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39 Comments

Do you have a blog for your project? which tool do you use?

Hey there,

I want to know if anyone here who launch a project or is in the pre-launch step have a blog ?

Today SEO is one of the best ROI you can do (better than advertising, in the long term).

I wanted to know if you have a blog to share your progress, explain your features... to attract new users thanks to SEO.

3 quick questions :

  • Do you have a blog for your project?
  • What tools do you use? (wordpress, wix, homemade, webflow, ghost...)
  • How much do you spend per month (time and money) on your blog?

I'm asking because I'm creating Insta to Blog (instatoblog.com), a tool that automatically converts your post Instagram to (perfect) post SEO.

If you only have to manage your Instagram account (the image, the 800 words of your description for a perfect SEO article) and no longer have to manage a blog (which takes too much time) because our tool would do it all by itself. Would you be interested to try and set up Insta to Blog for your project? >>> instatoblog.com

Thanks to read me and answer my questions,
Paul

  1. 2

    I built https://3things.dev with Gridsome, and have just finished it today, was one of the easiest (and cheapest solutions) I could find. It's hosted for free through Netlify too.

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      Nice work!
      You say "cheapest solutions" how much it cost ?
      You choose Gridsome because you use Vue.js ?

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        Costs a total of $0 to host it on Netlify, complete with custom domain.
        Yeah, I'm pretty comfortable with Vuejs at this point - so was looking for vue-specific tools. Was looking at using Vuepress over Gridsome, but Gridsome just did everything I needed with minimal changes and setup.

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    I use 11ty as a static blog, mainly for the speed and I didn't need anything fancy.
    Also, ghost is a good alternative.
    This is my blog https://daily-dev-tips.com/

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      I dont know before 11ty. Thanks for sharing. Yep it looks likes fast !

  3. 2

    Yes - https://versoly.com/blog
    Our tool :)
    Not much we do more engineering as marketing

    We have people who love blogging and have a lot of content. If you can/like writing it can be great.

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      Nice work! Versoly offers blog creation? or what you use for your blog is homemade and just for you?

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        Yeah we offer blog creation :)

        Before we used Ghost and converted it into a static site but that was a ton of work.

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          We're just about finished doing that same work.

  4. 1

    I actually posted on here a few weeks back asking about blogging platforms. https://www.indiehackers.com/post/what-blogging-platform-do-you-use-2131aafc7a

    I ended up going with Webflow since that is what we hosted our marketing website on. I don't know how much I like Webflow for blogging yet (I am one post in). It took too long IMO to get my first post right. I use Ghost for my personal blog (which has a different purpose) and have been loving it thus far.

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      Keep me in touch for your next article on Webflow ;) Can you share the like btw ?
      Why are you using for your personal blog Ghost and not WP ?

  5. 1

    I made my current blog with Jekyll, but I'm in the process of rewriting it using Gatsby. I'm sure there are some no-code alternatives that are just as good.

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      Why are you switching from Jekyll to Gatsby ?

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        To be honest, mostly because I had been hearing a lot of good things about Gatsby and couldn't come up with a project to do at the time. I seem to redo my website about once every year or two, so I decided to rewrite it in Gatsby this time.

        Jekyll is an excellent tool.

        Oh also, I don't really use Ruby, so having to install that was kind of a bummer for me.

  6. 1

    I use Jekyll: https://blog.wunderbucket.io Works great with a static hosting service, which is what I'm building, so it's easy to dogfood.

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      Your blog looks great ! Thanks for you comment :) So you choose Jekyll because it's cheap and easy ?

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        Thanks, Paul. Yeah. Jekyll was cheap and easy and it seemed to cover everything I wanted out of a blog. Other options were just overkill.

  7. 1

    I have written a static site generator in 100 lines of which uses open source libraries to take some markdown, templates and spits out a blog. Simple and don't need to deal with made up conventions from other tools

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      Nice ! It's online ? Do you have a repo or a link to share ?

      1. 1

        Let me know if usage instructions are clear enough: https://www.npmjs.com/package/usite
        An example of a new project I am working on which uses usite: https://mobilerank.co

  8. 1

    I don't have a blog for my product (yet).
    But since I started doing all my frontend work in react, I would definitely choose gatsby. Especially since my existing blogs and many of the projects I built use gatsby on the frontend.

    I find it liberating to do everything with the same technologies.

    1. 1

      Okay, that makes sense :)
      And why not dissociate your blog from your main site, and therefore use another tool?

      1. 1

        That's definitely a possibility and I would consider it in cases when the frontend is not already written in gatsby.

        I'm on the edge between adding the blog directly in the main frontend (no setup required, easy access to existing components, client side routing between blog and site, but full rebuilds of the frontend on product & blog changes) and to create a gatsby based blog that lives outside of the code for the main frontend (would require more setup).

        It's really just because I'm also using gatsby for my stand-alone-blogs.

        However, if I have an application that does server side rendering, I would be very tempted to dissociate the blog from the main frontend and use something with static hosting for the blog.
        In such a case I could of course totally see how using a blogging platform that handles this for me would make sense!
        (as long as I would have the possibility to use a subdomain of my domain for the blog)

  9. 1

    I used WordPress to get my blog (https://criticalbanker.com) up and running fairly quickly. There are a ton of pre-built templates and a lot of helpful plug-ins. You can find hosting plans for $5 or less (I use Interserver). Once the blog is set up, it takes almost no time to update the blog using the admin console, so just the time it takes you to write the content.

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      Common stack.... and it works very well ! Thanks for sharing Erol Aspromatis :)

  10. 1

    We've recently launched our resource page through an independant wordpress site as our dev team have their hands full at the moment. So far so good as we have managed to get a bit of traffic, but it's too early to say really.

    In terms of time and money, we try to post 2-3 times per week but really prefer to have content on there which is relevant to our users (video & drones) rather than to just fill it up for the sake of doing so.

    Instagram is not really a big platform for us at the moment, but will absolutely check out your product!

    https://blog.vreel.co

    1. 1

      Hey Emelie, thanks you very much for your answer and thank you for sharing your work processes. Do not hesitate to subscribe on instatoblog.com to be informed ;)

  11. 1

    I just launched a new blog on splitbee.io/blog
    It's data comes from Notion which is so powerful. I've also written a short article how to it works under the hood!

    1. 2

      Great job Tobias ! Can you explain me how you connect your content from Notion to your blog ? I'm really interested.

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        I've written about it here:
        https://splitbee.io/blog/notion-as-cms-using-nextjs

        I'll add a more detailed explanation later on. Using https://github.com/dragonman225/notionapi-agent to query data

        1. 1

          Really interesting, thanks for sharing :)

  12. 1

    For Arnold Analytics (https://blog.usearnold.com), we use Known (https://withknown.com). A bit heavy but very happy with the UX.

    1. 1

      Hello, thanks for sharing this tools, I don't know before.

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    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

    1. 1

      Hey Andelob, thanks for your answer. So your Ghost blog and posts are "embed" directly in your node.js website ? Why did you choose Ghost and not an other CMS ?

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        This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

    1. 1

      Hey Pierre, nice work and thanks for your comment. BTW interesting app.

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

    1. 1

      Hello! Thanks for your answer :) Why choose Ghost and not an other CMS ? You speak about the price, there is others solutions cheaper :)

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