
Ask HN: How should I create my personal academic blog? - sammosummo
I’m a junior (ish) neuroscientist with some decent quantitative and coding skills. I want to create a personal website to share code, tutorials, opinions, those sorts of things. I would like the site to be quick to load and as small as possible; I’m not afraid to code and pay (a little) for hosting. Would HN readers like to inspire me by describing their blogging workflows?<p>To date I’ve tried two approaches, neither were ideal. (1) A WordPress site with Bluehost. This came with a domain and was extremely easy to use, the themes looked great, etc. The major downsides were that pages loaded really slowly and I was paying for features I would never use. (2) After a while I attempted to switched to Jekyll hosted at GitHub pages. The new site was quick to load and free, but I was uninspired by the available themes. I attempted to modify several of them but it was annoying as all hell Due to the lag between pushing a commit to GitHub and seeing the results on my webpage.
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Artemix
Static websites are the way to go, and as for hosting, I personally find
Netlify to be awesome, and well fit for static websites (my blog is built with
a custom SSG, run by Netlify on every commit).

You can simply use git for versioning, FrontMatter for article metadata (like
title, published status etc.), reStructuredText or Markdown for writeup, and
whichever tool you may see fit.

If you don't want to build your own, Hexo, Hugo or Jekyll are well-known, but
if you want something a bit more "fit" for you, I'd recommend checking out
Metalsmith.

As for the website hosting, you have a lot of available options due to the
simplicity of hosting some dumb HTML pages and medias.

\- Git hosts, like Github, Gitlab (my favourite), Bitbucket

\- Netlify, Surge

\- Some shared web hosting, like the base offers at OVH: When you buy a domain
name, you have, for free, 10MB of space for a shared web hosting, which can
easily serve HTML files. Buy a .xyz domain for less than 3€/year and have free
hosting.

~~~
sammosummo
Thanks! Could you be specific about where to purchase a domain? Sorry I’m not
an expert in web-based stuff.

~~~
m11a
Cloudflare Domains is soon a thing (meant to be available from later this
month in waves to current Cloudflare users, my guess is it should be available
for all start of 2019). That might be nice. Cloudflare promises not to charge
more than how much it costs them to get the domain, so they are dirt cheap
domains, and Cloudflare has a great reputation for tolerance/no censorship -
so you don't have to be worried about having your domain terminated/suspended.

Currently, namecheap is also quite popular, it's not especially elegant but
it's cheap and secure. Tends to be my personal choice. I would immediately
point your DNS to Cloudflare, after purchasing a domain, and manage your
domain's records from Cloudflare.

Also worth checking out: [https://www.gandi.net/](https://www.gandi.net/) and
[https://njal.la/](https://njal.la/)

Usually, namecheap is a safe bet. That'd be my recommendation, currently.

~~~
ryanlol
>Cloudflare has a great reputation for tolerance/no censorship

Great but undeserved reputation. Cloudflare will ban your domain if a BigCo
asks. Just try adding “doxagram.is” to your CF account.

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codegeek
WordPress could be a good fit if you set it up correctly. First, don't use
cheap shared hosting. Get a VPS and setup a LEMP stack with PHP-FPM. Use PHP
7.2. Then select a non-bloated blog theme and delete/uninstall unnecessary
plugins other than some caching (I highly recommend WP Fastest Cache &
Autoptimize). Also, configure nginx to do things like gzip etc. I can assure
you it will load fast. I have started my blog on a $5 DigitalOcean VPS with WP
and it loads superfast but I only do basic blogging.

~~~
sammosummo
Thanks for the advice, I’ll investigate.

~~~
codegeek
np. If you need help, I would be more than happy to help for free as I love
servers and Linux stuff and this is my bread and butter :)

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adrianN
Anything other than a static site for a personal blog is madness imho.
Personally I found writing markdown and using a Makefile and pandoc to
generate the site to be good enough.

If the lag of pushing to Github to see your changes is annoying to you, you
could just install jekyll and a simple web server locally to generate the site
on your machine without having to push and wait for Github's magic to work.

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jppope
I would definitely go with a SSG (static site generator)... sounds like you
might just need to do some custom theming. Personally I enjoy coding that sort
of thing for myself... but if you didn't feel like doing the work you could
grab a theme from themeforest or similar for $10 and put it into your SSG.
please update the URL to this post ... I love reading well built academic
blogs :)

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fundamental
Neuro is a cool area to be in right now. Are you going into the computational
or more of the biological side?

I just got out of the computational side a short while ago. I didn't blog
about it much since there is a lot of background which you need to explain for
most numeric methods (not to mention all the time needed to provide good
instructive data visualizations).

I've tried a few different iterations of posting content to my site. Initially
it was editing raw HTML, then a small custom common lisp app, then there was a
short lived rails project which I forked from the original dev, then there was
a brief stint using ikiwiki, and now I'm using jekyll on my site for the blog
side of things.

Per the current workflow I typically get a seed idea when I'm actively working
on a topic and have a bunch of loose notes. Then I formulate the core idea of
what can be conveyed to readers (and myself when I look at things months/years
later) with pencil/paper. Next I typically transcribe things to an AsciiDoc
document, build figures with Julia scripts or in a jupyter notebook, and edit
a bunch. Once things are looking decent I use jekyll's auto-rebuild feature
and built-in server for semi-final tweaks/formatting. Finally I commit it and
verify that everything looks fine on my remote server. Some of the better
posts I've made are collected at [http://fundamental-
code.com/](http://fundamental-code.com/) to give you an idea for the results.

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vfulco2
Check out the amazing work Yihui Xie and other R-luminati have done with R's
version of markdown and the package "blogdown". Plenty of academic examples
around and can get up and running quickly, securely, and for free if you wish.

[https://bookdown.org/yihui/blogdown/](https://bookdown.org/yihui/blogdown/)

All the cool kids are using static sites these days.

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Kagerjay
My site runs on WordPress and sitegrounds, it's very fast. But the learning
curve is higher than netlify and jekyll due to having to learn WordPress.

My site has too much garbage content I wrote on it at the moment (in hindsight
I wrote whatever came to mind). Half my pages aren't even exactly done yet.

I'm going to focus less on writing opinionated articles, more on useful
articles and or tutorials on there or well thought out reflections related to
lessons learned.

Short term I'm going fix minor things now, write more useful content now. Long
term do a 2ndary blog redesign from scratch, writing my own custom
functions.php file.

I have used jekyll,hexo and hugo, but it's really convenient to just be able
to download any plugin you want with wordpress. I'd rather focus on writing
than site design ,SEO, analytics, integrations, etc.

Also it's nice having a useful skill that always has a market use.

My site is on my userhandle if your curious, would like feedback too.

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shivammishra
Try Ghost, I use it for my blog, has a markdown editor, a beautiful no BS
admin UI, seo friendly out of the box

~~~
ian0
I second this. Ive used both the cloud version and self hosted it. The default
design is lovely, its lightning quick too.

For the self hosted version I use heroku (7$ / month) and this[1] library,
remember to hook it up to an AWS bucket though else you'll loose your pics
each time the server restarts.

[1] [https://github.com/cobyism/ghost-on-
heroku](https://github.com/cobyism/ghost-on-heroku)

------
50
Blot ([https://blot.im](https://blot.im)) or GatsbyJS
([https://gatsbyjs.org](https://gatsbyjs.org)).

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soared
I wanted: cheap, fast, minimalist, and easy to publish. Blot.im does all those
very well. I used to use wordpress for everything but wanted to write
something in a word doc and have it show up on my website with no fuss. (Fast
load times and minimalist design were nice too).

Blot.im is like $20/yr and my domain is similar through google domains. Set up
takes like 10 mins, and you just drop word docs into dropbox. There is some
depth if you want to get into site structure, file hosting, etc.

Here is my site: npzero.com. For ~$3/mo its awesome.

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esalogika
I've started to use [http://gohugo.io/](http://gohugo.io/) and like it more
than anything I've used earlier, including Jekyll.

~~~
theoctopus
I wanted to like Hugo (especially with its ridiculous speed compared to
Jekyll), but I found that any time I wanted to do something slightly unusual I
had to spend far too long finding what template file name I was supposed to
use, mostly by trial and error. With Jekyll I just specify the template name
in the front matter.

~~~
esalogika
Have you checked out the series at
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtIqKaDlqXo&list=PLLAZ4kZ9dF...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtIqKaDlqXo&list=PLLAZ4kZ9dFpOnyRlyS-
liKL5ReHDcj4G3) ? It doesn't cover everything exhaustively, but it is a
relatively good introduction if you haven't seen it. Hugo's documentation is
also helpful. I want to stick with hugo just for it's speed and learning it
seems like a worthy investment.

------
qwerty456127
I really recommend GitHub pages but you actually have to fork a theme and
modify it to suit your needs (it's fun and possibilities are infinite). You
don't have to push everything to GitHub wile you debug your theme and prepare
your post, just run Jekyll and see everything on the localhost and only update
it on GitHub when it seems finished.

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simon_acca
While as a software engineer I'm partial towards static websites, I have to
say the best academic site I've come across is a wordpress one that seems to
use the "faculty" theme.

The site is Kelly Weinersmith's (of SMBC fame):
[http://www.weinersmith.com/](http://www.weinersmith.com/)

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zhte415
Blogs are chronological. I decided that I didn't want to be bounded by that
and went with pmwiki.

In this format things can be chronological, can be topic based, pages can be a
work in progress, no default. Markdown editing. Files are stored as text also,
no database. Choice of themes though nothing like Wordpress.

I host on personal domain on a $5 DO droplet.

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DoreenMichele
I moved from hand coding my sites to Word Press to BlogSpot. I get a lot more
done on BlogSpot and it's completely free.

I actually set up BlogSpot sites for other people for a few bucks. So if you
want help with getting the look you want, I'm for hire.

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halzenwick
You are right with Jekyll, but quite on the wrong street with GitHub pages. It
takes time to get your changes up and running, I would say that'd be around
~15 minutes, and I believe that depends on worker's availability on the GitHub
server to "compile" or "render" your Jekyll blog.

My experience currently is with Hugo. I have a DigitalOcean (DO) VPS that I
use to host my Hugo blog.

The workflow is as follows:

1\. Commit and push from local to my VPS.

2\. My VPS receives the commit, a git hook runs server-side build for my Hugo
blog. The script is pretty short.

3\. Server finishes build process, new changes are reflected.

Feel free to experiment with that others are suggesting here, e.g. Netlify.
Jsyk, I pay $5/month for my DO VPS and that is $0.50 cheaper than my everyday
coffee.

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billconan
right now my blog is on medium.com. I used to be picky about theme too, but
now I prefer something simple. Medium.com is ok to me in that sense. I choose
it for its content and audience discovery network. It's more social than other
blog platforms I have tried.

But I'm also building a developer-centric blog platform now. it will support
markdown, equations and code embedding.

------
lawson11
you can easily create
[https://djheadphonereview.com](https://djheadphonereview.com) this type of
blog

