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Ask HN: Do you still self-host a blog? What's your publishing stack?
Question says it all - I'm curious what the state of the art is for a community like HN (that, intuitively, wouldn't just start an eg. Substack).
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Question says it all - I'm curious what the state of the art is for a community like HN (that, intuitively, wouldn't just start an eg. Substack).
My personal blog is -
https://rxjourney.com.ng
I self host because I love writing code. It's inspired by Medium. It was built with Django and Svelte. I could have written the whole thing with Django but I wanted to learn Svelte, and I had plans of making it bigger and more interactive initially.
It's hosted on Render.
Add it to built with django!
https://builtwithdjango.com
Will do!
A lot of aggregators will also not allow your blog to be posted if it's on a newsletter site like Substack, Patreon, etc.
I use GitHub Pages for hosting, Porkbun for the domain, and Astro for the blog itself. EZPZ to manage and very straightforward, plus Astro's docs are great.
It's hosted on a computer located inside my apartment. It used to be hosted on a cheap Synology NAS. No Cloudflare or CDN or anything like that, just a bare NGINX server.
The website itself is built on Jekyll, but I want to switch to something else because I don't use Ruby/Gem for anything else and I can't be bothered to commit that stack to memory just for that.
Is there a particular stack you prefer?
If JS, maybe consider Astro (for simple blogs)? It has built-in MDX support and deploys in a few seconds.
There's also Ghost, but it's a bit more complex. It has both a paid cloud version now and also the FOSS self-hosted version: https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost
If PHP, maybe https://getgrav.org/?
For Go or a prebuilt binary, maybe https://gohugo.io/?
I'm a low-level kind of person, both at work and at home. My requirements are static site only, hosted locally and no fuss (if I need to look up how to install the associated ecosystem or deal with a package manager it's out).
If I had to migrate right now I'd probably go with Hugo.
Fair enough! I can't be of any help there then. Hope you find something!
Github pages: https://github.com/abid-personal/abid-personal.github.io -> makes -> https://omarabid.com
The static site is made with nextjs. This template: https://github.com/timlrx/tailwind-nextjs-starter-blog
Just nginx and static pre-compressed html and txt files. Publishing stack is my fingers and vim to get spell check. Backups are automated.
I edit my posts in a self hosted Ghost site that I run on my laptop as needed and then I use Eleventy to translate that into a static website which gets pushed to Neocities.org via WebDAV (requires the $5 a month plan)
https://mat.tl/blog/2024/10/29/migrating-from-wordpress-com-...
Nikola to generate a static site and blog that I never bother updating because Mastodon is easier, and some shell scripts. The script that publishes the site creates a git repo, adds the static files and the remote host, force-pushes to origin and then gets deleted. It's as elegant as it is useless.
Static website written entirely in Emacs' org-mode with a slightly customized publish script that gets executed on a push to `main`. Hosted on GitHub Pages.
Hugo, s3 and CloudFront. I use GitHub actions to push to s3, that is my deployment pipeline.
https://lille-oe.de/
Jekyll on GitHub Pages with various actions to automate stuff like calculating mileage statistics.
Editing via the GitJournal app.
Hosted on GitHub Pages, built with React. For now I'm using nextjs, but a self-made static site generator is on the roadmap.
I use a from-scratch python script that generates a bunch of html files which are pushed to GitHub pages
Next.js with SSR, hosted for free with Vercel. I’ve used Jekyll, Django and Craft CMS in the past.
Astro hosted for free on Cloudflare Pages.
Astro, netlify (in a process to move to a VPS), neovim
Jekyll and nginx in Docker on Hetzner for €4.49/mo
Jekyll s3 cloudfront
Ethereum.
Astro blog deployed on Github Pages.
VS Code for editing.
Points to Ponder
-> Use the basic Astro template for blogs. It is basically enough for a self-hosted blog needs. Using any of the third party themes/templates with a list of features has a bunch of disadvantages. It takes more effort to customize and upgrading to newer versions totally breaks the setup, sucking in hours of your time.
-> VS Code has plenty of Markdown Extensions. Markdown Preview and Frontend Masters come to mind.