Ask HN: Looking for lightweight personal blogging platform

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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Nutrient – The #1 PDF SDK Library, trusted by 10K+ developers
Other PDF SDKs promise a lot - then break. Laggy scrolling, poor mobile UX, tons of bugs, and lack of support cost you endless frustrations. Nutrient’s SDK handles billion-page workloads - so you don’t have to debug PDFs. Used by ~1 billion end users in more than 150 different countries.
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  1. Jekyll

    :globe_with_meridians: Jekyll is a blog-aware static site generator in Ruby

    In future, if you want to move from Jekyll to something else, you just have to worry about that `_posts` and `_assets` folder. They may have different naming convention but you can just config-managed it or change it to your choice. This is why I suggested owning that two yourself.

    You also may not worry about FrontMatter[3] (meta in the header) and its accompanying jazz by asking Jekyll to use the plugins `jekyll-optional-front-matter` and `jekyll-titles-from-headings`. These comes as part of the officially supported Jekyll plugins[4] by Github. That way, you are just writing a human-readable plain-text spiced up with Markdown and readable by almost every other Static Site Generator.

    Now, play with the `_config.yml` that Jekyll generates for you from the theme above to define your post dates, navigation, and others. Jekyll is one of the OGs — the Gandalf of Static Site Generators. If you have a problem, someone somewhere has solved that.

    Did I missed something? I was supposed to write a blog article for my website on this one and this comment will serve as my starting bullet points.

    1. https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-s...

    2. https://jekyllrb.com

    3. https://frontmatter.codes/docs/markdown

    4. https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-s...

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  3. Hugo

    The world’s fastest framework for building websites.

    As per many other comments, it sounds like a static site generator like Hugo (https://gohugo.io/) or Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/), hosted on GitHub Pages (https://pages.github.com/) or GitLab Pages (https://about.gitlab.com/stages-devops-lifecycle/pages/), would be a good match. If you set up GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD to do the build and deploy (see e.g. https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/), your normal workflow will simply be to edit markdown and do a git push to make your changes live. There are a number of pre-built themes (e.g. https://themes.gohugo.io/) you can use, and these are realtively straightforward to tweak to your requirements.

  4. eleventy 🕚⚡️

    A simpler site generator. Transforms a directory of templates (of varying types) into HTML.

    I can't recommend Eleventy enough!

    https://www.11ty.dev

    I converted my WordPress blog to Eleventy 4 years ago and never looked back, it's been delightful!

    https://www.joshcanhelp.com/taking-wordpress-to-eleventy/

  5. mataroa

    Naked blogging platform

    I love Mataroa: https://mataroa.blog

    I jumped from WordPress to Mataroa and I'm also using Jekyll, Hugo, Zola, and Obsidian to blog.

    There are a lot of great things about Mataroa that I love. I've blogged about Mataroa: https://pivic.blog/blog/mataroa/

  6. astro

    The web framework for content-driven websites. ⭐️ Star to support our work!

    Many of the recommendations in this thread are great. Go with a SSG; almost all of the bigger players will be able to do everything you list and (a lot) more. Personally a big fan of Astro[1] but Hugo, Jekyll, 11ty, etc. will do the job just fine and there's imo no reason to pick one over the other in your case apart from working with a framework in a language you're comfortable with.

    If you're looking to get started right away and don't care about having it hosted by someone else there's also bearblog[2] which I can recommend btw.

    [1] https://astro.build/

  7. Hexo

    A fast, simple & powerful blog framework, powered by Node.js.

    A lot of great suggestions here and some stuff I’ve never heard of before!

    Throwing my own suggestion into the ring, as I was just looking into this last week.

    I started setting up a blog using Hexo. It’s another Node based SSG that uses markdown and supports tags. It has a lot of neat plugins that people have developed, too.

    I like it so far!

    https://github.com/hexojs/hexo

  8. gutenberg

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

    If I were to start again from scratch, I'd likely use Zola as SSG (https://www.getzola.org/)

  9. Nutrient

    Nutrient – The #1 PDF SDK Library, trusted by 10K+ developers. Other PDF SDKs promise a lot - then break. Laggy scrolling, poor mobile UX, tons of bugs, and lack of support cost you endless frustrations. Nutrient’s SDK handles billion-page workloads - so you don’t have to debug PDFs. Used by ~1 billion end users in more than 150 different countries.

    Nutrient logo
  10. congo

    A powerful, lightweight theme for Hugo built with Tailwind CSS.

  11. jamstack.org

    The official Jamstack site

  12. Publii

    The most intuitive Static Site CMS designed for SEO-optimized and privacy-focused websites.

    Most SSGs, or if you want to have it easy: https://getpublii.com/ - generates static sites, can publish to github pages (among others), has themes.

  13. blog

    My personal blog, implemented with Jekyll (by TCGV)

    Here's my personal blog, set up in 2019 on github pages (free hosting), built with Jekyll [1] which supports markdown, code snippets, tags, sections and more.

    For a technical person, it does the job pretty well and almost without any maintenance effort:

    - Github: https://github.com/TCGV/Blog

    - Live: https://thomasvilhena.com/

    [1] https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll

  14. pages-gem

    A simple Ruby Gem to bootstrap dependencies for setting up and maintaining a local Jekyll environment in sync with GitHub Pages

    As per many other comments, it sounds like a static site generator like Hugo (https://gohugo.io/) or Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/), hosted on GitHub Pages (https://pages.github.com/) or GitLab Pages (https://about.gitlab.com/stages-devops-lifecycle/pages/), would be a good match. If you set up GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD to do the build and deploy (see e.g. https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/), your normal workflow will simply be to edit markdown and do a git push to make your changes live. There are a number of pre-built themes (e.g. https://themes.gohugo.io/) you can use, and these are realtively straightforward to tweak to your requirements.

  15. hugotunius.se

    My website/blog. Jekyll, S3, Cloudflare

  16. awesome-static-generators

    A curated list of static web site generators.

  17. fruitionsite

    Build your website with Notion for free

    Lately I've been using Fruition - which is just a way to attach a custom domain name to your published Notion directory. The script is no longer maintained but it keeps working using some Cloudflare agent scripting mechanisms.

    URL: https://github.com/stephenou/fruitionsite

  18. gozer

    Fast, opinionated and simple static site generator in a single static binary. Mirrored from https://git.sr.ht/~dvko/gozer.

    Sounds like any static site generator supporting Markdown will do.

    - Jekyll: the OG, but requires a ruby toolchain.

    - Hugo: compiles to a single static binary, but you may have to get used to its (Go text/html) templating.

    - Zola: also compiles to a single static binary, but uses Jinja-like templating.

    - Gozer [^1]: my own, like Hugo, but 1000x simpler. I rolled my own because I wanted something that didn't move under me in the next 10 years and just because it was fun and easy enough to build.

    [1]: https://github.com/dannyvankooten/gozer

  19. minimum-viable-hugo

    No CSS, no JS. One static HTML page to start you off.

    I like Hugo a lot, personally.

    If you want to go as minimal as possible, my https://github.com/Siilikuin/minimum-viable-hugo gets you set up with a single no-CSS, no-JS HTML page. I found this pretty ideal for staying to learn the platform.

  20. MDsveX

    A markdown preprocessor for Svelte.

  21. SvelteKit

    web development, streamlined (by sveltejs)

    I've played around with several platforms in the last year or so. I've landed on the following setup that works very well for me and ticks all your boxes:

    A SvelteKit[0] app hosted on Cloudflare pages. The repo is hosted on GitHub and hooked up to the Cloudflare Pages app [1]. On PRs, I get preview environments. On merge, the changes get deployed to my "production" website. I write blog posts and other content in markdown, which is then processed by mdsvex[2] with very minimal setup.

    Mostly, my requirements were more focused around getting the actual framework, hosting, etc. out of my way so that I could focus on writing. Gatsby and Next.js were too configuration heavy and turned me off once I scratched beyond the surface.

    [0] https://kit.svelte.dev/

  22. jekyll-docker

    ⛴ Docker images, and CI builders for Jekyll.

    I run Jekyll in its own official docker container. You just need to mount the directory with the md files and it autogenerates new htmls whenever an md is updated. No need for Ruby.

    I'm on my phone now and I can't check what I used to run it but all the details are at https://github.com/envygeeks/jekyll-docker/blob/master/READM...

    Then HTMLs can be deployed to the public facing server.

  23. TiddlyWiki

    A self-contained JavaScript wiki for the browser, Node.js, AWS Lambda etc.

  24. quartz

    🌱 a fast, batteries-included static-site generator that transforms Markdown content into fully functional websites

    Quartz! https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/

    Beautiful, performant, native support for editing via Obsidian. I use it for my personal side, https://thestu.art

  25. pandoc

    Universal markup converter

    Others have mentioned static site generators. I like Hakyll [1] because it can tightly integrate with Pandoc [2] and allows you to develop custom solutions if your needs ever grow.

    [1]: https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/

    [2]: https://pandoc.org/

  26. hakyll

    A static website compiler library in Haskell

    Others have mentioned static site generators. I like Hakyll [1] because it can tightly integrate with Pandoc [2] and allows you to develop custom solutions if your needs ever grow.

    [1]: https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/

    [2]: https://pandoc.org/

  27. blog-in-a-box-container

    A repository that hosts the container for blog-in-a-box. We maintain and publish the container separately so that we can reference in blog-in-a-box to start the dev container quickly.

    I created the BlogInABox[1] devcontainer to help people get started with Jekyll + GitHub pages. It's a repo that you can fork that has a site ready to go, and a devcontainer that has nice utilities like spellcheck & markdown linting/fixing. It comes with a companion site [2] that shows how to get scheduled posts, comments, etc. working nicely.

    [1] https://github.com/SeanKilleen/blog-in-a-box-container/

  28. Lektor

    The lektor static file content management system

  29. jekyll-scholar

    jekyll extensions for the blogging scholar

  30. retext

    ReText: Simple but powerful editor for Markdown and reStructuredText (by retext-project)

  31. SaaSHub

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

    SaaSHub logo
NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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