Hi there!
I'm wondering what's the best tech stack to run a blog smoothly. My main concerts are these:
Substanck is ok because it's free and the delivery through email is very good. Easy to use and straight to the point. However, has poor SEO capabilities.
Any good tool or combination of tools?
Thanks!
personally, I like wordpress. Its the true, tried, and tested. I recommend using a CDN (I personally use bunny CDN) to make it super fast!
Using wordpress motivated me to spend less time developing it (procrastinating) and just start putting out content.
Just use Ghost or WordPress and start writing. It's more important than the setup.
The best stack is the stack you're most familiar with.
If you know React you can blog in Gatsby and host on Netlify for free. The only cost is domain.
If you want CMS you can use Ghost, Contentful or Strapi. All have free and paid versions.
You can easily build great blog on Wordpress.
The right solution is familiar solution.
@sadamiak is right. I would add some extra point... If you are 100% sure it will only be a little blog without special functions, then you can use wordpress or another simple builder. But if you want to build a bigger project and want to be flexible, if the project grows. Then use something you know. You will save time later, when you develope new functions, where no plugin exists for. For me it was sometimes Cartalyst Platform, because I develope with Laravel/PHP. There are others like October CMS (also PHP/Laravel). If I build it for my own, I use these systems. If a customer asks, I think about using WP (only for small things), because customers often know wordpress and dont want or dont have time to learn other systems. So it depends on the project.
Exactly. There are so many great options, and the choice depends on your skillset and requirements.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this question recently, and decided to go with Ghost:
I've also got a personal blog on Netlify + NetlifyCMS + Gatsby which is way less nice to write on. And I've used Wordpress in the past.
Agreed. Ghost is an awesome software to start a blog or newsletter
How did you add it?
Most of the solutions out there require you to fork out $$ for email capture. I’m thinking of embedding Substack’s iframe.
I haven't added it yet so I don't know. That's worrying if you mostly need to pay...
Turns out I was mistaken.
The option to turn on a newsletter was not easily discoverable in the admin interface (Ghost v3.38.3). There’s also no direct mention of it in the 7 default help articles tagged under “Getting Started“—all of which I read before unpublishing them.
Plus, I did not know that Ghost was setup with a means of sending email via
nodemailer
. Ghost was impersonating my domain when sending me emails over SMTP, which of course all ended up in my spam folder.That's frustrating. But the option to turn on a newsletter is in there? I will be trying this out soon, so that's good to know.
Yep. While logged in to Ghost Admin, navigate from Labs → Members, then toggle the Enable members option
Ohhh, no way. I already saw that option and it was not at all obvious to me that it was about emails.
+1 to Ghost. As an alternative, we integrated Prismic into a next.js project to provide blog support to an existing funnel.
Ghost was on my shortlist.
I'm don't have technical skills to install it, but the cloud version could work.
I will take another look. ;)
Thanks for your recommendation!
I'd check out https://gloat.dev/ by @dr
I can do the favor for fellow indiehacker to installing ghost on a selfhost server or for a managed hosted version you can checkout my product https://spookey.io
I honestly think that you don't need amazing technical skills to follow the steps in the guide I mentioned. Unless it breaks!
challenge accepted! :P
Nice one! If things don't seem to work, feel free to email me at [email protected] and I'd be happy to help out.
Same here! Decided to use Ghost for https://blog.tally.so
Your blog has a reaaally nice clean theme - do you mind pointing me towards a link for it? Or is it custom-designed?
Update: whoa, Tally is cool! That editor is freakin' elegant!
Thanks Louis! Happy to hear that :-)
Sure, the template I used is a free one: https://iveel.co/ghost-themes/ease-ghost-theme
I removed the header image and adjusted the colors to our branding. How to install it: https://iveel.co/docs/ease-ghost-theme
I recently tried out Contentful as a headless CMS with a Gatsby site deployed on Netlify. Works nicely, super fast site (is static) and is 0 cost (both Contentful and Netlify have very generous free tiers).
Keep in mind if you have a million blog posts your build time will get out of wack but that's rare.
I'm using this stack at paytient.co/blog. It's free and easy to manage once set up. Would recommend this or a similar stack to folks familiar with React (Nextjs or Gatsby with any popular headless CMS hosted on Netlify or Vercel).
I prefer OctoberCMS instead of Ghost. Its very flexible and developer friendly. My website https://programmerspub.com/ is based on OctoberCMS, it works out of the box with few plugins and its highly customizable which will give your website a unique SEO advantage.
I use Easy WP by Namecheap. Basically a managed wordpress offering by them and is quite cheap https://www.namecheap.com/wordpress/easywp-less-like-work/.
let me tell you honestly, if you are not a tech geek, go with wordpress. nobody can match it with right now. If you are tech savvy, ghost will be okay, using paywall in a self hosted ghost is pain in the asses. It need third-party integration. Ghost has limited themes and major headache is any change in theme need recombilation every time.
We also use Ghost and seem to be working really well with SEO. It is open source, but we decided to pay because maintaining servers and updates isn't really free.
Wordpress is well established and has almost infinite extensibility with a ridiculous library of existing plugins to help you get what you need to done.
The #1 most important thing regardless of platform is content.
If you'd like I may be able to help with that 😁 ... Contentkoala.com
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Thank you for such a good list of tips and tools!
I think I'm going to try the paid version of Ghost. 🤔
Yesss, I know someone will think that I can install something myself, other would prefer Wordpress... But with the info that I have I think I'm comforable trying Ghost, because the features and SEO seems quite good, and the paid version will help me with my lack of tech skills.
Give luck!
Blogger.
Because you have nothing to do.
I some how consider Substack is a place for blog. I quite enjoy its hybrid of landing page and newsletter deliver feature. Currently writing here. I usually drive traffic from referral and social media like twitter & linkedin.
I also vote for WordPress:
COST: Free
SEO: Adding AMP is trivial, Yoast SEO is the best tool in the industry
Delivery: Cloudflare (also free) will help you there
Substanck is a much cooler name
Affordable ($35/m)
Great for SEO
Has built-in newsletter and you can take payments with Stripe
Has anyone here had any (good?) experience with Grav? It’s a flat-file CMS that’s supposed to be big on performance.
Yeah, I've build a blog with Grav. It's okay but doesn't have many built-in SEO optimizations.