Anyone have any recommendations for Blog software?
I was considering for a while just using a mastodon instance as my blog because I just kinda wanna sign in and upload my papers that I’ve written. I was pretty close with Hugo. I’d rather not have to build the site everytime I upload and I want to self host and not use Github actions. I think I still could do it since I like using Cloudflared tunnels.
What is all out there?
Ghost, Hugo, Jekyll…etc. all the same ones you’ll probably find by searching around.
Ghost is probably the most fleshed out if you’re looking for guardrails and a UI.
Simple means different things to different people.
I self-host Ghost and find it pleasant to use and low maintenance. It is a single Docker container plus MySQL. I recommend a reverse proxy in front of it like Nginx. There are importers from many other blog formats.
If you want to try again with Hugo, you can self host forgejo and let it build Hugo on your server when you commit, then serve that HTML
Whack. I just set up a Forgejo too.
I’ve had good luck with Jekyll, saving the source on github, and setting it up so pushing to main auto-deploys to a Cloudflare site. Using Markdown and for larger media, uploading to S3.
Much easier to set up and maintain than github pages. Since it’s static output, pretty snappy. Also includes RSS feeds and permanent URLs.
Have also set up several Wordpress sites. Slower, but if you want wysiwyg editing, user comments, or there are several contributors, would work better.
Have also heard good things about ghost, but haven’t actually deployed one yet.
I ended up with Hugo, a git repository, and a cron job for the build. I write an article, check it in, the server picks up the git change and rebuilds the site. What I like about the setup is that the server only has the binaries hugo and git, and a shell script for the rebuild. Also, I write in Markdown, add media to the git repository, and articles are published soon after I check in without any remoting on my part.
I did look at WriteFreely after the setup, though. I find the minimalist design very beautiful. Didn’t switch to it, but may look at it again for another project. https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely
Haven’t seen it mentioned yet, but zola is great. It’s a static site generator in a single binary, and it includes RSS feed generation. Been using it for my blog for a while.
