I want to make my own website, like a blog where I talk about tech and tutorials and such. Something like https://kerkour.com and https://lukesmith.xyz. Any ideas for simple but modern design?
My answer is probably boring, but it works, and I had fun with my own. Just set up Wordpress. At this point, you can find templates for any site design imaginable, and there are a million plugins for it. It's an all-around solid platform, that has mountains of documentation. Wordpress was made for blogging, can't go wrong there, but I've used it for all kinds of stuff, including ecommerce. It's simple and effective enough that I have a hard time going any other direction.
I used to host Wordpress sites on a home LAMP server; it was a fun project that didn't cause a bunch of headaches, mainly because of the amount of available documentation. Search "wordpress self-host" and you'll find a whole lot of information.
The problem with WordPress and the like is maintenance. If you don't keep it up to date, it will get taken by malware. Guaranteed. Any plugins you add increase the risk.
I moved my blog to a markdown based compiled site a long time ago so I didn't have to worry about that upkeep.
I'm yet to understand why people downvote comments like yours. Your answer was on-topic, provided a reasoning, was well-written... even if I haven't fully recovered from the trauma of having two wordpress sites hacked, I still think your comment has merit.
It turns out that people on Lemmy are no better responsibly using a downvote button than anywhere else. I think you should have to at least select a reason why you're downvoting to add some friction - maybe options something like "I don't like this", "I disagree", "This is factually incorrect", "Spam", "Abusive language", etc. Then you can filter out the first two!
That's was some fanboy of those overly complex but allegedly simple new-age bullshit website compilers (Hugo) where you place a bunch of markdown files in a folder, install 200MB of dependencies to compile the thing into HTML that you can then deploy via a closed solution such as GitHub actions to a closed ecosystem like Cloudflare. The same guy who'll discover in a few years they won't be able to "compile" their blogs anymore because some dependency is broken, their SEO is trash, Cloudflare is no longer free, GitHub actions require a subscription etc... you know, our run-of-the-mill piece of shit developer from 2023 so up their asses who don't understand shit about what their doing and that can't even be bothered with a simple drag-and-drop to a FTP.
I wish this were the case. I have to manage multiple Wordpress sites and its backend is a sticky mess of outdated PHP conventions and plugins with very little standardization and even less thorough verification. If you’ve ever had to migrate sites or move new content from one site to another, if you’ve ever had to shift domains or deal with multi-site configurations, you will realize that Wordpress makes things easy for the end-user but there’s a reason there are so many managed Wordpress offerings out there.
I'm sorry, still I've and I do that from time to time. Last month or so I was upgrading old WP sites from PHP 7 to work on PHP 8.2 and yes I had to manually fix stuff here and there. As you yourself said the problem isn't WP alone, its the amounts of shit people do with it - plugins and themes very poorly coded etc.
I've had two very different experiences, websites that were properly coded back then and updates go very smoothly without intervention (or little) and then the run of the mill theme coded in India with 400 plugins that will all break.
When things are properly done by professionals they tend to work fine in the long run, you don't have to deal with shitty plugins and poorly structured code. WP itself is solid and good, what people add above tends to be garbage.