#1

A thread for discussing Blogging Platforms, Setting Up A Website and The Problems With The Web.

Some resources, pulled from below:

Static Site Generators

(note: these require you to know—or be willing to learn—a bit of code. Their aim is to output a website made of just HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and save you some of the trouble of hard-coding every <head> and <body> yourself. The official documentation often comes with a helpful tutorial)

WYSIWYG Editors / All-in-Ones

(Aimed at mostly non-coders, or people that don’t want to mess around
with the uglier bits of web design)

Content Management Systems

(These seem to be somewhere between an all-in-one solution
and a library or framework for web developers to work in.
They seem aimed at creators of fairly large sites.)

Domain Registry

(As in, how you buy a URL)

Hosting

(As in, where you put the data from your website somewhere accessible by a server.)

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#2

seconded! curious what the new platforms are (preferably open-source) for this sort of thing (and for general portfolio sites). can’t do wordpress anymore. i remember indexhibit was neat. thinking something a little less code-y than jekyll?

edit: apologies for the derail, this thread can be split if desired

edit 2: all said, monome site uses jekyll, it’s great. i was more thinking tumblr-level ease. if there is such a thing these days.

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#3

I was planning on using something like Jekyll :joy:

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#4

That is super! I’m hopeful others will weigh in with options, but folks I know have had an easy time with wordpress.com. I, myself, have been on self-hosted WP since 2007. (I know there are WordPress detractors. I’d ask that if you have strong opinions, just focus on what the alternatives are and their benefits.)

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#7

if you’re comfortable diving into front end development I would highly recommend wordpress. it’s open-source, very extensible, and has a huge plugin ecosystem. if you’re less dev-friendly squarespace and cargo have nice looking themes.

(bias: posting this while working on a wordpress site)

someday though I do want to try something different to get away from PHP

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#9

Self-hosted WordPress forever! All reputable hosting providers have one-click WordPress setup, so at this point the technical overhead is negligible. I don’t do much poking around in the PHP and CSS innards, but I have done so in the past, and it’s nice to know I have the option. It might be easier in the short term to go with a hosted provider like Medium or Tumblr or whoever, but those companies have a tendency to go out of business, or get bought by other companies and shut down, or otherwise behave in user-unfriendly ways. As long as I keep paying my hosting provider, our interests align with each other, and I keep a local backup of my site in case things go south with them too.

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#11

I’ve found Wordpress to be a security nightmare. Then again, I gave up on it a few years ago. I’m guessing there are strategies and configurations that reduce wordpress security issues?

I’m a fan of approaches that don’t expose a scripting language and database connections to the public web (in other words, I like static site generators, of which Jekyll is one example).

Some more thoughts on the subject:


https://jamstack.org/

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#12

My life on WordPress has seen security issues come and go. New hacks and attacks are pretty much continual, the community responds fast and patches/updates get issued. Once in a blue moon I have to change my password. Nothing particularly terrible has happened.

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#14

I played around eith Hugo. It uses go and the go html templates to define layouts, and markdown to create the content. It is static and i managed to create one using the github pages.
You do need to install go and the hugo engine in order for it to work.
Don’t know how it compares to jekyll, as i never tried it.
I did have a good experience using hugo, but it does require some technical skills to create more elaborate templates.

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#16

Given my inability to decide on a theme/topic for my blog, and my lack of time for long-form writing (much as I may wish it weren’t so) I’m finding myself attracted to this approach:
https://micro.blog/

Especially since I refuse to use Twitter.

That being said, I haven’t tried it yet, so I don’t know anything about how difficult it is to set up and maintain, yet.

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#18

also, there’s a point to be made that if you’re only going to be posting to your blog like once every three months it could be easier to just edit raw html :^)

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#19

Yeah, my blog from 1996 to 2007 was just hand-coded html made in Windows. Even the RSS feed, once I got it going. Then I moved to WordPress.

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#20

I hadn’t seen Hugo before, but have been looking for a simple static generator to use with Github for my personal site. I checked out Jekyll, but Hugo seems more up my ally at the moment. Going to give it try!

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#21

It starts slow at first, until you get to grasp the way it works for using different templates, but once you get it going, it’s really good.

#22

I really like using Wagtail CMS - easy enough to get up and running thanks to good documentation. I built my own and a friend’s website around it and was very easy to explain the cms interface to the end user. https://wagtail.io/

For what its worth Github pages is well worth checking out for static sites

#24

oh yes indeed ye olde https://nnnnnnnn.co is a tiny bit of html, sees love once a year or so…

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#25

I would not recommend self-hosting WordPress unless you’re willing to be very on top of security updates. WordPress is the most widely installed web platform in the world, and as such is a very common target for attacks and exploits. If you keep on top of your updates you’ll do fine, but as security updates are released, the vulnerabilities are announced, which gives attackers knowledge of what they can use against installations not yet updated.

Even if you are not storing any sensitive information, your install can be harnessed for link farming, use in a botnet, hosting illicit code, etc.

WordPress itself will host you with a custom domain for $5 a month. If you go the WordPress route, I would recommend this option.

1 Like
#26

i’ve enjoyed using simple html for my personal & music websites.

considering making the move over to cargo collective

#27

used wordpress and cargo before
i currently use indexhibit despite some frustration

it works well for me tho

#28

@alanza, what are you wanting to do with said website?