How to Start Your Blog in 2023

• Ghost

  299 45,820 10.0 JavaScript

  Independent technology for modern publishing, memberships, subscriptions and newsletters.

  

Happy user of Ghost [0].

Open source; small but smart team. Highly recommended.

[0]: https://ghost.org/

• microfeed

  16 3,192 6.4 JavaScript

  a lightweight cms self-hosted on cloudflare, for podcasts, blogs, photos, videos, documents, and curated urls.

  

If you like Cloudflare and want to host a few GB media files (e.g., audio, video...) for free, then you can try microfeed: https://github.com/microfeed/microfeed

• SurveyJS

  surveyjs.io featured

  Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  

• Isso

  18 4,968 7.8 Python

  a Disqus alternative

  

• Pico

  15 3,795 0.0 PHP

  Pico is a stupidly simple, blazing fast, flat file CMS. (by picocms)

I'm using https://picocms.org/.

It is PHP based, works on a cheap limited web hoster.

The concept is: Upload a markdown file plus associated media, and it does the rest for you.

For customisation, you can use Twig and CSS, or a predefined theme (I didn't look into these, I wanted a custom appearance).

For feeds there are plugins, for comments I use a "mail me at [email protected]" approach.

• mod_blog

  4 107 5.5 C

  A blogging engine in C

I used to write raw HTML, but have since come up with my own markup system [1]. The posts themselves are still stored in HTML because I don't want to get stuck with a sub-optimal markup language. By storing the rendered HTML, I can change how the markup language works (and I have).

The blog engine itself [2] is one I wrote starting back in 1999, and still in use. It works, does exactly what I want, so there's no reason to change it. And to see it in action: <https://boston.conman.org/>.

[1] You can see an example here: <https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog/blob/master/NOTES/testmsg>. The markup engine is written in Lua: <https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog/blob/master/Lua/format.lu...>.

[2] <https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog/>

• pagefind

  27 3,010 9.2 Rust

  Static low-bandwidth search at scale

  

I use Astro SSG and Cloudflare Pages. I use https://github.com/cloudcannon/pagefind for search on my Astro setup. You can test the search functionality here https://tinyrocket.pages.dev/.

From its repo: "Pagefind runs after any static site generator and automatically indexes the built static files. Pagefind then outputs a static search bundle to your website, and exposes a JavaScript search API that can be used anywhere on your site."

Pagefind is cool!

• ghostToHugo

  3 132 0.0 Go

  Convert Ghost blog export to Hugo posts

Couple that with the regular "your theme is no longer supported" messages, I got fed up of burning time to keep up with their updates, which offered no benefits to me. I quit and moved to Hugo (using a ghost-to-hugo migration tool [1]).

[0] https://ryansouthgate.com/goodbye-ghost-hello-hugo/#im-no-lo...

[1] https://github.com/jbarone/ghostToHugo

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• Docusaurus

  282 53,091 9.5 TypeScript

  Easy to maintain open source documentation websites.

  

I am using https://docusaurus.io in combination with GitHub pages by committing to a personal public GitHub repo and let travis-ci automatically build the site. I am happy.

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