What is the best blogging platform for self hosters?

Any opinions on the best platform for dev-friendly blogging?

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I’m a huge fan of static site generators, nothing faster, can host it on a calculator, lol.

My usual ones are purely self-made, but I use Nikola on one of my things. There are a LOT of them though since they are so easy to build.

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I’ll be interested in the answers to this too as I still use… WordPress :joy:

It’s definitely better than what it used to be.

Do you mean this Nikola?

I think the reason I have kept with Wordpress is because I don’t want to lose my comments - would be great if there was something out there specifically targeting Wordpress users with a decent important feature…

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I have been using ghost recently but I do prefer static site generators. I have tried quite a few of them such as gatsby, hugo, nuxt, etc… But I have never found one that totally suits me. We have been using prember at work with great success, so I will be reaching for that the next time I need a site.

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Since I was in the core team for some time, I can only recommend Bolt. I especially like how it handles content and doesn’t force you into a specific way of organisation (e.g. concepts like posts and pages in WordPress).

I also created my own static site generator in Elixir named Fryse. It’s far from feature complete and I mostly just work during Hacktoberfest on it because I do not do much coding in my free time currently.

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Yep yep!

I don’t have comments on almost all my static site pages. ^.^;

Yeah that’s my issue, hence why I just keep repeatedly writing them from scratch… >.>

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Oh hey, speaking of static site generators, apparently there’s a book for Hugo here:

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I’ve heard a lot about Hugo! Definitely need to give it a closer look :nerd_face:

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IMO, if you’re a dev you don’t really need a platform or a framework. If you’re on Linux, you would probably manage just fine with a makefile that uses pandoc (with a template) to convert your content to HTML5, hand-written CSS, and rsync to upload everything to a host like nearlyfreespeech.net or Dreamhost.

Hell, I once built a static site generator on OpenBSD 6.6 that used nothing but tools provided in the base install: ed, make, m4, grep, and openrsync. Here’s the repo if you’re curious.

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I really like the Jekyll concept to do blogging. No database necessary.

Just host a bunch of .md files in Github pages and start writing!

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Jekyll is very popular, also because the Github integration. I wish Github would make it possible to have the same for other static site generators as it is kinda unfair to all the Jekyll alternatives.

What I do not like about Jekyll is it’s strict concept about being a blogging tool, with support for normal pages as well. I little bit more freedom would be nice.

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GatsbyJS is easier for bootstrapping based on different themes and multiple nodejs libraries can be easily integrated. This provides pluggable structure and if you’re comfortable with ReactJS, then definitely this can save you a lot of effort and time.

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I really like HUGO for the following reasons:

What I am excited about is the upcoming (soon…) Notion.so API which I hope I can use to write articles in Notion and publish it to my custom blog. (There are unofficial APIs out there but you know…)

https://github.com/dashbitco/nimble_publisher is also a cool project which I have to try out

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Using the pandoc tool with makefiles makes for a really good setup actually, pandoc is quite useful for applying settings and templates and all.

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I will always go for static site generators, but if you want something dynamic I would go for Ghost. It’s like a new and much improved Wordpress

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Right no my blog runs on Jekyll but I’m switching to Publish at the moment because I know Swift better than Ruby.

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I am going to plug soupault: https://soupault.neocities.org/

I like this approach of static site generators where you have more control over page layout and what format you are writing in. In fact here you basically have full control as it doesn’t impose any structure. This gives me freedom to just write.

I contributed the preprocess_element widget which allows me to run any part of the html file through an external program. I can embed diagrams by writing digraphs straight in the html. I can get server-side syntax highlighting by running the code through highlight. I can even embed latex and run it through pandoc.

For me, this is awesome. I don’t have to be forced into a page structure I don’t like. I don’t have to care about templates and variables. I can just write content of any sort and transform it into nice static pages. No bloat, I know exactly what is going on behind the scenes.

I build the content through a normal Makefile and also written a small watcher bash script using inotify tools to automatically compile on save.

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