It Took Me a Decade to Find the Perfect Personal Website Stack – Ghost+Fathom

• gutenberg

  106 12,673 8.3 Rust

  A fast static site generator in a single binary with everything built-in. https://www.getzola.org

  

• Plausible Analytics

  304 18,286 9.8 Elixir

  Simple, open source, lightweight (< 1 KB) and privacy-friendly web analytics alternative to Google Analytics.

  

Or you need to use some other static site generator to build the HTML table from JSON.

Something very simple, but yet so difficult.

I liked that it was possible to use SQLite3 in production for Ghost. It worked very well and scales as well since it is mostly read operation, but they are officially dropping support for production and using only MySQL. I guess the one argument was, that sending emails for many subscribers was too much for SQLite.

There is also another good analytics service, without cookies and also fully GDPR compliant: https://plausible.io/

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• obsidian-releases

  1,652 7,956 9.9 JavaScript

  Community plugins list, theme list, and releases of Obsidian.

  

• hugo-blog-awesome

  1 322 8.5 HTML

  Fast, minimal blog with dark mode support.

I also run Hugo via GitHub Actions. It took me about 2 hours of setting up; could've sped the process up enormously if I would've just copy-pasted the hugo-theme's example blog.

https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/

Example blog from one of the popular themes: https://github.com/hugo-sid/hugo-blog-awesome/tree/main/exam...

• Grav

  84 14,291 8.5 PHP

  Modern, Crazy Fast, Ridiculously Easy and Amazingly Powerful Flat-File CMS powered by PHP, Markdown, Twig, and Symfony

  

I took a more traditional approach, focusing on something that's "good enough", which in my case was a cheap VPS and an install of Grav: https://getgrav.org/

Some optional customization for page templates/fonts/CSS, some CI so I can build and deploy it inside of a Docker container, Matomo for analytics that respect privacy (which I already use elsewhere) and some additional web server configuration to hide anything interesting behind an additional login and I'm good. Maybe backups and uptime monitoring if I'm feeling brave, which is what most sites should also have (so copy + paste there).

All of that for under 100 euros per year (could also pay half of that if I didn't host anything else on the server), the blog has actually survived getting on the front page of HN once or twice and requires relatively little maintenance, at least a bit less than a proper install of WordPress, due to its larger surface area.

The best thing is that it's simple enough for me to understand how it works, to be able to move it anywhere as needed and use more or less plain Markdown for writing the blog posts. Here's a quick example of a recent post: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/ever-wanted-to-read-thousan...

Now all that's left is to find motivation to write more, but at least 90% of my time doesn't go into tinkering with custom fancy solutions, no matter how much I'd love that. Then again, nothing wrong with the alternatives either: 400 euros might be perfectly worth it for some, whereas working with static site generators or even custom CMSes would be a fun experience for others!

• obsidian-github-publisher

  6 522 9.7 TypeScript

  Github Publisher helps you to publish your notes on a preconfigured GitHub repository from your Obsidian Vault, for free, and more!

  

400€ per year on a personal blog? To each their own, I guess.

I host my blogs on GH pages or Netlify. Additionally, I dump the notes I want to share with the world on GH pages as well with the excellent Obsidian Github Publisher [0] Plugin. I don't really care about analytics for a personal blog though.

Works for me, and costs nothing.

[0]: https://github.com/ObsidianPublisher/obsidian-github-publish...

• obsidian-github-publish

  1 - -

400€ per year on a personal blog? To each their own, I guess.

I host my blogs on GH pages or Netlify. Additionally, I dump the notes I want to share with the world on GH pages as well with the excellent Obsidian Github Publisher [0] Plugin. I don't really care about analytics for a personal blog though.

Works for me, and costs nothing.

[0]: https://github.com/ObsidianPublisher/obsidian-github-publish...

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  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.

  

• ideas

  19 3,763 1.8

  a hundred ideas for computing - a record of ideas - https://samsquire.github.io/ideas/ (by samsquire)

My blogging/journalling setup is simple.

I just use GitHub. I just rely on the default repository view on GitHub.com

I create a README.md and add markdown headings to the bottom or to the top (bottom if its a journal, top if it's a blog) and then when I get to 100-800 I create a new repository and repeat.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas (2013)

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2

• ideas4

  26 89 4.6

  An Additional 100 Ideas for Computing https://samsquire.github.io/ideas4/

My blogging/journalling setup is simple.

I just use GitHub. I just rely on the default repository view on GitHub.com

I create a README.md and add markdown headings to the bottom or to the top (bottom if its a journal, top if it's a blog) and then when I get to 100-800 I create a new repository and repeat.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas (2013)

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2

• ideas3

  12 253 0.0

  An Extra 100 Ideas For Computing - https://samsquire.github.io/ideas3/

My blogging/journalling setup is simple.

I just use GitHub. I just rely on the default repository view on GitHub.com

I create a README.md and add markdown headings to the bottom or to the top (bottom if its a journal, top if it's a blog) and then when I get to 100-800 I create a new repository and repeat.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas (2013)

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2

• ideas2

  13 268 0.0

  Another 85+ Ideas for Computing https://samsquire.github.io/ideas2/

My blogging/journalling setup is simple.

I just use GitHub. I just rely on the default repository view on GitHub.com

I create a README.md and add markdown headings to the bottom or to the top (bottom if its a journal, top if it's a blog) and then when I get to 100-800 I create a new repository and repeat.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas (2013)

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2

• Ghost

  299 45,721 10.0 JavaScript

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

  

Seemingly the only point of this dreadful article is to gain referrals and make the author money. I'm not sure why its getting upvoted on HN

https://ghost.org/?ref=davidgomes.com

• Shynet

  21 2,806 7.1 Python

  Modern, privacy-friendly, and detailed web analytics that works without cookies or JS.

+1 on shynet! I use it for my personal website and my blog, and it's been working great.

I got it up and running with Podman, so no need to install and run the Docker daemon. I also fixed SQLite support [1], so no need for an additional DB server.

I analyzed available open-source web analytics tools [2] and AFAIK there is simpler solution for web analytics that doesn't involve a third party.

[1] https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet/issues/208

[2] https://blog.fidelramos.net/software/privacy-respecting-self...

• blogalog

  1 8 9.5 JavaScript

I just switched to this a few days ago; everything's still very very in flux: https://github.com/janzheng/janzheng-2

I'll have to do a better writeup of it once it's stable and fixed.

• SaaSHub

  www.saashub.com sponsored

  SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

  

Suggest a related project