this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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Web Development

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Best way to add a blog to an existing, static website? (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/webdev
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I exported a Wordpress site as a static site and have been hosting that on Gitlab. I'd like to start updating the blog again and I'm wondering how to go about it.

For the blog, I've been adding/coding the entries manually, which I still prefer to using Wordpress. Now I have someone who needs to take over the blog and I need something more simple for them.

I've looked into DropInBlog ( https://dropinblog.com ) but it's way beyond our budget, so I've been thinking to either:

  • Give them git access and let them add a text file and image to a special directory when they want to post. Then I can have a script run a few times per hour which converts that into a blog post. I'd also need to update the blog index with my own code.

  • Let them use something RSS based with a nice interface and scrape that to generate the blog. Mastodon is one option, as is Wordpress. Ideally the blog they maintain would not be accessible to others on the web though. I don't want to split our SEO presence.

Does anyone have a better suggestion? The website doesn't use a framework like Jekyll or any of those. It's just HTML, CSS and JS.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I thought Jekyll just compiled the input files to html/css/js and created a static site?

Hugo, too? I hear Hugo is easier.

I haven't used either of them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

They do. The issue is that I already have a static site. I don't want Jekyll or Hugo to overwrite those. I suppose I can choose which sections I push to Gitlab Pages. Maybe one of those would work in that case.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Maybe look at Astro and develop a lightweight blog post admin panel to create, edit, and delete posts. Should be relatively easy and you should be able to render out a static site from it each time you need to update it.

[–] Kissaki 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

If Markdown formatting is enough for you, I would look into using a static site generator, like Hugo or Jekyll.

If you want to keep your existing content as static files but same website skeleton and layout instead of copying and editing files you'll copy one and create the layout template. Then content and new posts and pages can be generated from Markdown files. If you set up CI they won't need to run Hugo or what you're using, only push the Markdown files to your Git repository.

Whatever you want to do primarily depends on: Your formatting, styling, functionality, and interfacing needs for the editor, and what you're willing to use or invest for setup.

Hugo runs from a single binary. The source layout is reasonable. With a single layout the folder structure doesn't have to be complex.

I'm not very familiar with alternative [Markdown] static site generators.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Hi Folks, Jesse here from DropInBlog. If you're trying to add a blog to an existing site, the best solution really is DropInBlog. I might be biased, but this use case is the reason we built it in the first place. We had an agency doing static sites and found we really wanted a blog to run on our html sites and didn't want to make a whole theme for wordpress to match the existing site / run on a subdomain etc.

Regarding price — honestly if you're planning to add a blog to your existing site and don't think that effort is going to return the cost of the product, I'd avoid content marketing all together. That said, there is a $100 off promo running at the moment that might help ease the first year :)

Happy to answer any other specific questions about the tech of the product as well. -Jesse