If you want to keep going long-term, like 10+ years, and can find some enjoyment in really owning the tech (blogging takes only a very basic stack), I recommend self-hosting. There is nothing like being in total control, back to front.
I took a windy route to get to that point myself though, and still have an old blogger blog that lives on long after I decided to self-host.
So it may be worth considering that this is a platform you are picking, but the platforming process is also a journey in which you discover your personal likes/dislikes.
I've run blogs on these platforms: WordPress, Blogger/Blogspot, Joomla, ModX, Textpattern, ProcessWire, and a bunch of other FOSS blogging platforms, including static blog software and forums with blogging features.
These days I have a bit of a platform on-roading process where I go from LibreOffice HTML (personal framework) -> HTML framework -> PHP + HTML Framework -> Textpattern Section or ProcessWire page-section. Depending on how serious it's getting. :-)
(BTW: Textpattern is still freakin' amazing for how quickly you can create an endpoint and some output combined w/ any logic and any mimetype, and do that in your browser without touching PHP, after installing the CMS itself. I used it to tie a food distributor's online marketing & sales websites & back-end sales PDF tools together, and in this leverage point it still has few rivals. Especially in the lightweight CMS space)
As we are on HN, I'm going to assume that you are comfortable using Github and can follow instructions.
Write it on Github and publish on your domain. Github has an option for you to fire up a web-editor (VSCode) right there in the browser with the keyboard `.` (<- that is a period). So, you can write right then and there (I do it quite often these days).
When publishing, choose a Jekyll theme of your choice from Github Pages[1]. Your focus now are just enough plain text (Markdown).
If you want to bring it to your desktop/device, just checkout the repo and write. These days, my choice is to just write in Obsidian and don't even try to run Jekyll.
What do you get out of this? The simplicity of focusing on your writing with almost Plain Text while Github takes care of your theme, hosting, SSL, and custom domain[2] for FREE. I have been on the Internet long enough to know that the best intentioned services will go away one day and so you need to be able to own your content and use tools to publish them the way you want.
Of course, you will need to book a domain and own it. I like Cloudflare[3] that takes care of pretty much everything you want to do with a domain for free. If you so wish, you can even let Cloudflare do the page building[4] and hosting while you keep Github for the source.
Plug: I build a super simple Jekyll theme[5] just so I can do this. I wrote an article about it on my website[6].
To underscore this comment: by simply enabling GitHub pages on a GitHub repo, it will automatically render Markdown to HTML as soon as you push the repo.
If you want, you can layer on Jekyll and a custom theme down the road—but if you know how to write Markdown in a GitHub repo, you can have a blog live in 2 minutes, and then get started on those articles you mention are already in your head.
I'm honestly surprised by this statement. Why not just use the gem or the remote theme and never even deal with anything that constitutes the theme, except, maybe, the `_config.yml`. I do that quite often when I need to fire up a site.
I know, I'm kinda from the old-school world and Jekyll was magic when it came out. I think I got comfortable.
Self host your website and do POSSE (Publish once and syndicate everywhere else).
You can use Hugo or other Static Site Generators (SSG). Then republish your articles on other platforms like Medium, Substack and use canonical links so the search engines know your website is the source of the article. This means none of the policy changes of platforms effects you. Not even if the platform dies. Another thing is that you can experiment by isolating audiences. Like experiments with provocative titles, writing style being simple vs very direct and detailed technically. Also, I republish everything to Medium but only share developer stuff to Dev to and Hashnode. You can do all of this stuff cos you have a safe haven called your own website.
Tips:
- Start small and progressively improve or change things. Instead writing everything from scratch for instance, find a SSG with tons of free themes. Find the one which fits your needs. This means you can start right away without doing a full blown software project. And it reaches a time where you will need more features or need changes. Then and only then work on your own theme.
- Writing and Keeping the website alive is always the hardest part. Not the part of creating a website.
- Don't worry about the article counts or traffic. Everything will happen organically.
- When republishing, find platforms which have a high chance of discoverability for your older content. You website as people starts seeing will always have regular traffic even if it just 50 or something cos your website link is more likely to be discovered more than the platforms which almost always prioritise new content.
I find medium useful like that, for example I get people's comment and likes to an older content of mine in Medium. Meanwhile with Dev.to, they are always on a rat race for new content. Write your content and in a week it will never get another view. This pushes you to write new articles all the time. But I like to write some articles on my pace and not be a karma farmer.
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If you still want to use a platform, I recommend Bear Blog. It's a small project, made with love and respect for Indieweb. Good luck! :)
> Then republish your articles on other platforms like Medium, Substack and use canonical links so the search engines know your website is the source of the article.
I love the spirit behind this idea, but please know that Substack doesn't allow to set canonical urls on posts. This means that all content published outside of Substack will be considered a duplicate for SEO purposes unless Substack is set as the original source (which is the opposite of the suggested idea here).
Thank you for the info. I always thought it's there. So I guess I won't be republishing in Substack. Joining Substack has been on my todo list for a while. Oh well.
This is probably not a popular answer. For my blog I use Tumblr. I don't have any complex needs and Tumblr does everything I need it to do. I use my own domain and a simple theme so most people that visit the website don't even realize it's hosted on Tumblr. Having said that, if I were to create a new blog right now I would most likely choose Github pages or https://micro.blog/.
What do you want to do? Tinker with getting a blog up and running, or write?
If the latter, I haven't found a quicker solution than ponying up ~$50/year for a personal Wordpress.com blog. You won't get every bell and whistle, but you won't have to do a darn thing to maintain it.
It's core to their business and they are big enough that they aren't going to be bought or go out of business any time soon, so your content is safe.
You can also bring your own domain, and if you ever feel like self-hosting, you can do so.
I personally advise people to focus on the writing part of writing, rather than the tech tinkering, since "putting pen to paper" is difficult enough on its own.
I use Hugo [0] and host on Netlify, but anywhere works. Couldn't be happier. I used Wordpress and Jekyll previously, but Hugo has been a good upgrade.
The problem with Wordpress is that it's difficult to export content if you ever decide to move, unless you love dealing with SQL and format conversion. It's also annoying to host since it requires a database. Static site generators like Hugo/Jekyll can be deployed anywhere for cheap without dependencies and since it's just plan text / Markdown it's easy to move between frameworks.
I've been blogging on various platforms for around 20 years. I blog purely for my own benefit so can't speak to the marketing and traffic generation side of the different platforms, but if you just want a nice space that is your own to post your writing to, I'd recommend self-hosting.
I've used everything from Expage to Angelfire to Geocities to Vox at first. Different content platform providers keep coming, and at one point I felt the urge to jump from one platform to another. Self-hosting is the only thing that made that "what if I move to this OTHER place" feeling go away for me. Eventually I hosted a WordPress blog on one of those cheap shared-hosting providers, but now (and for the last 10-ish years) my preference is a basic static site generator (Hugo) deployed to S3. If you like the idea of a more interactive editing experience vs just markdown, there are platforms like Publii that will provide a visual editor for the static site, let you install themes, help you set up deployment to S3 or GitHub Pages, etc.
I've used Blogspot and Wordpress in the past. I suggest:
- GitHub Pages supports Jekyll. I want to like this, but it's too fiddly for me at the moment.
- https://dev.to/ -- easy free Dev-focused blog host. I think you can use your own domain. Good support for quoting of code. A criticism of dev.to is there's tons of low quality and/or beginner material on the site, but this doesn't bother me.
For my purposes (lots of Dev, DevOps, and Quality ideas), I'll be posting on https://dev.to for the next few weeks to see how I like it. If it doesn't fit, I'll go back to GitHub Pages/Jekyll.
There was a cool site someone made where you update your blog over ssh in markdown I believe. Can't seem to find it though. There has to be a service like that where you just push a git repo in markdown and update the blog contents.
It’s just rst so keeps it simple and updates are easy, I have a gitlab that will trigger a content refresh on push so updates are zero friction which gets all the ugly stuff out of the way of just writing.
If you’re going to self host I would look at using Astro. It’s an SSG that allows you to build components in all of the most common JS frameworks including using multiple different frameworks in the same app if you wanted to. This way you can build your blog as normal but if at a later date you want to expand it into something bigger you don’t have to rewrite everything from scratch as you’ve already got all your components in whatever framework you want to use.
(Prompted by a remark from one poster here that people don't comment much on blogs much nowadays...) What are people's views on how important having comment functionality on a blog is?
I have a low-readership blog published with a static site generator and without comments (I had instead invited comments on Twitter) - so it's been a potential to-do to add a comments solution but I always wonder if it's worthwhile.
IMO the killer feature of Medium/Substack is that they've already built up an audience willing to read long-form content, and they're happy to immediately start recommending your content to interested sections of that audience. Search engines too are happy to surface content from those sites.
Self-hosting is ok if you're not writing for an audience, or the legwork of promoting yourself, building up an audience from scratch, and doing SEO doesn't put you off.
Another option is Logseq [1], which is not a blogging app per se, but a good visual outliner/note-taking piece of software (for both the desktop and mobile), based on plain-text Markdown and Org-mode files, that can publish a complete static site, with customizable themes, for you to host it wherever you want.
I self host a Ghost instance for my personal blog and for any blog I setup for other stuff. No longer utilize wordpress for blogs. That said, Ghost decided this year to make Ghost only compatible with MySQL 8 instead of allowing MariaDB like it did before, or any other DB setup. But otherwise it’s a good simple setup. My personal blog is hosted on a container on my homelab and behind cloudflare.
Nowadays I'd go with static site generators unless I need fancier types of content (widgets, linked content, metadata). A CMS on the cloud is a pain to maintain, unlike a collection of files. It also gives you more freedom over the tools you work with.
I'd definitely self host, or at least keep control over the domain and have an exit strategy if the tool I use pulls a Medium.
If you Want to do some dynamic stuff and ultimately have a static site generated, check out jigsaw. It is PHP based with Laravel's blade template. Comes with JS integrations as well.
I use hugo for my personal site / blog, the source code is hosted on github and deployed to a custom domain bought and managed on namecheap. Github has a premade action for this, its pretty easy to setup, debug and write posts due to the use of markdown
I've heard horror stories about substack/medium censoring/closing blogs for unclear reasons. I would go selfhost.
I use ChyrpLite, I am considering WordPress as well.
I took a windy route to get to that point myself though, and still have an old blogger blog that lives on long after I decided to self-host.
So it may be worth considering that this is a platform you are picking, but the platforming process is also a journey in which you discover your personal likes/dislikes.
I've run blogs on these platforms: WordPress, Blogger/Blogspot, Joomla, ModX, Textpattern, ProcessWire, and a bunch of other FOSS blogging platforms, including static blog software and forums with blogging features.
These days I have a bit of a platform on-roading process where I go from LibreOffice HTML (personal framework) -> HTML framework -> PHP + HTML Framework -> Textpattern Section or ProcessWire page-section. Depending on how serious it's getting. :-)
(BTW: Textpattern is still freakin' amazing for how quickly you can create an endpoint and some output combined w/ any logic and any mimetype, and do that in your browser without touching PHP, after installing the CMS itself. I used it to tie a food distributor's online marketing & sales websites & back-end sales PDF tools together, and in this leverage point it still has few rivals. Especially in the lightweight CMS space)
Good luck & hope to see you writing soon.