this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Recommended Blogging Platforms in 2023? (self.experienced_devs)
submitted 1 year ago by dannymcgee to c/experienced_devs
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I'm looking to spin up a new personal website, after leaving my current one languishing for 5 years without an update. I built that one mainly to facilitate my transition from WordPress development to modern SPA engineering, but it's kind of onerous to update since it's not backed by a CMS, and the codebase is... well, it's a first-attempt SPA built by a WordPress dev. :)

The new one will serve a similar purpose (I'm looking to transition into gamedev), but the challenges are a little different this time around — all of my work over the past five years has been on internal or otherwise not publicly available software, so I can't really show a thumbnail collage of my recent projects. All of my personal, gamedev-related projects are in various states of unreleased or unfinished WIP, and they're all individual features or systems intended to slot into a bigger project that doesn't exist yet, so I also can't really throw any playable demos up on itch.io or whatever.

So I'm thinking that the best way to showcase my knowledge/skillset this time around would be with a blog, where I can talk about some of the nascent projects I've been working on, the challenges I've encountered and how I'm approaching them, etc.

However, it's been a long time since I've published an actual website, so to get started I'm trying to get acquainted with what the ecosystem looks like for this sort of thing in 2023. All of my domains are currently at Google, so I'm thinking about giving SquareSpace a try (since they've recently purchased Google Domains).

The pros for SquareSpace, as I see it currently:

  • Pretty painless initial setup (besides agonizing over which template to use)
  • Some flexibility to grow into it and customize to my needs over time, though I haven't deeply investigated this yet
  • Zero time spent thinking about hosting or server-side whatever

The big con:

  • Totally closed-source, walled-garden type of ecosystem, so if I wanted to migrate eventually I would need to mostly start over from scratch.

I'm tempted to spin up something fully custom, so I can choose my own tech stack from top to bottom. But the major downside of that is that I would need to spin up something fully custom and decide on a tech stack from top to bottom. As fun as that sounds, I kind of doubt it would be the most valuable use of my time right now. It would also force me to think about things like hosting and server configuration which I have no enthusiasm for. I'd really like to get something off the ground within the next few days, so I can start writing content this week.

Any recommendations? Options I haven't considered? Good or bad experiences to share? Any success/horror stories about SquareSpace in particular?

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[–] canpolat 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Disclaimer: I'm not an expert on this at all (I don't have a blog either).

Have you considered using static site generators (Jekyll, Hugo, Gridsome, Pelican, etc.)? Both Gitlab and Github support custom domains? I suppose you can set up a pipeline (Github Action) to convert and publish your markdown files into the blog. You don't need to think about hosting at all. And you have all of your content in plain text files in a Git repository.

[–] StudioLE 4 points 1 year ago

I also came with the intent to recommend static site generation.

Hugo is pretty easy to grasp and Netlify or Render really simplify hosting/automated build on pushing to GitHub. Cloudflare Pages might be worth a look too but I've no personal experience with that.

[–] nickel 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Came here to say exactly this.

I was going through these motions a few months back and bearblog was a top choice of mine. However, after doing a little more research, I found Hugo and a hugo-bearblog template. Combined with Github hosting I'm able to get the power of bearblog, but a lot more control over it. I'm free to take the entire thing anywhere I want, and it's all under my own domain.

Separately, I had originally tried Jekyll, but I found the install process to be cumbersome. I pegged it as being a ruby-based install. I loved being able to just brew install hugo and having it just work from the get-go.

[–] dannymcgee 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

That's definitely an option that's on the table! But it comes with more questions, like:

  • Which static-generation framework / templating language to use?
  • How customizable are these things? I need support for YouTube embedding and syntax-highlighted code snippets at a minimum — preferably, I'd like to be able to customize the syntax highlighting, and I'll likely need some less common "block" types as well, like math notation

I would kind of like to support comments as well, but for that it might be better to just post the blog links to Lemmy and link to the corresponding Lemmy thread at the end of the post.

[–] josejfernandez 6 points 1 year ago

I think if you can achieve what you want with HTML, CSS and JavaScript by yourself, any static site generator will allow you to do it. They just automate filling in HTML templates, which you can create yourself too.

I know Hugo. It's simple and, as I mentioned, I do by myself what I don't find out there.

[–] canpolat 2 points 1 year ago

I believe Jekyll is the most popular of them and Github supports it natively. They even have documentation on how to set it up: About Github Pages and Jekyll. This page touches syntax highlighting. It also supports additional plug-ins.

[–] pwshguy 3 points 1 year ago

I've been using WordPress on Bluehost for a few years. I'm looking to move to something like Jekyll. Pretty much everything I get from WordPress can be done with a like JavaScript and Jekyll. There are plenty of examples out there of building it off of GitHub actions.

I also do NOT recommend Bluehost. I was having issues with my site going down for no reason a while back. I contacted their support to see what was going on and they told me it wasn't on their end. And guess what, it was on their end. Ended up catching the guy in a lie. Just been trying to find the time to move everything off of them.