
Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform - mrfusion
I’m curious what everyone would recommend for a new blog?  I really want to focus on the writing and not deal with updates and viruses. But I’d still like to do a good degree of customization and plugins and a custom domain name.
======
dceddia
To avoid updates and viruses, go with a static site.

There are a ton of good static site generators out there. My blog[0] runs on
Jekyll[1]. Hugo[2] is a popular option. I've fiddled with Gatsby[3] and heard
good things. Eleventy[4] looks as close to Jekyll-but-in-JavaScript as I've
seen.

Since you want to be able to customize it, I'd probably take the static site
generator's language into account. Do you like...

Ruby? -> Jekyll[1]

Go? -> Hugo[2]

JavaScript? -> Gatsby[3] or Eleventy[4]

Some other language? -> google "[language] static site generator" and see how
many GitHub stars it has.

Once you've figured that out, most of the hosts support custom domains.
Netlify[5] is free, and works very well. It's what I use currently. I used to
host my site on DigitalOcean[6], but Netlify is definitely more painless,
especially from a devops/patching standpoint. Plus it has a CDN so your site
would be faster.

[0] [https://daveceddia.com/](https://daveceddia.com/)

[1] [https://jekyllrb.com/](https://jekyllrb.com/)

[2] [https://gohugo.io/](https://gohugo.io/)

[3] [https://www.gatsbyjs.org/](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/)

[4] [https://www.11ty.io/](https://www.11ty.io/)

[5] [https://www.netlify.com/](https://www.netlify.com/)

[6] [https://www.digitalocean.com/](https://www.digitalocean.com/)

~~~
bishalb
Static blogs are ok until it's a smallish blog with not much content or many
visitors. But can't recommend it for a serious blog proect. One would have to
jump through the hoops and use hacks for even the basic things like
commenting, searching etc. And forget about slightly advanced stuff like
popular posts, related posts etc without some Hugo or Jekyll hacking.
WordPress has the lowest barrier to entry as most shared hosts offer one click
installs, is the most feature rich blogging platform and even for a complete
noob, it is much easier to get started and even customize their blog to a
great extent with plugins. I would also like to add that virus affecting
WordPress is much of a myth now, WordPress has improved greatly in the recent
years and if you just stick with the basic install and just install the
reputable plugins, you should be fine. The hacking cases related to WordPress
are very few and far between.

~~~
michaelanckaert
I agree that getting things like comments and search running on a static site
is a lot work. But I’m of the opinion your personal site doesn’t need those
things.

Rarely have I seen interesting discussion happen in the comments of a personal
blog. All great discussion is held in aggregators like HN.

Similarly search is best left to specialized platforms such as a search
engine. Blogging software may have decent search by why recreate a search
engine when duckduckgo.com will far exceed capabilities with _site:_ and
_filetype:_?

For me a personal site and blog are mostly single visit kind of stops. I end
up on a blog via a link but almost never do I feel the need to read the top 5
best posts of some blog. I got some interesting information from the current
article but then I’m of to the next link that shows up in my feed.

In my opinion a website needs readability[0] and an ATOM/RSS feed. All the
rest is part ego ("my content is so great people just have to see what else I
wrote") and part feature creep.

[0] [https://www.sinax.be/blog/general/guidelines-for-spartan-
web...](https://www.sinax.be/blog/general/guidelines-for-spartan-
webdesign.html)

~~~
bishalb
Sure, for a personal site or a portfolio site, they are not even needed. I
also use Hugo for one of my sites, which is just a 5 page website. It is great
for such stuff. But for a personal blog, I think both of those
things(commenting and search) are absolutely essential.

>Rarely have I seen interesting discussion happen in the comments of a
personal blog.

I disagree with this and even more so if we are talking about programming
blogs. A lot of interesting discussions and rebuttals happen in the comment
sections.

Regarding outsourcing search to a dedicated search engine, its a mixed bag.
99% of the users don't even know about the `site:` and `filetype:` stuff. You
also have the option of embedding Google site search but the first four
results are ads which isn't very ideal. Wordpress search is decent out of the
box but if you want something advanced, it has some nice plugins that allow
advanced searching with fuzzy matches.

~~~
majewsky
> But for a personal blog, I think both of those things(commenting and search)
> are absolutely essential.

What I've found to work well for commenting is to put an e-mail address on the
page where people can send their comments. When there is a good comment, I put
an update in the article.

The main advantage of this approach is that it weeds out garbage responses. By
making it ever so slightly harder for people to post a comment, they are
forced to take an extra few seconds to consider if they really have something
meaningful to add.

~~~
bishalb
That is a good idea but would people really want to leave the site to open
their email client and make a comment?

I had once thought about a different approach - Creating a Google form (for
each blog post) and then embedding it on the blog post. Then whenever anyone
submits a comment via the form, it would get saved to a Google
spreadsheet(this needs to be made publicly readable). The unwanted comments
can just be deleted from the spreadsheet. The contents of this spreadsheet can
then be obtained in a JSON format and displayed on the blog post using
Javascript.

~~~
KajMagnus
Hmm interesting approach. What about reply notifications? If Jane replies to
Joe's comment? Maybe with Zapier or ifttt it'd be possible to construct
automatic reply notifications. ... But then, what about unsubscribe, hmm.

> saved to a Google spreadsheet(this needs to be made publicly readable)

Hmm, then, people's email addresses cannot be remembered, meaning, no reply
notifications?

~~~
bishalb
Yeah this is just a hacky solution, not very effective. Forget reply
notifications, even replying to a comment in a threaded style would be tricky
using this approach :)

------
jamesponddotco
While it doesn't seem very popular in Hacker News, I think WordPress [1] is an
excellent platform for a blog. The community is terrific, there is a
tremendous amount of documentation out there, and it is entirely customisable.

If you go with the managed hosting route, most companies handle security and
updates for you, so you can focus on writing and leave everything technical to
someone else.

I am working on one myself — and have a private beta running, if you are
interested [2], —, but of the top of my head, some companies that will go
above and beyond as far as WordPress is concerned, include Kinsta [3],
Pantheon [4] and Presslabs [5]. The last one is based in Romania and open
sourced a bunch of their stack, worth checking out.

[1] [https://wordpress.org](https://wordpress.org)

[2] Just email me at help@madpony.co for information

[3] [https://kinsta.com](https://kinsta.com)

[4] [https://pantheon.io](https://pantheon.io)

[5] [https://www.presslabs.com](https://www.presslabs.com)

~~~
sneak
Wordpress falls over under an even modest amount of traffic without jumping
through a bunch of caching plugin hoops, it’s written in PHP, it requires
dynamic hosting, and it regularly has major security issues. It’s not good.

~~~
cweagans
IMO, the only reason that you gave that holds water here is that it requires
dynamic hosting and that the resulting operational complexity just isn't worth
it for a personal blog. Having to add caching plugins/config for a PHP CMS
isn't out of the ordinary, being written in PHP is not in itself a negative
point (modern PHP really doesn't suck).

I will never, ever, ever advocate for running Wordpress for much of anything,
but I would also argue that any nontrivial piece of software has a fair number
of security issues and that Wordpress vulnerabilities are particularly visible
because of how widely used it is and the public-facing nature of the software.

------
gexla
If you have a gun pointed to your head with the requirements you have listed
then you go Wordpress. Updates aren't difficult. I'm not sure about plugins (I
haven't used WP in a long time,) but you can set the core Wordpress updates to
be automatic. It will handle everything you need.

If after a week of coding you arrive to the weekend and think "I want to do a
bunch more coding" then you go with a static site generator. Then you don't
finish over the weekend and have to screw with it the following weekend as
well. Then you finally publish the thing with "good enough but not quite what
you wanted" functionality and let it sit there for weeks. Then you come back
to it and scratch your head trying to remember how to publish / build / deploy
it (or you cycle through your shell history hoping the commands are still in
there.) One day you decide that you want to add that functionality you left
out the first time and find that you have to relearn everything you had to
learn to build the thing in the first place. Sure, you vaguely remember the
easy stuff, but you have to refresh on the easy stuff to get back to the
harder stuff which you never had time to figure out from the beginning.

Anyone been there? ;) In this case, I'm thinking of Hugo, but I imagine it's
much the same for all the others.

With Wordpress you get enough balance of customization and ease of use that
you can just get on with it. If you need a bit of help, then get on Fiverr or
similar and have someone throw you pointers (or just do it for you) to save
you time in getting past tricky parts.

There's a reason loads of sites on the internet are using WP. People use it to
GTD and move on to something else.

~~~
bishalb
Exactly. Outside of the nerd bubble of HN, Wordpress is still the defacto
choice for a blogging platform. Nothing comes close to WordPress in terms of
customization freedom and "zero to deploy".

~~~
ryandrake
I agree. A social (card gaming) group I’m involved with used self-hosted
WordPress and it’s been great. We use it primarily for events and post-game
blog posts. Non technical people can contribute blog posts and other stuff,
and I can occasionally pretend to be a sysadmin.

Cost is essentially free since it piggy backs on a VPS that would otherwise be
running anyway.

------
PatrolX
Ghost [https://ghost.org/](https://ghost.org/)
[https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost](https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost) is best
for the need you've described, it's no-nonsense fast as lightning, unlike
bloated WordPress.

~~~
bovermyer
Hosted Ghost is _really_ expensive.

Self-hosted Ghost is a pain in the ass to maintain.

Disclaimer: the above is my own experience, and not necessarily that of
others.

~~~
dewey
How is it a pain to maintain? I’m using the Dockerized version and apart from
increasing the version number in the Docker Compose file there’s 0 maintenance
in the last years of running it.

~~~
bovermyer
The Docker community maintains that image, not Ghost directly.

I ran into several problems writing Ansible automation to spin up and
configure a Ghost server. Eventually I gave up and used a different blog
engine that was more amenable to automation.

Granted, this may just be a low motivation on my part to use Ghost, in favor
of just getting something up and running.

------
rukshn
Sadly even though it is not popular in HN WordPress is the best for you.

Easy to set up and try and you can customize it as well. With lots of plugins
for everything.

You can go with the paid WordPress.com and they will handle all the updates
for you.

Static sites are good but when it is time for SEO and customisation you will
realize that it can get really painful in a static site generator.

~~~
masukomi
> Static sites are good but when it is time for SEO and customisation you will
> realize that it can get really painful in a static site generator.

care to explain? because that makes _no_ sense to me. SEO is primarily about
content these days. The little "add this tag for SEO WIN" type things stopped
being useful years ago. Have a good title, have good content, link your stuff
well, update regularly: success!

------
gitgud
If you really want to avoid updates and viruses, you need to go _static_.
There's hundreds of static site generators out there.

I recommend [1] hexo, for it's simplicity. You can write in markdown files and
generate a static blog for static hosting.

But [2] Gatsby is another similar framework, but it uses React.

[1] [https://hexo.io/](https://hexo.io/)

[2] [https://www.gatsbyjs.org](https://www.gatsbyjs.org)

~~~
yagodragon
Another static site generator that is gaining traction is Eleventy[1]. It's
very small and simple, entirely build in js, supports most templating
languages you already know and it's more flexible than GatbyJS. For a more
complete blogging solution, though, I'd recommend Ghost.[2]. If you're
building a small blog just for fun you should definitely go static and scratch
your hacker's itch.

[1][https://www.11ty.io](https://www.11ty.io)
[2][https://ghost.org](https://ghost.org)

~~~
johnonolan
You can also combine the two and use a Ghost back end with an Eleventy front-
end, fwiw:
[https://ghost.org/docs/api/v2/eleventy/](https://ghost.org/docs/api/v2/eleventy/)

------
pknopf
I wrote my own one-off static site generator.

It is freeing. Anything is possible, and nothing is in your way. It really
doesn't take that much time.

[https://github.com/pauldotknopf/pauldotknopf.github.io/blob/...](https://github.com/pauldotknopf/pauldotknopf.github.io/blob/staging/generator/src/Blog/Program.cs)

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

~~~
quickthrower2
Yeah I find just knock something up in NodeJS. Then when you need to do
something custom you are writing JS. Familiar stuff. Compare that to the
headache of figuring out how to get Hugo templates to do anything non trivial.
Or even getting Jekyll to run.

------
awill
I used Wordpress for years. It was such a hassle constantly getting emails
about patching. In the end I got fed up and moved to hugo hosted on netlify.
Fantastic. Zero maintenance.

~~~
hellwd
I was also impressed by Netlify. I tried multiple other solutions to host my
website but Netlify was my favorite at the end. Easy to setup, free and fast.
I configured my account, access to Github, deployment, custom domain and SSL
in 5 minutes.

------
SanchoPanda
Static sites are cool but annoying to customize. WordPress is cool but a
server is annoying to maintain.

Solution: build on WordPress, use wget to pull a mirror, serve that as a
static site. This is way more common than you may initially guess.

------
ggoss
I also wrote my own static site generator using Python [0] that I use to
generate my personal site [2], and that I introduced as a blog post here [1].

Posts are written in Markdown with simple formatting, templates are HTML/CSS
with Jinja2 templating, and it includes support for things like automatic
table-of-contents generation for posts, blog index pagination, tags, related
posts (manually tagged, for now), comments (using utteranc.es and GitHub
issues), and automatic image compression/scaling/caching (between builds).
Eventually, I intend to add things automated 'related posts' list generation,
but haven't gotten around to it yet.

[0]: [https://github.com/ggoss/sitegen](https://github.com/ggoss/sitegen)

[1]:
[https://garrettgoss.com/blog/2019/05/sitegen.html](https://garrettgoss.com/blog/2019/05/sitegen.html)

[2]: [https://garrettgoss.com](https://garrettgoss.com)

------
arkitaip
WordPress all the way. I genuinely think it's the self-hosted solution that
offers the best combination of control, flexibility and ease-of-use. You just
need a couple of plugins for performance and safety and you are set [0].

There are literally tens of thousands of themes - open source and commercial -
that you can try out in a matter of minutes instead of wasting days or weeks
designing your own theme.

You rarely have to code stuff by yourself because there is a plugin for any
functionality you can imagine.

Latest version of WordPress comes with the new Gutenberg editor which I'm
personally not a huge fan of as it obfuscates too much of WordPress' inner
workings. You might, therefore, want to use the Classic Editor plugin as a
solution.

If you haven't already bought a domain name, I recommend Porkbun. Moved
several domains to them in the past months and have found them to be cheap and
yet reliable straight shooters.

[0] My list of must-have plugins: Yoast (for SEO), Autoptimize
(caching/performance), Wordfence Security (multi-layer security).

~~~
bishalb
For any serious blogging project, WordPress is by far the best choice, nothing
comes close in terms of features, ease of use and ease of customization. I
would also add contact form 7 to the list.

------
clintonb
I got tired of dealing with WordPress. I moved to Jekyll hosted on Netlify. I
use Forestry as a frontend. You can read more at
[https://dev.clintonblackburn.com/2019/03/31/wordpress-to-
jek...](https://dev.clintonblackburn.com/2019/03/31/wordpress-to-jekyll/).

------
hamaluik
After years of trying different things, I found something that works great for
me, though I suspect you’ll have to try a few things until you find what is
comfortable for you.

I publish my blog as a static site served by nginx on a $5 / node (which also
hosts a dozen other things—I don’t get much traffic). Every once in a while I
ssh in and run an apt upgrade but no updates to manage beyond that. I use
[https://getstatik.com/](https://getstatik.com/) to generate the site from
markdown files. I’m surprised it hasn’t caught on more given how flexible it
lets you be with defining how your site should work. The whole thing is stored
on git and I can deploy with a push to my server remote.

That said if you want to focus on writing I would start with something as
simple as ghost of medium to see if you’re actually as into writing as you
think.

------
wheresvic3
I personally started with a hand-rolled static html site and some content.
When I decided to self-host, I got a super cheap VPS and just ran the site off
of Node.js with an nginx reverse proxy.

After around 10 blog posts, I just wrote my own static site generator:
[https://smalldata.tech/blog/2018/08/16/building-a-simple-
sta...](https://smalldata.tech/blog/2018/08/16/building-a-simple-static-site-
generator-using-node-js)

Most importantly, what works for me is just writing in HTML. It is more
expressive than markdown and the browser preview _just works_ (including
displaying images and/or running inlined js if certain posts require it)!

------
imwally
I've been using pelican [1] with S3 for my blog [2]. It comes with a nice
makefile that handles the generation (markdown -> HTML), dev server
(localhost:8000 that regenerates files upon modification) and deployment to S3
(uses s3cmd along with API keys to upload to a designated bucket). It offers
GitHub, ftp, ssh, and dropbox options for deployment as well, but I've never
tried them.

[1] [https://blog.getpelican.com](https://blog.getpelican.com)

[2] [http://nil.wallyjones.com](http://nil.wallyjones.com)

~~~
IronBacon
Also _rsync_ (the one I use).

------
amerkhalid
I use both, WordPress and Hugo.

I use WordPress for personal blog, which consist mostly of links, highlights
from books, photography, and stream of concise writing.

And I use Hugo for my professional website with a few blog posts but it is
mostly focused on resume.

WordPress makes it super easy to share content via its app or bookmarklet on
computer. Writing experience on WordPress editor is okay. I get average of 100
visitors per month but don't get any comments. I leave comments turned on
because if I want to add a note when using someone else's machine, I can.
Otherwise, I would turn off commenting and reduce one risk vector.

For Hugo, I use dedicated writing app, iaWriter[0]. It is definitely better
experience of writing. My Hugo blog also has a private area where I write my
fiction projects or write private notes. Of course, Hugo has no comments or
search. Not really important for me. You can easily modify Hugo template to
your liking but stuff like scheduled posts, automatic sharing on social
networks, related posts, etc is not easily doable.

Based on the fact that you want to focus on writing, I would suggest Hugo with
a good writing app. Of course, you can write blog posts in any editor and copy
paste into WordPress or wherever.

[0]: [https://ia.net/writer](https://ia.net/writer)

------
randomsearch
I’ve spent countless days trying various static site generators and
alternatives. I was trying to replace a self host Wordpress site with github
pages to save money.

I am now planning to instead build a new wordpress site and self host
somewhere cheaper. WP is a PITA from a security point of view, but the
alternatives are IMO uniformly terrible. WordPress just works and has a good
ecosystem of plugins and themes.

I was really disappointed with the static site generators. I’d love to write
one that works as I’d expect - a simple way to turn markdown into a site with
a single config file and python command, no complex setup, no using git as a
package manager etc. with a ready set of auto-generated based on themes for
other packages - but this will be a future project.

It would look something like:

/pages - contains markdown pages /posts - markdown posts /themes - one subdir
per theme /output - generated html

To generation html “ssg” in the root dir.

The themes would be anything you like, with very few template tags. The
markdown would be translated to simple html and inserted in the files.

    
    
      pip install ssg
      create a page in /posts with a title and body
      ssg
      open output/index.html

------
jjjbokma
I also wrote my own static blog generator. It's available as either a Perl or
a Python program [0]. I use it to write a static microblog [1].

[0] [https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog](https://github.com/john-
bokma/tumblelog)

[1] [http://plurrrr.com/](http://plurrrr.com/)

------
flaviocopes
I use Hugo for my blog but also for other non-blog sites. Generating static
HTML gives me peace of mind and Go is super fast at regenerating the site.
Deploying is a joyful process using GitHub and Netlify. I’d go static just to
use Netlify. And the best part for me is the tech is “boring” so I just focus
on the content, rather than on the blog platform.

~~~
olingern
Your posts have been helpful, thanks for the writing you do!

------
johnnyAghands
If you like writing some code, want full control (i.e. payload size,
extensibility, theming, etc) with some OOTB features (i.e. zero setup, server
rendering, static exporting, etc), and don't mind react or markdown, I'd
recommend nextjs + netlify.

I find Gatsby and Hugo very powerful; but miss the simplicity of Jykell. Even
if you don't think nextjs is great for blogging, it's still worth checking
out! Their docs + getting started guide are some of the best.

For example; writing up a small MVP site to test out a business idea
([https://www.hiredsomehelp.com/](https://www.hiredsomehelp.com/)), it's in
progress, but even still, only took about 15 minutes to push up via netlify.

That being said, I feel like all these new static site generators are
terrific; a real sweet spot in web development in my opinion :)

Stay the hell away from Wordpress. It. Will. Get. You. When you least expect
it ️

------
ibudiallo
This may not be for everyone but here is what I did.

I wrote 5 articles that I thought were interesting. Then I bought a domain
name, wrote a php script to serve them. (If url1 do x, if url2 do y) nothing
fancy.

Only when I saw that I could sustain writing regularly I started worrying
about the platform. And there is no best platform, only the one you are
familiar with.

~~~
bdcravens
Curious, why didn't you just make it a static site then?

~~~
ibudiallo
Only to have a reusable header and footer.

~~~
davidcollantes
You can do that with a static site and includes.

------
sergiotapia
I ended up with a domain purchased on Gandi.

A Hugo static website on Github.

Netlify hosting that Github repo.

It's really turnkey and zero maintenance, and free.

[https://sergio.dev/posts/genserver-webcrawling-in-pure-
elixi...](https://sergio.dev/posts/genserver-webcrawling-in-pure-elixir/)

------
tomlockwood
Github Pages + Jekyll.

Can use it with your custom domain, pretty customisable, and since its a
static site, relatively secure.

~~~
saagarjha
That’s what I use, but one word of warning: if you rely on GitHub to generate
the pages for you, you can’t use any custom plugins aside from the ones
they’ve whitelisted.

~~~
dangoldin
I had a similar issue - turns out you can generate it statically locally and
commit the generated HTML files: [https://help.github.com/en/articles/using-a-
static-site-gene...](https://help.github.com/en/articles/using-a-static-site-
generator-other-than-jekyll)

------
wishinghand
Unless you absolutely cannot stand PHP I will always recommend Kirby. You get
blogging out of the box, comments, search, tags, related posts, featured
posts, metadata stuff like SEO/RSS/Sitemaps is easy, a decent amount of themes
out there, easy to make your own, can be deployed on shared hosting like
Siteground or a bespoke server like Digita Ocean and the CMS interface is a
joy to use.

Downsides: all the code is on github but it’s not technically open source. I
forget what the license is but it’s not MIT or anything like that.

It also technically costs money. The maintainers let you download a working
basic site and never nag you about paying. It’s an honor system.

------
nstart
Highly recommend the ghost platform. It gets out of your way and lets you
focus on writing. Nothing else. You can customize it as much as you want but
it's primary focus is getting you to writing first.

This is assuming you are willing to pay for at least your own server. Their
hosted option is also great and highly recommended if you want to just start
writing before thinking of customizations.

I find static site generators to be awesome but generally a hindrance to the
flow of wanting to start writing spontaneously. More often than not, more time
goes into figuring out the perfect workflow for the blog system rather than
writing. Caveats, YMMV etc apply :)

~~~
bishalb
Does Ghost support commenting yet? Can't imagine a blog without a commenting
feature.

~~~
DavidDarnes
There's several comment integrations you can choose from
[https://ghost.org/integrations/community/](https://ghost.org/integrations/community/)

~~~
bishalb
That is exactly my point. With Ghost, I would have to resort to a third party
service to have something so essential as a commenting system for a blog.
Comments are a part of your blog's content and it is necessary to have your
own control over it, as these third party providers can shut down or just ban
your site for any reason(take Google Plus comments for instance which many
blogs were using as a commenting platform for their blogs). Relying on a third
party provider for comments should be a choice, not a compulsion.

~~~
DavidDarnes
Aren't comments a response to your blog content and not part of the content
itself? Having the option to use a multitude of commenting services seems like
lots of control surely?

If you look at the various options being suggested in the comments here you'll
see many of them don't come with comments out of the box. Jekyll, Gatsby,
Hugo, 11ty all require you to use a third party service or roll your own.

~~~
bishalb
I strongly believe that they are a part of the content, just not in the
traditional sense. Many times I find more substance in the comments than in
the main content. Sure it's great to have more control over which commenting
system to choose, but would adding a native commenting diminish that control?
Certainly not right? (If you check out ghost's forums, you will find many
people asking for a native commenting system)

Yes none of those static site generators support commenting, making them not
very suitable for blogging(they dont even support searches). That is why I am
not a proponent of static generators as a blogging platform.

------
jeromescuggs
wordpress always felt really overkill for what i wanted, and static site gens
are fun for people who like to tinker under the hood. personally i use hugo,
but i am still shopping around for something a little less convoluted.
stumbled onto a super old package called blazeblogger and it'a been neat, but
we will see

when i just want something i can setup with minimal hassle, i have always
loved GetSimple ([http://get-simple.info/](http://get-simple.info/)) although
i imagine mentioning a flat-file platform will probably elicit some reactions
- flat-file meaning it doesn't use a database to store content, but instead
simply stores the data, encrypted, in actual textfiles on your webserver. when
i was using godaddy as a host, their mysql db's were always a bit laggy, and
something like wordpress would always have that extra, noticeable pause during
loading that bugged me to no end. getsimple with the blogging plugin was
always faster, configuring it was easy, and i didn't have to stray too far
outside my limited knowledge of html/css/php to play with the styling and
theming.

------
gmays
WordPress is hard to beat. For a simple blog the updates are minimal and there
are even Managed WordPress hosts that will keep it updated for you as part of
the hosting plan. They typically also have on boarding.setup wizards to get it
all fully setup in a few minutes.

Sure, you could use something more custom, but you'll just spend more time
coding rather than writing on your blog.

------
jefftk
Static is great: more secure, stands up to very high loads, minimal
maintenance.

I'd actually recommend writing in plain html+css at first, and then moving
over to a static site generator once you have ~10 posts. You'll have a much
better idea about what makes a good system at that point.

(I wrote my own static site generator after ~100 posts, which is longer than
I'd recommend going!)

------
ascales
In my experience Hugo has been really nice and simple to work with. I just
push markdown to git and it shows up on my site.

------
cyneox
Tiddlywiki! Currently I'm working on having Tiddlywiki in a serverless env:
Lambda + DynamDB + API Gateway.

------
BayesStreet
We’re working on a security focused managed Wordpress hosting platform with
custom email and templates included. If you’d like to beta test it email
admin@ sitebay.org and we’ll put you up for however long you need free. Thanks
to YC summer startup school for hooking us up with some compute credits.

------
bovermyer
You're describing hosted WordPress (wordpress.com, instead of wordpress.org).

If you don't care as much about customization or plugins, then WriteFreely is
quite nice.

If you're willing to put in a fair amount of coding and design effort, you
could use a static site generator, backed by Netlify as the host.

------
pier25
Another options that seems promising is Netlify CMS:
[https://www.netlifycms.org](https://www.netlifycms.org)

It puts the content in the git repo so that your SSG can read from that. Then
your CI can trigger a build and deploy after each push to the repo.

------
davewasthere
Gatsby, Hugo or plain(ish) Jekkyl.

Simple, clean, fast. Updates and viruses are a non-issue.

Depends what plugins you're talking about, but if you're a non-programmer/dev
type, then you're probably better off using Wordpress as a blogging platform
if some serious customisation is wanted.

~~~
save_ferris
Tried gatsby recently and I hate it. Their choice to use graphql for a static
site generator makes no sense to me.

Trying to build anything beyond a super generic blog is a huge chore. Hugo has
a much, much better community IMO

~~~
pknopf
I agree. Gatsby is one of the worst products I have ever worked with. The code
itself isn't bad, but the tech stack and UX is horrible. It's the epitome of
hipster JavaScript.

I'm amazed that they got funding for it...

~~~
edude03
I hate to be negative about products others have built as I tend to believe
that if it "sucks" it's because I'm not the target audience.

That said, I am happy to hear I'm not the only one with this sentiment.

~~~
save_ferris
I’m the same way, but there’s a big difference between using a technology
that’s not designed for your use case and using a technology that just sucks,
and frankly gatsby is the latter. It in no way outshines any other major
static site generator available today.

------
KajMagnus
There's Zola, a bit like Hugo but written in Rust,

[https://github.com/getzola/zola](https://github.com/getzola/zola),

and, looking at the readme, a bit more features than Hugo, e.g. built in
search (how does that work?).

------
stockkid
> I really want to focus on the writing and not deal with updates and viruses.

In such case, html+css might be a good choice for you. Using static site
generator could make it easier to maintain your blog. I personally like Hugo
due to its speed.

------
DoreenMichele
Humorously, you can (probably) do all that with BlogSpot.

~~~
bishalb
Blogspot is still a very good platform. If I am not hosting it myself, I would
choose a Blogspot blog over a GitHub pages one anyday. And blogspot also
allows advertisements which is great.

~~~
bovermyer
I would argue that advertisements are not, in fact, great.

But Blogspot as a blogging platform is still a viable choice.

~~~
bishalb
Yes of course ads aren't great but I love me some money on the side while I am
blogging away :). Also I don't find adsense small text ads to be very
obtrusive. 10 years ago I knew a few bloggers that were making 4 figure
earnings via just blogspot blogs and adsense. Adsense pays like shit these
days.

------
CameronNemo
I use hugo with gitlab pages. Hugo is customizeable and portable. You can host
with anything, not just gitlab. nginx even.

------
mattbgates
[https://micro.blog](https://micro.blog) is nice too.

------
Teichopsia
Recently I looked into the landscape to see what I felt comfortable with.

tl;dr: I ended up using eleventy with tailwindcss.

It depends what you are comfortable with...

There are a few blogging sites (their names escape me at the moment but are
similar to [https://write.as](https://write.as)) that seemed interesting.
Again, I did a quick search but couldn't find the one I had in mind.

My preference is python, so naturally I looked there first. I can't remember
what happened to pelican, why I didn't go for it. Nikola seemed nice until I
started reading the documentation. I also looked at some that were further
down static gens list. But something was missing.

Jekyll has great documentation, but there are a lot of moving pieces. You can
make it into a full fledge website that has a blog, or make it into a blog -
quite easily. It seems that whoever states that Jekyll is geared towards
creating a blog..... who knows why?!

Played around with Hugo last year and meh...

Now, I don't know how much looking into different ssg influenced the ease it
was to pick up eleventy, but it just made sense. It's a bare bones static site
generator that - just works. There are several blog posts that will get you up
and running quickly. There are several skeleton GitHub repos, some use
tailwindCSS, some have netlify Cms already configured, some are plain. Or you
can just build your own.

Another I picked it, which is on a personal level. Since it's such a well
structured, bare-bone project, its helping me learn/practice JavaScript and
it's ecosystem. npm scripts is all you need.

All the other tools, gatsby, etc - are great if you already understand react.
And even if you don't but are interested - I got the impression (gatsby at
least) that it's documentation was good and you could learn a great deal about
react going through it. Maybe, I don't know.

Finally... I feel that some projects could do with an overhaul, at least with
their documentation. Some parts felt like an afterthought instead of one
cohesive, linear explanation. Not an easy task in the least, but what is?

But more importantly, pick one thing and stick to it (unless it proves to be
hindering productivity).

------
ryanmercer
I'm a Suarepspace guy myself, have been for 9 years in November.

------
rishav_sharan
Github + github pages.

Keep your text in md files and host them for free.

------
zoeybourqueee
If you're looking for a blog to help you with your productivity, I highly
recommend [https://quire.io/blog/](https://quire.io/blog/)

~~~
bovermyer
This has nothing to do with the OP's question, though...

------
dlphn___xyz
jekyll, ghost, and wordpress are the easiest to setup and customize

------
marc_io
Publii + Netlify

------
susam
If you like writing Python code, I recommend
[https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite](https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite)
(makesite.py). As the README says, it is a simple, lightweight, and magic-free
static blog generator. The entire static blog generator code is in a single
file named makesite.py.

Add your content to the `content` directory. Then run `python3 makesite.py` to
generate the static blog. It writes the generated blog to the `_site`
directory. Finally copy this directory to wherever you want to serve your blog
from, e.g., GitHub repo with GitHub pages enabled, virtual private server,
cloud storage, etc.

It works pretty well out of the box and it is highly customizable too because
doing so involves just modifying the existing Python code or writing your own
Python code.

Disclaimer: This project has been written by my wife. I use it myself to
render my static blog at [https://susam.in/](https://susam.in/).

~~~
majewsky
FYI: That's a disclosure, not a disclaimer. A disclaimer would be something
like "This project has been written by my wife, so I don't take any
responsibility for its quality", which is clearly not your intention.

~~~
susam
Thanks for correcting me. Indeed, I meant it as a disclosure, not a
disclaimer. I was aware of the difference between the two words but I made a
thinking error while writing my comment.

------
nimchimpsky
github pages, and commit my own vanilla html

