blogging.

~~~
veddox
True that, but it's good fun anyway ;-) Plus, I'd rather spend two days
setting up a usable, solid stack than be annoyed with WordPress every time I
load their web interface...

~~~
marpstar
It's good fun to do once or twice, but eventually, like the parent poster
states, you eventually find yourself having spent more time tinkering with the
stack than actually writing.

I, too, went with WordPress after years of trying to avoid it. After having
launched ~30 WP sites in the past ~5 years, it just made sense.

~~~
willio58
Once you are forced to use WordPress for a few projects you realize how
powerful and easy it is to extend. If you can deal with PHP it will serve you
well.

------
rahimnathwani
My personal blog: [https://www.encona.com/](https://www.encona.com/)

Built using:

\- gatsby (static site generator)

\- netlify CMS (git-based headless CMS)

\- GitHub (git remote for netlify)

It was dead easy to set this up, as someone had already done the work:
[https://github.com/alxshelepenok/gatsby-starter-
lumen](https://github.com/alxshelepenok/gatsby-starter-lumen)

I tried to set up something similar from scratch myself, using Strapi as the
CMS, but I found myself re-inventing too many wheels (e.g. how to allow a blog
post to include an arbitrary number of inline images).

So when I found this great starter project, I went with it. There's zero
maintenance for hosting the site or CMS. But I can still customise whatever I
like, and deploy with a simple git push.

~~~
MitchellCash
I have an identical setup to this, painless to deploy updates/blog posts and
zero cost.

I was previously using Jekyll, but moved over to Gatsby a few months ago and
have enjoyed the built-in features of Gatsby and it’s surrounding ecosystem so
far.

I have also considered integrating a git based CMS like Netlify CMS, but
because it’s so easy to make new blog posts with just a git commit and a push
I haven’t taken the time to change the workflow.

Links:

[https://mitchellcash.com/](https://mitchellcash.com/)

[https://github.com/MitchellCash/MitchellCash.com](https://github.com/MitchellCash/MitchellCash.com)

~~~
rahimnathwani
I like using the Netlify CMS because:

\- I don't need to think about filenames

\- It gives me a nice preview

\- I can edit markdown as either plain text or rich text, and switch between
them with a toggle

\- (Most important) I don't need to worry about whether I've properly filled
in the 'frontmatter' section at the top of the file

The format of the frontmatter is indicated to Netlify CMS by the existence of
a simple config file in your repo. So it should be easy to give it a try if
you want:

[https://github.com/alxshelepenok/gatsby-starter-
lumen/blob/m...](https://github.com/alxshelepenok/gatsby-starter-
lumen/blob/master/static/admin/config.yml)

------
remyp
Static HTML. The last thing I need is to worry about keeping blog software up
to date so it doesn’t get hacked.

~~~
muzani
I tried this but adding <p> and </p> everywhere really got in the way of my
flow.

~~~
theandrewbailey
Use Markdown.

------
probably_wrong
Mine was written using Bash and Unix utils, because I wanted to see if I
could. I then migrated most of it to Perl once it became too complicated to
keep track of which variable was supposed to be escaped how.

What I learned from my experience: I should have stuck to Wordpress. SSH'ing
into my server, loading the environment variables, and running the generation
script was often friction enough for me to file a post under "finish later",
from where it never came back. For all its faults, Wordpress made it super
easy for me to share an idea right there and then. Technology was not my
problem - friction and writer block were.

~~~
commandlinefan
> I should have stuck to Wordpress.

Ha - I’m exactly the opposite. I put off starting up a blog for years because
I didn’t have the patience to learn some blogging “platform” like WordPress.
It wasn’t until I “rolled my own” and “invented my own wheel” that it was
interesting enough for me to want to focus on it. On the other hand, it’s
probably a little more expensive for me to host everything myself (I could
blog on Medium for free after all), but it’s interesting to work through all
the technical details of things like adding a comment section, adding a
captcha to that comment section, standardizing the look and feel, etc.

------
toyg
Blogger/Blogspot. Yes, it’s super-basic and frozen, but it’s also rock-solid.
I’ve tried self-hosting and self-coding several things through the years, and
almost all of that has been lost one way or the other... whereas good ol’ B
still happily shows my posts from 2002, with zero effort on my part to keep it
secure or up to date, and gets preferential seo treatment from Google.

------
rwieruch
Hugo for my blog, but I am redoing everything with Gatsby.js now.

My course platform uses Next.js for server-side rendering + Firebase. When I
launched it, I have written up a longer article about my choices:
[https://www.robinwieruch.de/how-to-build-your-own-course-
pla...](https://www.robinwieruch.de/how-to-build-your-own-course-platform/)

~~~
alok-g
Why the switch?

------
davchana
Earlier it was simple Tumblr, but now GitLab Pages + Jekyll

------
rasikjain
My website: [https://www.rasikjain.com](https://www.rasikjain.com)

I have built this website with Hugo Static Generator. I found that Hugo has
lot more variety of themes to choose and easier to understand the structure. I
also like their templating engine. Set up is very easy and building and
compiling the site is very fast.

I have also tried Gatsby before finalizing to go with Hugo. IMHO, Gatsby is
equally good. However Gatsby is well suited for developers with bit of react
knowledge and has limited set of theme selection. For performance, I like the
pre-fetch functionality of Gatsby.

Here is my current setup.

    
    
       1) Hugo Static Site
    
       2) Code repository on Git
    
       3) Automated build and hosted on Netlify (Simple and easy to use)

------
soulchild37
My personal / iOS dev stuff blog : [https://fluffy.es](https://fluffy.es)

I am using Ghost (running on node.js + MySQL on DigitalOcean $5 server), used
the 1-click installer and got it done within 15 mins.

------
huevosabio
I wanted something that i) is simple to host and edit, ii) did not require me
maintaining a server somewhere, and iii) it was easy to go from Jupyter
notebooks to a post.

So I opted for Pelican
([https://blog.getpelican.com/](https://blog.getpelican.com/)) which has a
plugin for converting Jupyter/IPython notebooks into blog posts. It is hosted
in S3. If you are curious, here it is:
[http://ramondario.com/](http://ramondario.com/)

~~~
gradschool
I'm interested in hosting a static site on s3 but worry that some smartass
could rent a botnet and hammer the bucket just for lulz. It might only take a
minute for the charges to bankrupt me, and I can't find any failsafe solution
in the AWS documentation. I know I could make a billing alarm trigger a lambda
function to disable public access, but it might not be instantaneous. Is there
any reliable information to be had about the financial risks?

~~~
amenghra
Host it on github pages?

------
labarilem
My blog: [https://marcolabarile.me/](https://marcolabarile.me/)

I'm using GitHub Pages, so Jekyll is the static site generator. As Jekyll
theme, I've picked minimal-mistakes: [https://github.com/mmistakes/minimal-
mistakes](https://github.com/mmistakes/minimal-mistakes)

Then I've customized templates to meet my needs. It was quite easy,
considering I've never wrote a line of Ruby.

------
rgoulter
I use a static-site generator. It can be fun to tinker around with (it's a
personal blog, I don't _need_ to develop to some deadline), the friction of
"generate, upload" isn't _that_ high, and it's easy to find free hosting for
the static content.

I guess the "stack" part of that becomes how easy it is to add on bells and
whistles which don't come out of the box. I'd chalk that up to "fun to tinker
with".

------
BjoernKW
My blog is part of my business website, which runs on WordPress (hosted, not
WordPress.com).

It's my favourite stack because hosting and running a website / blog is
neither my core business nor my core expertise.

Last time I checked, WordPress was still easier to use and to maintain than
static site generators. The plugin ecosystem is huge and provides ready-to-use
solutions for common (and not so common) use cases that I therefore don't have
to implement myself.

------
pixelbath
I'm using WordPress, but they've recently changed their UI to be fairly
terrible, necessitating another plugin to revert the writing interface.

While that's annoying, the platform supports anything I'd want to do
functionally with the site, and it helps that most of my freelance development
work is WordPress-related. Like arthev suggested, time spent jacking with the
software is time not spent blogging (or something else productive).

------
Sileni
Running my girlfriend's recipe blog on Python + Django + Wagtail CMS on a
Heroku server, wired up to Google cloud storage. It ends up being completely
free with the dev tier Heroku server and staying within the free tier of
Google's cloud storage.

It was mostly as a learning exercise, but it's a pretty flexible stack, and
I'm a fan of the Wagtail admin panel; didn't really feel the need to customize
anything there.

~~~
pkalinowski
How does it work with Heroku dynos waking up after inactivity? Whats the
loading time?

~~~
Sileni
Usually 10s or so. Not a great user experience, but she mostly uses it to
share recipes with friends or relatives. Once it's awake, it's pretty quick,
faster than Google's App Engine free tier in my experience. If she wanted to
generate traffic I'd have no problem paying the $5/month to keep the lights
on, and Heroku's pricing seems reasonable as you scale up.

------
corobo
[https://cohan.io](https://cohan.io)

If you're not familiar with Markdown it's probably not the stack for you
honestly. But it is my favourite blog stack I've had so far.

Hugo as the static site gen, GitLab as the repo host, Netlify as the web host.
Editing wise I usually just use Sublime Text on my desktop or a combo of
Working Copy (iOS git app) + Ulysses (Fancypants writing app) on my iPad.

------
veddox
I use coleslaw, a Lisp static site generator (see my setup description here:
[https://terranostra.one/posts/Blogging-with-
Lisp.html](https://terranostra.one/posts/Blogging-with-Lisp.html)).

I like the minimalism: I write in a text editor on my own laptop, then push to
my server with a single command.

------
heimegutAGS
If you don't use Wordpress, what do you use to write posts on your blogs? Are
there any other good solutions for typing up a post with formatting and
multimedia? And do you this in an admin page or something else? Been thinking
about creating a blog from more or less scratch, so I'm really curious to see
how other people are doing it.

~~~
jacobedawson
I would actually love to be able to publish a blog from Evernote - so my notes
and research are on one place while getting the benefit of a WYSIWYG editor.

* Just checked and apparently there's a WP integration with Evernote called 'CoSchedule' for publishing posts from notes.

------
theandrewbailey
Back in college, I started using what I knew for what I wanted to do. I ended
up with a blog using Java EE and Postgres. Total overkill (it's FAST!), but
it's been fun over the years to toy with not just blog things (like
implementing Markdown, full text search, and backup/restore), but HTTP things
(like SRI and CSP).

~~~
forgottenentry
Is the code for that project on GitHub / would you be willing to share the
source? I'd be interested in seeing that take on a blog implementation.

~~~
theandrewbailey
Yes:
[https://github.com/theandrewbailey/toilet](https://github.com/theandrewbailey/toilet)

I haven't updated it in a while (I haven't integrated git into my small,
informal process).

------
medhir
Mainly as a learning exercise, I wrote my blog from scratch. The back-end is
written in Go, mainly communicates with S3 for storage of photo assets and
blog posts and serves static pages using HTML templates. I have a front-end
written in React for admin views, including blog post editing and photo
uploading.

~~~
PenguinCoder
I would be interested in seeing some of this project code, and the blog
format.

------
mrstefan
I created my blog few years ago and it is written in Spring on backend and
AngularJS on frontend. Relational DB is MySQL. If I created it again, all I
would change is newer version of Angular.

Also I used Docker for containerizing and Jenkins for Continous Integration
but it was only in order to practice DevOps skills.

~~~
qnsi
Is your blog that dynamic that you have to use JS framework?

------
codegeek
Wordpress with a very simple theme and hardly any plugins. Put it behind free
cloudflare account, setup caching/minification and it works like a charm. I
self host so little bit of VPS setup knowledge is useful (Nginx with PHP-FPM).

I also like hugo a lot but never got the time to setup my blog on it.

------
joelvalleroy
I used HTML and CSS (and Github Pages).

I'll probably eventually add JavaScript and WebGL and WebAssembly for some
specific project pages.

[https://joelvalleroy.github.io/](https://joelvalleroy.github.io/)

eventually some more content might get added too ;)

------
alok-g
Including commenting system please. :-)

Is there any way comments could be shared across LinkedIn, HN, blog, et al,
all visible at the blog itself?

And where to find good themes for static site generators. Am willing to pay.
Theme for me is just as important as picking up the tech. stack.

------
shanehoban
Using Grav CMS [0] from my SaaS side projects blog. Pretty much what you've
described. Light, clean and simple, easy to manage back end (PHP). So far so
good!

[0] [https://getgrav.org/](https://getgrav.org/)

------
sdan
Initially used Express, Pug, and some Markdown libraries to build an automated
blog system. There were several issues with reliability, so I switched to:

Handlebars and Ghost.

[https://blog.suryad.com](https://blog.suryad.com)

------
AwesomeFaic
Wordpress, I've built enough by hand in the past I just wanted a nice theme I
didn't have to fiddle with for days on end.
[https://chrisgermano.dev](https://chrisgermano.dev)

------
martin_a
Have been using WordPress for 13 years but switched to Hugo last year.

The WP ecosystem is broken and Automattic rather cares about pushing out
_another_ page builder than fixing the ecosystem and core aspects of WP. They
will dig their own grave.

------
davidscolgan
My site www.lessboring.com is running on Pelican, a Python static site
generator. It's great for writing in a text editor and deploying with Git.
Fairly easy to hack custom functionality, and no backend to get hacked.

------
amerkhalid
Personal blog: [https://www.amerkhalid.com](https://www.amerkhalid.com) uses
Hugo and Netlify. BitBucket for private repo.

But also use WordPress for several niche blogs.

------
Adamantcheese
Bare HTML/CSS/JS. I did move to Netlify from Github Pages for privacy reasons
(and Github Pages for private repos costs money). Works on every device as
well!

------
elamje
Editing, testing, free hosting all done on [https://repl.it](https://repl.it)
(a YC company) in a HMTL, CSS, JS project

------
motakuk
Ghost in Docker deployed with Ansible. Default theme:
[https://mku.life/](https://mku.life/) (Russian)

------
otras
I use a very simple Hugo and GitHub Pages setup. I wanted to keep it as simple
as possible, because for me it's very easy to tinker instead of writing.

------
hexadec
Google sites and I am a huge fan.

-Simple

-Integrated SSO

-RBAC for changes

-Easy and quick to make changes

-Responsive out of the box

-Free and 0 time to manage

[https://sites.google.com/new](https://sites.google.com/new)

------
pkalinowski
Static website generated by Hugo with Bulma CSS and based on Cocoa EH theme.

Hosted on Netlify using their forms and redirects.

Editing in VS Code

Https://patrykkalinowski.com/hn

------
bkq
Personal blog/site can be found on my profile, runs on:

\- NGINX

\- jrnl - (static site generator I made that copies the transformed markdown
to the NGINX server)

------
mooreds
WordPress. Not light in terms of runtime, but definitely in terms of dev time.
(Aka simple to keep running.)

~~~
godot
Is it light in terms of dev time nowadays? 10+ years ago I had a self-managed
Wordpress instance and it was just getting hacked left and right and I had to
constantly be applying the latest updates/patches to be safe. 5+ years ago I
was in a startup with a self-hosted company blog using Wordpress, this time I
remember updates being easier to apply (1 click from the admin UI) but the
cheap server we ran it on constantly ran into resource issues.

I agree the initial setup is usually easy and fast, but a lot of maintenance
overhead to keep running. It's been a long time and maybe things are better
since then?

~~~
mooreds
Auto updates are great and the core has few security issues. I don't run many
plugins.

------
tugberkk
Flask (python). Just that, runs on it's development server and just use
Bootstrap for front-end.

------
interfixus
Web2py fronted by a Caddy server.

------
pabc1
I used a static site generator (Perun, written in Clojure) and host it on
GitHub pages.

------
na85
I do it old-school with markdown, compiled to php+twig templates.

------
dyeje
Gulp to build templates and SASS, copy pasted into an S3 bucket.

------
codingdave
Notepad. FTP. And pick your favorite flavor of HTTP server.

------
xiaoxiae
Jekyll!

Incredibly lightweight and simple to build! Still a WIP though.

www.slama.dev/

------
akulbe
On WordPress, on a Digital Ocean droplet. Easy peasy.

------
honkycat
gatsby + netlify, but I will probably switch to medium.

The medium SEO is so much better by default than my gatsby-hosted site with a
few hours of work.

------
trumbitta2
Jekyll + Bootstrap

------
ghettolabs
I use cloud run with GitHub and Hugo

------
iamthelord
Hugo - makes a lot of difference

------
potta_coffee
html/ css/ a tiny bit of vanilla js/ gitlab/ netlify.

------
namelosw
Gatsby + Org-mode plugin.

------
wyem
Hugo. Hosted on Netlify

------
gketuma
The Great Gatsby.

------
i18ns
hexo it's a static html blog framework.

------
kpennell
Gatsby

------
auct
Hugo Netlify Github

