Hi,
I’m looking into hosting a blog site for myself - nothing fancy, just a site where I can publish some of my thoughts and ideas. Maybe I also want a section to publish images. So, basically something lean and mostly text only.
What’s the easiest way to set this up for myself?
I really like hugo. Everything is written in Markdown and its pretty light. Definitely not as heavy as a full CMS. I also think the themes are pretty nice.
To deploy it you can use github pages or some cloud services (the hugo site lists some).
Its also pretty flexible, so its pretty easy to change how you want to deploy it, or change the look.
I also recommend a static site builder- you dont have to fuss with database or security, you can host with a simple http server, and it’s easy to work with. Hugo, Jekyll, etc
Yeah, I’ve been paying $5 (or is it $10?) a month for my Ghost blog on a digital ocean droplet. It’s not worth it, my plan is to move to a static site generator (probably CloudFront -> S3 deployed via GitHub actions in a private repo) at some point. The features of Ghost don’t really matter to me and I hate maintaining the install/updating. Ghost feels like it’s moved more into “self-hosted substack”-territory which I have zero interest in, my blog posts are all public. Also, you can’t hack static files so security isn’t a worry with SSG which is super nice.
Not sure which SSG I’ll go with, when I was younger I would have written my own but now I’ll just pick something off the shelf that has nice themes lol.
WordPress?
I do that. I have WordPress.org with classic editor enabled and the raw html plugin. Use a classic layout like twenty twelve if you don’t want the fancy effects. Look for a host that has softaculous or something similar to automate the installation. My host charges about £60 pa with unlimited bandwidth.
You can also use WordPress.com for free but it has Gutenberg, which I absolutely cannot bear. Some people like it though. It’s also less customisable.
Yeah the infamous block editor. As an old skool hand-coder, I can’t stand it. You have to manually enable classic editing each time on WordPress.com otherwise it defaults to the Gutenberg editor. I heard it’s improved somewhat recently, but when I first used it it was the biggest load of crap, worse than the beep beep boop one, which was at least useable. It was both dumbed down and unintuitive at the same time.
At least on a .org installation, classic editor disables Gutenberg completely.
I believe Gutenberg is a visual editor that WordPress uses, it has buttons that let you insert blocks throughout the page I think
With a static site generator you can host it for free with Cloudflare Pages.
