What is your blog stack?

I would consider using the hosted offerings from Ghost with your own custom domain. The custom domain part is important because you want that control and search engine mojo.

https://ghost.org

Spending time fidgeting with blog code doesn't make money or move your business forward. (Even though it's fun 😜)

Ghost will also encourage you to not waste time while writing too. It limits you to using Markdown so that you focus on content rather than styling h3s

If you really want to do some coding you can make your own Ghost theme.

I've finally settled on #2 - static generator (in my case I use Pelican, which is a static site generator powered by Python). I tried starting the project with Wordpress, but on the whole something like Pelican / Hugo / Jekyll gives me much more flexibility in terms of deciding how the page should look, and to make it match my website or app. Host it with Github or Netlify and I'm ready to go. For comments I can just use Disqus and for forms, there are lots of solutions like Formspree.

I sold literally millions of dollars of products using Wordpress.

After 8 years, we finally hit the limits of what was reasonable to do with WP and implemented a static site with nanoc + custom enhancements. -> https://stackingthebricks.com/unicornfree-is-dead/

For you… every hour you waste on fiddling with blog stuff up front is going to reduce your future income ;)

Sorry to hear you had a bad experience with Wordpress. It can definitely be a hassle to get started if you're not familiar with it but I'd really consider giving it another shot.

My blogging stack is Wordpress, The Yoast SEO Plugin and Disqus for comments. Wordpress is one of my favorites for blogging because it's great for SEO, offers plenty of customization and is open-source. Whether you want a simple theme or something that is more complex, the options are plentiful.

Short on time?

Grab a theme from ThemeForest.net for $5-$15, hire a developer on Upwork to install it along with an SSL cert on your site and you will be good to go within an hour or two. It will cost you less than a good night out with friends.

One of the other reasons why I love Wordpress is because it's owned by you. In comparison to Medium, you're running the risk of hosting your content on someone else's platform. Medium is easy to use but similar to the way that Facebook can change their algorithm and wipe out an entire media company - one adjustment to Mediums vision and your contents reach could reduce.

On top of that, from what I've seen Google doesn't give your site any recognition for a blog that lives on Medium.com. Meaning, if people are visiting your blog and linking to posts, your main site will not benefit from this as it relates to SEO.

I always go with WordPress because of the easiness to setup, host, and maintain.

Finding the right theme was always a problem for me. Recently, I switched all of my websites to GeneratePress theme. They are fast af compared to any other WP themes out there and probably the most easily customizable theme I've come across. Haven't seen as dedicated support as theirs.

Hosting WP sites are easy too.

The whole process takes me anywhere between 30-120 minutes, setting up the hosting (I use quickinstall to install WP, time taken: 2 minutes), installation of a few plugins that I require (time taken: 5 minutes) and setting up GeneratePress (time taken 30-100 minutes for the first time). I can easily export all the settings for the GP theme once I install it, so I don't have to spend time to customize for each website.

I am not affiliated with GeneratePress but I highly recommend you check that out. I've become a fan of their product(s).

I currently run my blog on my most minimalistic setup ever: a static site built using Hugo, hosted on Netlify. In addition to be minimal, it's also blazing fast, with a global CDN and it's completely free until you get over 100GB in monthly traffic.

I create my blog posts using Markdown, and I simply do a Git push to publish them, it's a huge productivity boost to just being a git commit away from publishing something.

Netlify also allows you to add forms to static sites, even though opt-in forms for email marketing are more nicely handled using ConvertKit thanks to its automation features.

I wrote about my Netlify hosting setup yesterday on https://flaviocopes.com/netlify/ if you are curious about it.

I'm using wordpress + beaverbuilder. It's not the lightest solution but it lets met play around with different page layouts without writing HTML.

Using Disqus for comments plus a couple of other various plugins.

I'm a dev so I'll be using Gatsby.js + markdown files for my blog.

This isn't that much more effort than starting a WordPress blog from scratch and it has more benefits for me.

1. I don't have to use wordpress
2. wordpress maintenance is absurd. You have to update plugins every month just so your website doesn't totally break.
3. I can have total control of every pixel on the page, don't have to use page builders to create my site.
4. It's faster, more secure, and more enjoyable to work with.
5. Working with markdown files is imo the best way to present blog posts and anything long form.

There is Wordpress, and then there is Wordpress.Com. :) I think that self-hosting the best choice for a software developer. You get much more control over things like email. I used the Wordpress stack with some choice plugins for developers (Crayon). I also wanted an excuses to play with the PHP/HTML5/CSS3 tools a bit so that I could fathom web development. I did just enough to know that I don't want to do more! 🤣

http://mikejfromva.com

I am quite happy with my jekyll template I optimized for SEO: https://pawelurbanek.com/jekyll-seo-template

Can you elaborate what are potential limitations of static pages generator ?

Medium is far from perfect solution. You can check out my blog post on it: https://pawelurbanek.com/medium-blogging-platform-seo

I'm using a static site generator (gutenberg) and I also re-publish on Medium, to reach more people.

PS. See here for the best way to do re-publish btw https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/217991468-SEO-and-duplicate-content

If you have development experience, Wordpress + docker makes things pretty simple. If you use the official Wordpress docker image, the only thing you have access to is a themes folder and a plugins folder. Drop your theme in, start docker & 🎉

I built the simplest theme I could for my blog - literally starting with an empty folder and adding the necessary files until I had something that displayed my posts.

I recommend the WebFlow. You can customize the CMS feature to best suit you.

I have read and listened about how cool the static site generators are. In fact, I am planning to take a couple for test drive. However, my CMS of choice for blogs, and client sites, is WordPress.

I am working with WP since the version 1.5, have built and customized dozens of sites using this great software.

Handlebars.js templates + a few hundreds lines of code because existing static generators are too complex. But I don't have and don't plan to have categories or tags or automatic pagination.

I have used Wordpress quite a bit over the years. My personal site still uses it with a free barebones theme.

If you go this route, beware of the fancy themes with page builders. They are full of security bugs. A recent site of mine running a premium theme was hacked.

I have recently started exploring hugo, and I have started building a landing page theme based on indiehackers podcast episode 17.

https://github.com/tvmaly/hugo-emaillist-theme

I would highly recommend a static site for performance and security. My only challenge now is to find an easy way to edit. In an ideal world I would be able to do something like the medium mobile app.

I made the switch from Wordpress to Jekyll a few years ago and am very satisfied. Wordpress was big and hefty for all I wanted it for. Static site generator made sense and I settled on Jekyll due to the GitHub Pages integration.

Stack includes:

• Jekyll
• GitHub Pages
• Disqus
• Cloudflare
• Google Analytics

I wrote about the migration here.
https://www.leemunroe.com/moving-wordpress-dreamhost-to-jekyll-github/

I use Ghost - https://ghost.org for my company blog and also have a personal presence on Medium.

Having something on Medium - maybe your own blog, or a <your company team> page is good because of the SEO benefits - having a few backlinks in from such a high domain-authority site is a good thing.

Try stdlog.net my minimal blogging project with markdown support.

I just went through the setup of WP blog on AWS with SSL & CloudFront CDN. My first post is about all the setup stuff and some lessons learned https://algosforcryptos.com/2018/02/13/low-cost-wordpress-aws-ssl-cloudfront/

I use CraftCMS on my blog. I am a designer/developer and gives me the best flexibility. You can check out one of my blog designs here: https://wearekit.com/journal/10-ways-to-kill-a-landing-page

Take a peek at forestry.io - static site generator with some good guys working hard on the platform.

The company blog is currently on Ghost, and we occasionally cross-post on Medium. (There’s an import tool in Medium that imports your post and uses canonical links to ensure your original post gets indexed in search.) As our company needs scale, however, we’re looking into more robust CMSs.

Ghost is a great starting point because it’s a lightweight CMS, but if you’d rather not deal with a database, a static site generator isn’t a bad choice. As your company’s content requires change or scale, you can revisit migrating to a more robust CMS (like WP) which has a lot of functionality that improves navigability.

I started blogging on http://sett.com/ which promised to increase readership but I lost interest in blogging. It's still an interesting site to host in.

My blog stack is static html files that I copy and paste to change the content of, its hosted on github pages.

I was using medium, but decided it’s time to take things to my own domain without medium holding the keys, so to speak

My first venture was a digital marketing agency and we worked on many projects that were started on wordpress. I have had fantastic results from Wordpress it is just fantastic when it comes to marketing. It definitely can be a pain to get setup but its worth dropping small few notes to get someone to do it for you. Marketing may not be on your radar from day one, but once you start trying to figure our how you are going to drive traffic to your blog then you will be thankful that you used wordpress. It is fantastic for SEO, I've also used Squarespace which looks great but I found it sucks at SEO. Also with workpress you have fantastic social sharing plugins. For example 'Click to Tweet' lets readers tweet quotes from your blog posts. Small growth hacks like this can drive traffic and boost engagement.

Since 2001, I have used something of my own creation called the "Presentation Engine". The current version has been rewritten from the ground up to use c#, ASP.NET Core 2.0 and sqlite.

https://github.com/jaylittle/presentation-engine/

I have worked with wordpress and ghost in lat 4 years. Ghost is great if you want fast implementation, minimal design. Hosting a blog on a subdomain though is costlier

Wordpress is the weapon of choice with almost infinite customisation possibilities and integrations with 100+ top apps/platforms. Needs lot of dev help to customize themes though.

Wordpress Community is much larger, support from community is amazing

Medium blog with a custom domain. However, Medium recently did away with the custom domain feature so you can't get a custom domain anymore unless you already have one. I think they've lost their way. They went from being the best blogging platform to one of the worst by removing one feature.

Hugo + Netlify. I like static websites for their speed and also because there are far fewer potential security flaws than when using something like WordPress which is backed by a database.

Also, as a developer, I like being able to use Git for keeping history as well as using GitHub or BitBucket for automatic deployment of the website.

WRT Netlify, I blogged previously about some of the reason why I like them.

I am using GatsbyJS + AWS Route53/CloudFront/S3 + JustComments (https://just-comments.com/) for comments. GatsbyJS is a static site generator based on React.

I use Wordpress plus BeaverBuilder hosted on AWS Lightsail.

I used to use WordPress cos it was what I knew. I've since fallen in love with Jekyll.

Wordpress is what I've been doing so far though not completely happy...adding code and LaTeX to the blog is still ugly/problematic (my personal blog is mostly on physics so would love pretty math and matrices without just doing it in LaTeX and taking screenshots)

I've tried a few of those too and had similar problems. Here are a couple of platforms I've used that worked quite well for me:

• https://gohugo.io - I've only really tinkered with this but is really cool
• https://grabaperch.com/ - A lot of functionality but also super simple if you're a PHP fan.
• http://get-simple.info/ - It's not that heavily updated and has been around for some time but I love how hackable it is if you're a PHP developer.

Hey Kirill, I use Medium for the blog and Gatsby.js for the doc. The rationale for me is that Medium makes it easier to get readers as you can take advantage of the existing network.

I'm mentioning Gatsby here because this is what I would have used otherwise. If you're familiar with React I'd recommend checking it out.

Medium seems quite ok for our current needs at https://keybin.io app. Even that the design is simple and minimalistic, most of the common features are in place in order to have a decent blog.
If you want to use source code formatted in your blog post, you can import it from github , codepen etc: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/224550008-Code-blocks-inline-code

A static generator written in Python named Hyde: http://hyde.github.io/

It's unmaintained for years so I would not recommend it and I actually do need to migrate to something else when times will permit.

I host the rendered pages on Amazon S3 + CloudFront and Disqus for comments.