Do you self-host it using FOSS tools? Use Wordpress? Design your own using PHP frameworks such as laravel? Just curious what those that do it use?
If I was to create a blog today, I would use a static page generator and host it on GitHub or GitLab. I would spend my time on creating original content instead of tweaking the infrastructure.
I eventually got tired of maintaining the infrastructure on my personal website, so I eventually moved it to google sites as I didn’t really need a lot of dynamically generated content as it basically just serves my resume with redacted personal info. So I’ve just tacked on my writings to it. Google sites actually isn’t bad as a WYSIWYG editor for blog posts. But there isn’t any good functionality for indexing, navigation or allowing comments. I don’t have a lot of writings so I just manually update the top level page with links to all my writings and embed Disqus at the bottom of my posts for people if they want to leave comments.
I used Google Sites a long time ago and I’m a bit surprised it still exists (with Google killing products all the time). How is it with revision history, etc. Is it easy to download the contents in a reasonable format? One advantage of GitHub/GitLab is that you have all your archive in source control all the time.
It’s fine for revisions history. I can see every published changed I’ve made going back 2 years when I created the site. You can actually use Takeout to get the raw css and html of the site if you wanted to as well. Although I wouldn’t consider it a user friendly process to do so. No real friendly way to export individual pages either though, so I couldn’t easily send my post to like a PDF for instance unless I printed it to PDF through the browser print functionality.
I liked it though because it gave me an easy way to create a consistent looking website that automatically sizes itself for any device without need for any hassle on my part.
Thanks for the explanation. If it works, don’t fix it :)
Blogs are pretty static, so I use Hugo to generate a static website, which I then dump in a github repo (I locally generate and then move said files into the right location and then
git add/git push), which I linked to my website/URL host (Vimexx - a Dutch host, which was a requirement as I don’t trust American ones).I love how I can now just write my blog in Markdown if I so want to, but raw HTML is available also, so I can mix and match as I wish. Pretty much backend heaven, IMO.
CSS is custom (using “CSS Grid”) and took me a long-ass time to get right, but I’m so happy I did! :D
Also, I added a little reference to The Net (yes, it works) :^)
Another vote for GitHub pages here. I use EleventyJS as the markdown-to-site generator.
It’s on my to-do list to replace GitHub pages with an S3 bucket with Route 53 and CloudFlare sometime in the next year or two, but that’s really just so I can pull analytics out of CloudFlare.
I haven’t updated in a bit, but I host on neocities right now and use jekyll to generate the static blog.
https://ticktok.neocities.org/
Although I have a web host now that I might transfer it over to. I also want to move my jekyll setup to my vps so I can write and upload new blog posts from my phone without having to remote into my home pc.
Self-hosted, blog runs on PHP scripts I wrote myself.
I personally use Bearblog. It’s open source but I don’t think it’s intended to be self-hosting. That said, it’s a super simple platform, and you can make blogs look really appealing with CSS if you don’t like the retro aesthetic they have. For example, this blog.
I went with a wordpress-like alternative called Ghost. I believe it’s open sourced as well and feels like a more modern, lighter version of Wordpress.
I like the general vibe of the admin portal, and it checks all the boxes for my needs. And it’s hosted from my homelab. So the only cost is a domain, aside from electricity of course.
I’m using picocms (PHP), it generates the HTML from markdown files. But I’m looking at Hugo (golang) as well.
I started off with a PHP blog based on PageNode which I hosted on a VM I shared with a friend, but later moved to Hugo hosted on Cloudflare Pages. I’ve had various Wordpress blogs in the past, but couldn’t keep any of them around - hopefully this one stays!
