Taking the plunge and starting a blog. Which platform should I use?
If I'm going to document my journey, I might as well make it publicly available, right? So, I'm going to start a blog. It needs to be real simple and to the point so that I can stay consistent. So, I'm thinking about which platform to use. What do you think would be best?
There's plenty more (and I'm definitely open to exploring) but these two are what I'm interested in at the moment:
- Webflow (https://webflow.com/)
- Ernestly (https://ernestly.co/) shoutout @Joshua_Tiernan
- others?
WordPress... simple , wide range of free templates which will save your time and no cost at all.
It really is hard to compete with WordPress. I suppose I just want something new? I've been using WordPress for years. Plugins get a bit wild.
WordPress.
WordPress
We just installed Ghost yesterday (self hosted on Heroku). It's fairly easy to set up and pretty nice
If you don't go with Ernestly look at a self hosted Ghost on something like digital ocean for $5 a month you get a great site.
That's a great combo. I appreciate the tip 👍🏻
Ghost and Proseful are worth a look.
Ah yeah, I enjoyed that Podcast episode. Taking a look - thanks!
Hi Bryce, nice to meet you! Jorje here, an Argentine entrepreneur meeting interesting people around here.
We are about to launch a Backend that allows you to create a site with the same functionalities as WordPress but Headless ... that is, you can choose any design in a 100% static front and then add articles and other items via API.
What do you get with this? Maximum flexibility in its design, omni-channel to take your content everywhere, no-code in the backend, WordPress-based dashboard, maximum security and zero maintenance and Gtmetrix +98 score.
Interested? You can know more at https://gorillasite.tech
Sorry about the language, we are currently working on the English version, but you might use Google Translate by now which should work just fine.
Hi Jorje! Thanks for the heads up. Looks like a pretty cool product you have there👍🏻 I'm already up and running for now but I'll keep you all in mind if I need to start the search again.
Big Ghost fan here.
Get it running in minutes and really cheap to host. I love how easy it is for me to make custom themes. I could make a change, package it and deploy my custom theme in less than 60 seconds. The SEO out of the box is on point too. No complaints from me.
It's open source too so nothing is really impossible either.
The SEO piece is really attractive... I'd love to not have to deal with SEO plugins and settings in WordPress. Also, speed... do you find your site to load super quick with Ghost??
Yup, the site load speed has never been a concern with Ghost unless it is of you own doing my having massive images or something.
Definitely a relatively new option, but consider checking out notion.so paired with custom domain hosting from potions.dev !
Notion is absolutely incredible and lets you do so much out of the box. We were already using Notion as an internal knowledge base at work and wanted to use it for public facing content as well. So we built potions.dev to let you host things like blogs or help centers from a custom domain (and actually have it render quickly in a whole bunch of different browsers). Would love for you to try it out!
Very cool! I'll take a closer look. I'm familiar with Notion but have always used Coda.
Check out Hugo. Its a static site builder, there's a lot of free themes available too. I've helped some friends move off of Wordpress and onto it since they never needed a complex content management solution in the first place (plus, who wants to worry about upgrading PHP, Wordpress, MySQL, etc). Super simple, can even throw your blog up on S3 if you wanted, cost next to nothing to host.
Thanks for the tip - I've never heard of Hugo. I'll definitely give it a look.
I normally recommend hosting on Netlify, it is free and the UX for static hosting is amazing.
Ghost blog is pretty good. You can either get then to manage/host it or you can host it yourself if you wish.
I'm currently using siteground for all my hosting so this is good to know.
If you don't want to focus on the technical side, Ghost no questions asked.
Gotcha. I'm not too concerned [edit sp] with the technical side... but I do prefer low maintenance and simplicity. Thanks for the input
Just made a new blog with ghost. Haven't done anything with it yet, but I wanted to do something besides WordPress.
Was it just that you wanted to try something new? That's sort of how I feel after years of using WordPress/Divi
Try something new, less "bloated". I didn't want anything fancy, just a simple platform to share ideas.
Honoured to be considered Bryce! Planning to add header images and profile pictures as that’s been a popular request - just in case that’s a consideration for you 👍
You got it - simplicity is key for me (at least at the beginning). Appreciate it!
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Thanks for the breakdown, here. This is really helpful. A commenting system seems to be a pretty great feature to keep conversations going. I'm wondering if the trend is for blogs to not have commenting and point to something like a Slack community for that discussion piece. Do you have a sense for what people tend to be doing more of?
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Thanks for the input, Arrigo. Always appreciate it. Yeah, I've been using WordPress for years and I certainly feel pretty comfortable with it. Plugins can be a bit hard to keep up with. I suppose my goal initially is to just keep myself accountable and share my journey with other people who are getting into the no-code space. I think eventually building up an email list might make sense as a means to share things I'm building.
I think one thing to factor in is that the blog may be a standalone piece... I plan on building out a website for the products I launch and want the blog to supplement it. I suppose I could use an addon domain like blog.[domain].com for the site and use WordPress and then maybe use something else for the other parts of the site someday.