Choosing your blog engine
Hey!
I'd like to start by acknowledging that this is not of crucial importance. Wherever your blog is, whatever is the platform, the importance of one's blog is the content and how it drives brand/problem awareness and allows you to add potential customers in your funnel.
With that being said...
If you had to start again (or perhaps you are in the process):
-
What blog engine would you choose and why?
-
Would you put it on a blog.* subdomain or /blog path?
-
Would you self-host your blog or would you use a hosted service?
-
Would you have a private blog (i.e. on your domain) or use something like LinkedIn posts and/or Medium? Or would you post your content on both?
Thanks!
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Gatsby!
It's probably not as powerful as hugo yet. You need to do the SEO yourself and too few theme choices.
But Gatsby is what I use for both my landing page and my blog under /blog
Content is hosted on prismic.io
Static files on netlify
💥
This comment was deleted 8 years ago
the saas pass is hosted on a subdomain. (https://secure.domain.com) So it's really kept separate from the rest
I recently built my blog using Contentful and it's been great (after a little setup). Here's what I've learned:
/blogsubdirectory over the subdomain.blog.is USELESS for your seo (unless you might consider your blog traffic to be different than your typical website traffic).blog.is easier with most services or sometimes the only option, but it's much worse for SEO.Hope those help!
I'm a web developer and I like to build stuff. Therefore I have a server I pay 8euro each month were I put the stuff which goes online. My blog is no exception.
I use Hugo after using Ghost:
You can use git page I believe if you don't have any server. Anyway Hugo is a great website generator, everybody I know who transition from Ghost / Wordpress to it are very happy.
Definitely second Hugo here. I've deployed sites in Jekyll and Middleman but I've stuck with and rebuilt my main site using Hugo.
In some case you can find some great themes. They are typically already SEO optimized so you can install and go.
I even configured my main site to use Dropbox as the "CMS" which makes quick edits a breeze (and possible while on the go). That way there's no extra costs associated with the CMS side of things.
Last but not least, you can host a static site with global CDN for free on Netlify. I used to host them on a DigitalOcean container but got fed up with keeping the OS updated, fixing crashes, and etc.
Was not going to write, but your message inspired me to revive my old blog and also to move it to Hugo.
So, thank you very much :)
Happy to hear that I inspired you :)
Looks like I'm #3 for Hugo. As far as static page generators go, it's by far and wide the path of least resistance. Being able to make quick edits on my phone via Working Copy and be done has been a god-send.
I've had my blog for 4 years now, using Ghost on a Digital Ocean VPS. It's working fine, but it's a pain to update it to newer versions. Also trying to customise certain functionality is not easy to do.
I've already decided to move to a static generator + Netlify with the added benefit that it's free to host! And I like the idea of just putting the entire blog under source control.
I've been thinking of reposting some of my tutorials on dev.to and Medium. I think they actually encourage that on dev.to, you'd definitely get more eyes on your content that way.
Why did you decide to put the time in maintaining all that instead of paying for a hosted solution?
And why are you making the choice to put even more time instead of paying for a solution?
Not trying to sell you here, just trying to understand what is driving you to have more control over your blog engine.
Thanks!
No problem, happy to answer these questions! :)
When I started, I was learning Node.js and I thought by doing the installation and hosting of Ghost myself it would help me learn more. I don't think that made a lot of difference though, I don't feel like I learned more from it.
As for the move to using a static generator, it's easy to implement (for me), and free, so I don't see the need to pay for a hosted solution.
Interesting!
I am considering paying for Ghost 29$/month as time is a limited resource.
As a freelance software engineer, I feel that spending time working for a client then investing that money in a hosted solution is a more profitable use of my time/resources.
Which static generator are you currently considering?
If I can jump into this: I'm using Jekyll as a static site generator. But that's because I'm a Ruby on Rails developer.
I can understand your reasoning. However, I didn't spend a lot of time on the maintenance of Ghost. I skipped a few upgrades here and there, so it's not like I was upgrading it every month.
I haven't decided yet on the static generator, I have used Hugo for a different blog before, which was very easy to set up. On the other hand, I have experience with Vue and wanted to try out VuePress but they're still in alpha with the blogging support.
Hey, Dominic
Re: WP, I'll just drop this here: I regularly see bot attempts of scanning for seemingly random WP URL paths / vulnerabilities, even though I don't use WP! :O Cut those out, or you're periodically wasting server CPU with a lot of 404's. I would agree with a number of other comments here that static sites would provide much better security, IF you don't need WP features.
Just if anyone is interested in the outcome, I have decided to use Hugo + Netlify. This is seriously awesome. I was able to port the website from my app (yeah, sucks, I know!) to Hugo in less than an hour and I also added the /blog.
Thanks to all for your comments, it really helped!
My niche site is a WordPress website with a custom theme. It's an online blog-magazine so WordPress made a lot of sense for hundreds of articles already published.
For my SaaS project, I started with WordPress but it was overkill and slow despite caching. I moved it all early to Gatsby (gatsbyjs.org) for a static-generated website. It is a hell of a lot faster, and incredibly cheap to host with Firebase Hosting. However, you need some sort of React/Javascript knowledge to make it happen.
I host on
/blog.I made my own blog.
I didn't want to install Wordpress. I don't use php or SQL on my servers and didn't want to install them on it. In my view, WordPress is a behemoth and I didn't want to spend the time learning how to use it.
Since I'd already written most of the code needed to create a blog using CouchDB/PouchDB, I went ahead and made it.
On the downside, it's probably not SEO friendly, but it's mainly used for documenting how to use my apps and a personal blog so that's not a concern for me.
I still have some work to do on it but on the plus side it's very easy to get up and running, easy to modify, and easy to use.
I'll be spending some time over the next few weeks tightening up the code and adding some features to the editor/publisher tools but as it stands right now it only takes about 5-10 minutes to get it up and running on a web server.
The blog code is available at https://azartiz.com.
Here are my few cents:
What blog engine would you choose and why?
WordPress. Simple to setup and manage, plenty of cool features (in form of plugins and widgets) available to spice up the site, great for SEO.
Would you put it on a blog.* subdomain or /blog path?
/blog as it is better for SEO
Would you self-host your blog or would you use a hosted service?
Self host as it gives more control and hosting is dirt cheap these days.
Would you have a private blog (i.e. on your domain) or use something like LinkedIn posts and/or Medium? Or would you post your content on both?
Actually I do both. I post at main blog and then cross-post to LinkedIn, Medium and other sources with link back to main blog.
I use Pelican, mainly because I'm really into Python, can use restructured text (which I like better than markdown), and is easy to maintain and develop plugins.
My personal preference is Jekyll (familiarity) and hosting on Netlify (which is absolutely amazing).
Having said that, for a product I do like /blog for SEO. This complicates things since fitting something into your app stack isn't always easy.
We ultimately decided to break the blog/marketing out of our main app. This is nice because then you can use whatever blog/CMS you like and then run your app at app.yourproduct.com/etc....and of course if your business isn't an app, it might not even need to be a consideration.
I run all my blog type sites on $5 digital ocean wordpress instances.
I've tried Jekyll in the past for a few static sites but never blogs. I tried Ghost for one site but didn't really enjoy the experience.
I'm (slowly) building my own: www.writingy.com
Just curious, why are you building a blogging engine?
I built it for my friends, they wanted a simple blogging platform. I don't like Wordpress, they couldn't be able to use static site generator and Ghost was missing some features, so I decided to create a simple solution, to have complete control over. And when it's done, why not make it universal and accessible to everyone, right? :)
Sorry for too many questions.
Everyone applaud Ghost for being amazing.
Care to share what the missing features are? I am just here to learn
That's OK :). For example (back in the time, I don't know the current ghost-2-state):
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
This comment was deleted 6 years ago