Recommendations for self-hosting a blog
Hi,
I'm looking into hosting a blog site for myself - nothing fancy, just a site where I can publish some of my thoughts and ideas. Maybe I also want a section to publish images. So, basically something lean and mostly text only.
What's the easiest way to set this up for myself?
I really like hugo. Everything is written in Markdown and its pretty light. Definitely not as heavy as a full CMS. I also think the themes are pretty nice.
To deploy it you can use github pages or some cloud services (the hugo site lists some).
Its also pretty flexible, so its pretty easy to change how you want to deploy it, or change the look.
And even if you absolutely want to self-host the serving of static pages: Making that secure and not prone to security issues is much easier than something that can actually execute PHP.
I hope someday ActivityPub support is achievable - though you could just always manually post a link
I also recommend a static site builder- you dont have to fuss with database or security, you can host with a simple http server, and it’s easy to work with. Hugo, Jekyll, etc
Yeah, I’ve been paying $5 (or is it $10?) a month for my Ghost blog on a digital ocean droplet. It’s not worth it, my plan is to move to a static site generator (probably CloudFront -> S3 deployed via GitHub actions in a private repo) at some point. The features of Ghost don’t really matter to me and I hate maintaining the install/updating. Ghost feels like it’s moved more into “self-hosted substack”-territory which I have zero interest in, my blog posts are all public. Also, you can’t hack static files so security isn’t a worry with SSG which is super nice.
Not sure which SSG I’ll go with, when I was younger I would have written my own but now I’ll just pick something off the shelf that has nice themes lol.
WordPress?
hiss *
With a static site generator you can host it for free with Cloudflare Pages.
I do that. I have WordPress.org with classic editor enabled and the raw html plugin. Use a classic layout like twenty twelve if you don't want the fancy effects. Look for a host that has softaculous or something similar to automate the installation. My host charges about £60 pa with unlimited bandwidth.
You can also use WordPress.com for free but it has Gutenberg, which I absolutely cannot bear. Some people like it though. It's also less customisable.
Gutenberg?
I believe Gutenberg is a visual editor that WordPress uses, it has buttons that let you insert blocks throughout the page I think
Yeah the infamous block editor. As an old skool hand-coder, I can't stand it. You have to manually enable classic editing each time on WordPress.com otherwise it defaults to the Gutenberg editor. I heard it's improved somewhat recently, but when I first used it it was the biggest load of crap, worse than the beep beep boop one, which was at least useable. It was both dumbed down and unintuitive at the same time.
At least on a .org installation, classic editor disables Gutenberg completely.
Depends on what you want exactly. Easy and self-hosted are not usually go well together unless you've got enough experience.
Easiest way for blog - use a platform. WordPress.com is great and has free tier.
More involved, but still relatively easy - static site generator. I use Hugo myself, there is Jakyll that is popular too. Host it for free on GitHub or GitLab pages.
I would not self-host a public web site for security reasons. But you can run a static site on some cloud service. A personal blog with small audience should be fine on Oracle free tier.
Hugo is awesome, check my go/markdown based site: https://sv1sjp.github.io
Static sites are okay. The problem starts with sites with comment section, searches etc which can be very vulnerable.
I don't use it myself, but there's a federated blogging service called WriteFreely that markets itself as being very minimalist and simple.
You can self-host an instance of it, just like you can with /kbin, or you can use an instance that already exists (I think it's a few bucks a month if you don't want to post anonymously).
Not sure if federation is something that's important to you but I thought I'd throw it out there.
Find a static site generator you can tolerate and style things the way you want, have the static files be generated, pick your favorite way to host and server up those static files.
It's not self hosted, but you might like 750words as well.
Bludit is very simple to install and configure. Worth a quick look at least.
I use a cheap (lowest tier) hetzner ampere server + wordpress container. Works like a breeze.
I'm looking to self host a blog but I want to use a Gemini capsule instead of a website.
Ghost is pretty simple, and might be worth looking at. I have a couple sites that I use ghost to manage the content and then a script that wgets the rendered site and uploads it as a static site.
I find a blog is something I won't self host since my homelab is mostly a dev environment and with that it isn't super available.
However I do recommend github pages and use some jekyll theme.
Other than that, you can always self host Hugo or Ghost, although when I tried that I always found I ran into issues.
I tried on 3 widely separated occasions and still found issues so maybe it's a problem with me or my environment.
Either way, people seem to mention those two so I'd recommend them if you want to selfhost, if not, github pages.
If you want to self-host it on a server, WriteFreely is as lean text focused platform. Lightweight and pretty easy to spin up and has some basic federation abilities.
If you're a bit more adventurous, I have a soft spot for Plume it is still under development so can be a little more work to get running, but it does have the ability to host images with a built in media manager and more federation interactivity between instances of Plume and also the rest of the fediverse.
If you're on a web host, can't go wrong with WordPress just make sure to use the cache plugins to make sure it is a bit less sluggish.