What do you use for your blog?

I recently switched from WordPress to GatsbyJS. I already use React for a web app that I'm working on, so Gatsby seems like a logical choice. I love React and the js/node/npm tooling and DX in general, and while there are a lot of great benefits of WordPress, I've never enjoyed the DX (php is ok, dealing with mysql, servers, deployment etc. is ok but not very fun). And context switching from React/js/web-app mindset to WordPress/php/mysql/dynamic-website is somewhat a bother.

So far Gatsby w/ React has been fantastic. Less context switching for me. Deployment is super fast and simple. I'm using Firebase hosting since I'm already using Firebase for my web app, but lots of other super-fast super-cheap hosting options available such as AWS, Netlify, Zeit, Surge, etc.

Gatsby has a great ecosystem with great plugins for working with markdown content, image optimization, routing/links for "instant" navigation, etc. Static site means my site is super fast and I don't have to worry about scaling anymore which was constantly in the back of my mind with WordPress (e.g. dealing with caching, setting up CDNs, etc.)

We actually do most of our blogs in house at Rejuvia (www.rejuviamedical.com). It helps keep our message and personality consistent!

I’m using Hugo for both jake.nyc and SongRender.

I found it on https://www.staticgen.com looking for one that wasn’t a React app. These are both content sites, so no need for mounting a whole app on page load. I really like Hugo — it’s simple, flexible and lightning fast.

I built https://craftcode.design/ with https://nextjs.org/ ( frontend ) and https://strapi.io/ (headless CMS)

I use Jekyll with Github pages for my personal website (https://shime.sh).

I love it because:

• it's completely free
• I don't have to worry about traffic spikes, since it gets handled by Github's servers

The downsides are:

• you have to be tech-savy since Jekyll is a Ruby gem, so it has a learning curve
• everything is just static HTML, so you have to use third party services for any forms or comments

I'm very happy with it overall, couldn't recommend it enough.

OMG!

I've been blogging publicly for 19 years! my first blog post was in late 2001.

so, i've been doing it for quite some time.

i've used every blog platform under the sun at this point... and what matters more than platform is that you just write. choose one and go. you learn more about writing by actually writing and you learn more about what you want, tool-wise, the more than you blog because you'll actually know the tooling and feature-set(s) or and the lackthereof!

a lot of people "shop" around for a while and i think that's precious time wasted.

again, i've been writing for a long time, so, i can talk about pretty much any topic (and may have written something about it).

ernest hemingway once said:

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

it's the same now as it was then.

i give this some more thoughts here.

finally, to answer your question about why i blog... here you go.

I use Gatsby + AWS Amplify. It has this awesome CI/CD pipeline that basically configured itself after I posted the project over on Github and connected the branch. I have both a staging and a production branch so I can test everything out before making it live.

1. What do I use to blog?
   https://www.willeder.us/u/pritesh/

2. Why I decided to go for it?
   I feel like we are a generation that doesn't like to sit for hours on end. Moreover, it can be pretty difficult to compile all the fragments of updates about the blog from notes app, slack, discord or just any other platform.

But blogs help provide context and people can have a deeper understanding of how/why someone tried something. Willeder makes it easy for me to just micro-blog updates about a certain experience. Collectively these updates become a story about that experience and showing many experiences together helps me share a complete narrative as well.

Gatsby with Strapi!!

1. Statmic
2. I use Laravel and Statmic runs on Laravel
3. Stamic now offers a static site generator and can deploy to Netlify. I love how easy this is and wanted a cms, it was a no brainer. Best part is that it is a flat file markdown system.

We use Hugo (https://gohugo.io) for both blogs and static sites. I started using it in my day job and thought is was a super clean way of creating static sites.

• Full control of all HTML, CSS and JS
• Lightning fast and cheap hosting (we deploy it on S3 with CloudFront)
• Markdown
• Easy version git version control
• Secure (completely static = nothing to break into)

• No plugins like in WordPress for example

1. jekyll, hosted on gitlab pages (for free)
2. ran into it years ago on github (as it powered github pages) / intrigued by static site generators as they were fairly new at the time
3. extremely flexible, great community and plugins, familiar syntax (ruby, liquid, markdown) / builds can be on the slow side depending on the number of pages you have, my blog is over 600 posts so it's noticeable. with that, i looked into hugo just the other day and while faster, the barrier of entry to learn a new system (especially since my theme didn't automagically convert over) was a bit too much for me

I'm using wordpress despite it being heavyweight because I've worked with it before and it was free. I may move away from it eventually though, I'm having to tweak the design a lot to get it in a way that I like and its kind of annoying.

I'm using Medium because of the nice formatting and built-in community. But I've also heard it's better SEO practice to host the blog on your own domain.

Anyone have thoughts on this point as well?

I'm using https://ghost.org/ for my blog: https://serversncode.com/

It got a really great writing experience so it makes it easy to do. It's great for blogging, lets me just get on with writing and publishing and I don't have to configure a lot of moving parts.

I started it as a way to pass on things I have learned as I build things, also a great way to remember things I keep forgetting to do. I've lost track of the amount of times I've searched for something and my own blog has come up in the first page to remind me I've done that before.

I use Wordpress, self hosted on Digital Ocean. I was skeptical of something so “heavy weight” for a long time and consequently used many different other tools and services. But none of them can compare to the ecosystem of themes, plugins, tools, and support that’s available for Wordpress. It’s very easy to maintain as well and auto updates itself.

I built https://app.wftutorials.com/ because I though no one was handling coding blogs properly and I wanted pop up comments. (thought it was a cool way of handling more content). But I also use wordpress.org for another blog that I have. Low cost and overhead. But I've never gotten code snippets to work properly there unless you embed a gist. Great for general blogging though.

I'm using a free wordpress blog at the moment; I use the iPad write to publish since it is very easy to use and has less distractions than doing it through the browser. For some time I used https://ghost.org/

I use Proseful by Jonathan Sutherland @sutherland

It's minimal and clean, the technical SEO is on point, and I'm not distracted by all the other bulk that blogs now-a-days come with.

https://proseful.com

I built https://versoly.com/ for a different niche but the blogging CMS is actually great to get started and later on you can customise it very easy.

It also has a page builder so you can create a nice looking home page and custom pages such as about.

If you're using it for just personal usage, message me and we can come up with a very good price :)

Recently wrote https://versoly.com/blog/lessons-learned-3-successful-product-hunt-launches because I kept getting asked the same questions.

Also if you're learning a lot sharing with us will also give you a deeper understanding of the topic.

I REALLY wanted to have a storycreatorapp.com/blog instead of blog.storycreatorapp.com

I chose Ghost.js as my platform and went with the hosted version to save time. I was paying $30 for a simple blog which was quite pricy IMO, to begin with. Then I found out I needed a business plan to use /blog which is something like $200 per month.

I found they have a JSON endpoint that is free to consume. Since I am using Next.js I just quickly pull in that data, built a UI, and have a blog working within my main app. Pretty smooth IMO.

Check it out here https://storycreatorapp.com/blog I need to post some more content :)

1. I use https://www.11ty.dev/
2. It is the hot new thing! In actuality, its main advantage is that was the easiest to use and configure. Especially if you have an existing site you want to migrate. If you use 11ty, you probably want to use it with https://mozilla.github.io/nunjucks/ as your templating engine. It supports a bunch of other engines, but it's clear that nunjucks is the preferred default.
3. The main downside of 11ty is that its community is much smaller. Its main upside is that is very easy to use, so you can figure out things yourself pretty quickly.

After a lot of research, I decided to go with Netlify CMS for the CMS (headless) and use Nuxt for the frontend part using the SSR mode for the SEO (tried Strapi CMS but didn't like because you need a separate backend a database to store your blog posts.

By using a frontend that I already know, I can extend at will in the future the blog as I want and might make it more than a blog, by for example having a page to promote my products etc.

Anything that can be used with Angular to build a personal blog site just like GatsbyJS works with React?