Home
Starting Up
Case Studies DB
Products
Ideas DB
Vibe Coding Tools
Subscribe to IH+
Starting Up
Case Studies
Ideas DB
Products DB
Sign in
Join
6
Likes
24
Comments
Best blogging platform?
by
Alan Montgomery
What's the best blogging platform and why?
I really like Ghost, my blog is made with Ghost and it's very easy to use and improve.
I like Ghost as well man. I've started building my own blog platform in React & Node. Check a few screenshots in the middle of this post in a comment !
Hi @TheTechTeacher,
just to get it right. Do you mean which blogging software eg is the best or does it include hosting as well?
First of all, I can totally second @akfaew his advice. Your own domain is the place to be. It's an independent space just for your own. What you put behind it is, of course, your own choice.
I've never been a big fan of Wordpress. But it's as always a matter of taste. I really like Ghost (https://ghost.org) it's a simple and easy blogging solution with a superb editor. They offer hosting as well.
I've just started building my own blogging platform using React, & Contentful. I was looking at Hugo and some gatsby themed blogs, But I want complete control so I'm building it myself!
In that case, I can recommend gatsby. I've been involved in some gatsby/contentful projects and it's a solid architectural choice given the context.
One thing I, unfortunately, miss in this scenario is a live preview. Gatsby Cloud supports those for a couple of months but it doesn't justify the costs for me.
If you encounter any technical hurdles let me know. :)
Few days work, I've a full blog platform in development using React, Contentful and Bulma CSS. Plugins i'm using are react-contentful, react-helmet, redux and react router dom. Pretty light weight and very fast. I'd be tempted to turn this into a product lol 😹
That looks like really nice progress over the last days.
Just out of curiosity did you consider any server-side rendered React?
Interesting Idea. I think in its current state the solution is too tightly coupled with Contentful. But it could be a great series of tutorials or videos. Something which educates how to use these technologies.
Not until I thought about rendering meta tags on the likes of social media. So I'm thinking of rejigging my approach to a NodeJS / Handlebars.
Or a bit of a re write in PHP with postgresql.
Yes I thought that too Re Contentful. The way I have modelled everything I could easily pull data from a postgres or mongo dB in the same structure and it would plugin nicely.
For scaling into a product, yeah definitely is need to completely change it. I have my own server so I think I may look at doing this..
Love the idea of doing a video series it could be interesting.
This would be 180 degrees turn. Do you have any specific reasons why such a bug refactoring is necessary? I think maybe now is the right time to dive into Next.js and Gatsby. Both technologies achieve the same and you can reuse your React.js codebase.
Sounds like you're planning somehow your own CMS. There are great headless systems like Strapi- https://strapi.io
First of all the question is what makes your hypothetical blogging tool different from other competitors? For example, Is there a certain market you could serve?
Let's go. :)
Man, How have I never came across Strapi before? This is absolutely AWESOME. 🤯 Open source and free won it for me.
Just looking now. Gonna plug it into my current project using node/apollo or express to test it.
That's the great thing about headless. You can plug it in almost any technology or platform.
Want to show your content on the web? Use something like gatsby.
Want to display it within a native app? No deal just consume the API.
Yep exactly. I've we t ahead and got an instance of strapi setup on my server and serving it and have connected it to my blog tool and it works brilliantly. I'm just now thinking about refectoring with SSR. It's looking good.
I guess I'm thinking of achieving it with stacks and libraries I already have a fluent handle on. I've always wanted to jump into Next.js. This could be an option to be honest. I'll have a think.
Yeah ofcourse. If I'm going to offer this as a product I need an admin / CMS behind it to perform CRUD for blog posts. Strapi looks awesome 🙏🏻 Looks like strapi could be an answer instead of a bigger tech stack. Again, I think I'm thinking of ways to get it done quickly using tools I already know.
I guess, the overall experience is going to be super slick and simple. Target audience would likely be indie hackers, small to medium businesses, or on a personal level.
Speed.
It's very fast, and will remain very fast. It's a blogging tool. Too many times I've seen blogging platforms turn into full blown CMS's and the focus is taken away from solely being blogging.
Price.
It'll be affordable even for someone using it casually.
I guess this is really early stages, hence this discussion, but I really feel like I could build something pretty awesome. I've seen tried and failed attempts.
I definitely will delve into this! It would make for a nice series "Build a blog in React without a Database or Server" - something simple and eye-catching rather than including keywords like "with Contentful" etc. I'm gonna give this thought
It's just a question about the goals you want to achieve. :)
Fully agree. That's why I like approaches like Ghost. It focuses on blogging and doesn't try to be a hybrid.
Let me know how things work out. If you need any advice on the technical side, let me know.
Sounds like a great start und framing is really important. Technically almost any CMS uses a Database (a would exclude flat-file systems like Statamic) and Server. Probably emphasizing the easiness is an advantage.
Thanks man, really appreciate your input into this. I'll need to setup a product page if I get a bit further, definitely gonna persue it now, think it could be like Ghost's little brother with less customisation, and being a little more affordable .
Loving Strapi. Think you're right about Nextjs, it'd be the best transition, all I'm missing is that SEO metadata for social media links.
Thanks for that dude, I will do :)
You don't hear it mentioned much on tech oriented sites like this, but https://wordpress.com/, with a custom domain should give you everything you want. There's a cost, but it's not huge, and unlike some of the newer players in this field, it's unlikely to go bust or disappear anytime soon. Plenty of off the shelf themes to choose from.
I wouldn't trust anything free - it either won't be free forever, or the company will fold due to lack of revenue. Pay a little, spend as close to zero time configuring it as possible, and get on with the writing part of the blog.
Don't be seduced by something new and trendy just because it's new and trendy. Blogging and blogs are not new.
I'd avise against using a blogging platform. Hosting providers come and go, but your domain is forever (hopefuly). You'll want enough control over your blog to be able to host it under example.com/blog, not blog.example.com - and that can be tough with a third party platform. Also you want full control over the permalink. Have a look at what the pros are doing, like ahrefs.com for example. I recommend Hugo, a static site generator. It's free and you can host in under your own domain for free as well.
Brilliant advice. I totally agree with this also. I've just started building my own blogging platform using React, & Contentful. I was looking at Hugo and some gatsby themed blogs, But I want complete control so I'm building it myself!
I really like https://buttercms.com/
They have a free tier for developers, and it's really straight forward. However, you will need to stand up your own website to use it. For me I have it all setup through Gatsby for my personal site.
Hows it compare with contentful?
Little biased but we made http://versoly.com/
You can setup a blog in under 5 minutes and start tracking what blog posts do the best and where that traffic comes from. For IHs we collect 25-60% more data than Google.
Imagine you find the perfect target audience but Google Analytics doesn't show you that.
We also allow you to use our page builder to create unique blog posts.
IHs hate popups but they work and we plan on adding them as well.
We 4x email collections on https://saaspages.xyz/ by adding a popup and have had 0 hate for it.
Thanks for that @volkandkaya I'll definitely give it a go!
Thanks we limit to 5 blog posts on launch plan. But depending on your use case we can increase that for you :)