What's your favorite blogging platform?
Hey IH community!
I'm planning on adding a blog to my website and am looking for something simple to maintain & update.
So, I'm curious...what platform do you use for your blog? What do you like or dislike about it?
I love these kinds of questions.
Self-hosted WordPress is a powerhouse. It basically comes with every feature you could ever want – thousands of themes, plugins for SEO, mailing lists, etc. That being said, you'll have to keep the plugins updated for security purposes. If you're looking for hosting/setup recommendations, take a look at my single-page guide startyourblog.co.
If you're a developer, you have another option: static site generators. If this is you, I highly recommend Jekyll (jekyllrb.com) or Gatsby (gatsbyjs.org). You can get free hosting through Netlify.
For instance, I use Jekyll for my personal site at zeph.co. I write my posts in a text editor, push them to GitHub, and that triggers Netlify to publish the changes. Static sites are awesome under traffic (since there's no database), lightning fast, and best of all, free to host. There are lots of themes for both, although some of them look a little worse than WordPress.
Let me know if you have any other questions! I love talking about this kind of stuff.
I'm more in to Hugo... 😉
I've heard great things about Hugo, too. Haven't used it yet! :)
Jekyll rocks – I'm running most of my sites with it.
I also run a directory of Jekyll Themes if you're looking for inspiration!
I love the design of Jekyll Themes. Great job Mike! :)
You're site looks great, I've been leaning toward a static site generator. I'll have to spend some time with Jekyll and I may have s few more follow up questions for you!
Thanks! I'd be happy to help. :)
check out this article about statics.. been going through this for a couple days.
https://medium.com/dailyjs/how-to-choose-the-best-static-site-generator-in-2018-98bff61c8184
I like hugo, and if you use netlify, updates are as simple as pushing to a git repository.
I've been playing with 11ty (eleventy) lately as Netlify seems to like it.. it's okay ... hugo is amazing, def will be sticking with it.
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Not on mine, no. I think you would need to use disqus or look at alternatives if that's a feature you need.
If you want comments, check staticman https://staticman.net/. Big Pus: you will own your data.
If you want newsletter subscription, any manager would do (I mean, mailchimp and co. all handle form submissions).
Disqus injects very nasty ads. I would seriously avoid them unless you are willing to pay. Still, you won't own your data.
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Hugo + Netlify, or Webflow for something you can get up and running even faster
I'm a big Wordpress user!
Wordpress because of the flexibility of it. In my full time job, we build sites using Wordpress as a framework and not necessarily a blogging platform. But it takes more dev time to build out something that doesn't look like a standard WP site.
Do you have any themes that you recommend? I think wordpress at this stage is a little overkill for what I need, although it is incredibly flexible
We don't use off-the-shelf themes, we custom develop what we need from the ground up, although I'd say start with the 2017 theme and just modify it to your liking. If you're looking this route, create a free blog at wordpress.com, plenty of themes on there to choose from and start playing around with. Also depends on if you're going to host the blog or use a service.
@nahart if it's for your company site, which is built using a modern tech stack, check out https://buttercms.com/blog-engine/
We've recently moved our https://zenkit.com/en/blog/ to WordPress, but we started off on https://medium.com/.
I really liked Medium because there is a community there available to comment/clap on your posts. It's also super easy to use. Downside is that there isn't room for advertising, which is why we decided to make the move.
If you are looking for a professional looking publishing platform, go for Ghost https://ghost.org/ . They are what Wordpress could have been if it didn't turn into a CMS instead of a blog platform.
If you want to go for static, choose one written in a language you sort of know. If you are into ruby go for jekyll, if you are into python go for pelican, etc. It will give you a lot of pleasure when you are able to fine-tune your deployment with custom made plugins, etc.
I'm working on Writingy.com :)
I like Pelican: http://1rick.com/blogging-with-pelican.html
Surprisingly Tumblr, https://blog.fullstack.cafe. The reasons: free for custom domains, markdown support, themes, full code customization for SEO. Also an original markdown post from Tumblr could be easely imported on Medium and Codementor.io with minimal formating changes after. Cheers.
Neat. I Tumblr never even crossed my mind. Being free for custom domains & markdown support is pretty useful.
Thanks for posting your job on my site btw, I'll have to promote it a bit this weekend and in my next weekly newsletter :)
Right now it's https://getdirectus.com -- a headless CMS. It's really powerful and flexible but definitely solving a different problem than something like Wordpress.
Interesting, I haven't heard of this before. I'll have to test it out this weekend
I LOVE Webflow. Super easy to use. Great tutorials. Flexible CMS. It's really incomparable how easy it is to set up a (or multiple) blogs with Webflow. Check em out 👉 https://webflow.com?rfsn=1308780.989ef
I've been hearing a lot of webflow recently. I will check them out
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