What setup are you using blogging?
Hi there, hope everyone is doing fine.
I know this question has been asked a lot of times but I wanted some new answers. What blog stack are you using and would suggest in terms of:
- Ease of Access (easy posts upload along with images and other content, basically a good CMS).
- Low Maintenence (setup and forget).
- Modern/relevant tech stack(built on ReactJS if possible).
- Low pricing (Because being lean is good).
What I have heard till now is:
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Ghost: Seems good. But you need a server instance running it. Also if you want to create a custom site with NextJS or GatsbyJS you will need to use API calls to your Ghost server.
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Hugo: Static site generator. It seems a little old. It doesn't have a CMS afaik.
-
Contentful: High customization. But high pricing and a lot of setup.
Right now, I am leaning towards Ghost and thinking about running on AWS EC2 instance. What are your thoughts on it and how would you rank these?
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GatsbyJS!
Basically you only pay your custom domain and that's it.
My blog uses this stack along with TailwindCSS.
+1 to Gatsby.
Although, sometimes I think it's a little overkill, and it provides too much abstraction for things that should be relatively easy to do. I am also hosting my Gatsby project on Netlify.
Whoa! Same here with AWS Amplify. Using MDX to markdown my posts is really cool!
👆 I'm with this guy.
Except, I host on AWS Amplify instead of Netlify, but that's really a detail...
Doubling down on Gatsby, haven't put much time into styling it yet https://blog.portabella.io
I'm also importing all my posts to Medium, not sure how much benefit there is to doing that though
@Nicolas_ looks great. The contentful pricing looks a little high. How much are you paying for it rn?
Also, I love tailwind and how easy it is to use.
Actually they have a very generous free tier, I don’t think I’m ever going to hit the limit and start paying.
I agree. Gatsby is simple and quick to use. I have it on my personal blog as well. There are a lot of boilerplates available to get started.
I am using Publii (https://getpublii.com/) and upload to Netlify.
Very simple and free setup! Since Publii builds static files its also way faster (and more secure) than Ghost or Wordpress. You can use Publii locally on your pc/mac to build the files and it is way simpler than Gatsby or Hexo to setup and run.
This setup allows you to write blogs in a nice editor (like Medium or Ghost), but outputs just simple html/static files that you can host for free on Netlify/Github Pages or Vercel.
I would recommend staying away from anything where you have to touch code. Even though I am a developer myself but your time should go into the product and not setting up blogs.
Watch out that your blog is hosted at ww.yoursite.com/blog and not on blog.yoursite.com as this is important for SEO and I see many people here missing that.
I like this point, its very important... how many hours I wasted tweaking things instead of doing something important. That is issue only devs face because of the confidence that we can fix code, instead of utilizing our time well we jump into code without realizing the value of time.
To argue in favor of a coding alternative, I must say that you learn a lot by making a blog from scratch with React or your favorite stack. At least it's been the case for me. It's a safe space where you know you can experiment with something new every day. Of course, I agree that you can waste time too.
http://versoly.com/ starts at $15 (we're changing pricing soon to include unlimited blog posts)
We have analytics built-in.
Soon we will have popups so you can collect emails at a higher rate.
For example I added a simple exit popup to https://saaspages.xyz/ and 300% my conversion rate.
If you can't afford $15, Ghost on https://www.digitalocean.com/ is very easy i believe and you can even get free credits.
I always look forward to your reply @volkandkaya. Versoly is great and I might use it in my future projects.
Getting better everyday :)
If you OK with not having a full fledged CMS and know how to write markdown I think, Hugo+Github-pages can help and that too for free.
+1 for this!
I recently switched from GatsbyJS to NextJS. I think the combination of NextJS + Vercel (formerly Zeit) for deployment is the easiest setup I've ever worked with. It's also completely free if you're deploying from a personal git repo.
NextJS can integrate with any CMS much like Gatsby can. You basically write a function to pre-render a page. I'm using markdown that's in a content folder in the git repo as my CMS. It's simple but it works pretty well.
The downside compared to Gatsby is I don't think themes and starters are a supported part of the ecosystem. I'm using tailwind and built it all from scratch. If you're going to customize the look and feel, I find it easier to start without a theme.
Why did you decide to switch from Gatsby to Next?
In short, it was the release of this: https://nextjs.org/blog/next-9-3#next-gen-static-site-generation-ssg-support
When they launched 9.3, it made it so you could easily implement server-rendered pages and static-rendered pages all in the same project. It eliminates the decision fatigue of "will I ever need server-rendering?"
I've also found that there is just a lot less configuration to deal with since switching. It's been such a good experience all around I don't think I'll go back.
Thanks for the reply, this is helpful. I've been working with Gatsby for a couple of months now, and there are definitely times when the learning curve is a bit frustrating. But when I look at Next.js I feel like the SSG capabilities are too bare-bones at this time. I really like Gatsby plugins for things like image optimization, sourcing/transforming markdown, adding PWA features like manifest and offline support. But I definitely have my eye on Next.js and seeing how it develops.
I am too using this setup for my personal blog. But for some clients, it can be a bit too techy. :P
Yeah! Totally agree with this. People say that no-code is the future. They are probably right.
But there is a huge cost advantage right now to be able to build and deploy your own sites.
Ghost on a $5 per month Digital Ocean droplet. I used their 1 click install, was a pain to setup the email system that ghost uses though. Had to setup mailgun.
We are about to launch our own Headless CMS with a SaaS Backend in the next few days.
You don't have to worry about anything, the infrastructure is on AWS, we have security integrations and CDN distribution for the contents.
Our static HTML layout with CSS (TailwindCSS) and content is served via a ready-to-use API ... so you could do a lot more with them in the future.
And if you don't have a blog design yet, we can give away our free template similar to marketingexamples.com, intercom.com/blog/, among other similar ones with great email conversion.
All this for a monthly fee of $ 20.
If you find it interesting, please can you let me know right here. :-)
Cheers!
I almost forgot, if your blog performance doesn't come close to the best scores, we'll refund your money. :-D
I went with Jekyll, but wish I had used Gatsby :(
I'm running my personal blog on Imprint. It's a hosted social solution similar to Medium, but with custom domain support, built in email subscriptions, analytics, and more control over content ownership.
It's designed to have a 1 minute setup process/0 maintenance, so you can just start writing. And it's totally free as of now!
I use
Hosted on Vercel, for free.
I could use a 3rd party headless CMS, but for the time, I'm fine just hosting the blog posts in the local directory and pushing to master each time I have a new blog post or update. Vercel will then automatically pick it up and deploy to my custom domain.
Love it so far.
Netlify CMS + front end: Hexo or Gatsby
Easy setup, configurable, free. Need I say more?
This is one of the blogs. This one built with Hexo.
Whether hexo or gatsby I pick a starter theme and modify quite heavily. Then add the CMS.
I sometimes use this same setup for sites that are not even blogs. It just depends on if the content will be mainly textual, master-detail layout; then I go for this setup.
All in all I think I have about 5 projects that are setup this way and they are all free.
You can put your hugo repo in github and use the github editor, which is what I do for one of my programming blog.
Or Netlify CMS is another alternative (I haven't used it though).
Depending on the project:
My personal site is a simple custom made static site generator. In reality just a bunch of tools and scripts glued together.
disclaimer: i do Grav and Wordpress consulting
Wordpress!
For my blog I use Gridsome. As far as I understand it is very similar to GatsbyJS, but instead of React it is built on top of Vuejs.
git pushand you are done.Yes, it's kind of the equivalent of NextJS blogs but in VueJS. I like Vue but I love React more:P
GatsbyJS + Prismic
I'm using it for the blog & documentation on my project : www.churni.io
@Nicolas_ @vaibhavThevedi @volkandkaya @MrAtiebatie @rywils21 @bigben. I was thinking of creating a twitter thread with this result. If you are ok with it, I would like to mention your handles. Let me know your twitter handles in that case.
Sure! My twitter handle is @rywils21
Sure, why not! My twitter is @vaibhavthevedi
Yeah sure good idea :) my twitter handle is @sjorsvdongen
Of course!
My handle is @NicolasRacchi
I personally use Contentful for the Knowledge Base of targetaudience.app. And I love Contentful! The editor is amazing and even with the free plan you have more than enough space to do all your blogging for a while. Once you hit the limits I hope you make enough money to cover the costs ;-)
And I find it an advantage that it's headless.
What front-end stack do you use?
Nuxt.js (Vue.js). I love Vue.js. I started using Nuxt recently and I’m not the biggest fan yet. They offer some structure in your project. However, the documentation is quite poor and the nuxt-community plugins are terrible imho.
Here's our blog / website stack:
This set up works for us because we're all Ruby developers here, and so we all already speak the same language. We used to run things behind Nginx on Digital Ocean, but found that Cloudflare Workers (static site) did the same thing, and was fast (<400 ms load for entire site).
I don't use Ruby so no idea. But I've heard good things about Ruby and gems.!
Have you tried ButterCMS? It's a headless CMS with a preconfigured blog engine, so you don't have to spend time building one (or if you want to customize one you can do that too). Butter is headless so all maintenance of the CMS is done for you. It has support for React so you can plug in a blog and be up and running in minutes. It is a SaaS product and the blog plan starts at $49/month, unless this is for your personal blog then ButterCMS has free developer plans for you!
Substack
It allows me to write articles easily + also sends the published article to my email list.
Have a look at it here: https://booksummaries.substack.com/p/book-summary-02-advertising-secrets
why not use IH?!
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/3-ways-to-use-indie-hackers-as-a-project-product-blog-f6fc367485
it's working!
Can you compare the pros and cons you have encountered till now?
the pros is that it's simple.
there have been zero cons. true story.
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