by gtrubetskoy on 5/16/20, 6:51 PM with 39 comments
E.g. mine is grisha.org and it's hosted on github pages and behind cloudflare which is how I get SSL. Cost: $0. The blog itself is Octopress and it's kind of aging, I might look at Hugo next if/when I have time.
by staysaasy on 5/17/20, 6:47 AM
- Our site is built using the static site generator Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/docs/). We use the Hydeout theme (https://github.com/fongandrew/hydeout) + some additional CSS styling, but you can really use anything.
- Gitlab pipelines for continuous deployment
- GoDaddy for domain management
- Fast out of the box.
- Simple to get set up (on the order of hours to get production-ready with full CI/CD!)
- Flexible (you can customize Jekyll all you like if you know a modicum of CSS - tons of control).
- Managed and versioned in Github, collaboration and updates are a breeze.
- Free
- You need to be technical, but that's probably not an issue for the HN set.
by theandrewbailey on 5/16/20, 10:55 PM
1. Namecheap DNS registration.
2. Server is an old PC in my basement.
3. Dynamic DNS client running on my OpenWRT router.
4. Code is a homemade blog system. Linux, Java (Servlets + JSP + EJB), Payara, PostgreSQL.
5. Uses a Let's Encrypt certificate.
It's totally old school, but fun to play with, and it serves pages fast.
by axegon_ on 5/17/20, 6:31 AM
Personally I've been meaning to start writing for some time now but I keep kicking the can down the road for multiple reasons.
Problem 1: Lack of time, other more important things that I need to take care of and basically life in general - I've had serious time constraints during the last few years. Which I have been able to considerably improve lately. Which is completely unrelated to the lockdown and has more to do with me figuring out how to organize everything and catch up. And ultimately I've been looking into starting again lately.
Problem 2: The absence of a decent platform: I really don't want to deal with maintaining a database or a server for the purpose of serving text and images.
Problem 3: sphinx, hugo, and all other static site generators, while great, are not self-contained and a huge overkill imo for a personal site/blog. Meaning that managing them on the go is still painful - I'd have to setup a ci/cd to manage them, which I feel is the same as having a database and a server somewhere.
So I tried to somewhat fix problem 2 and 3 and built something from scratch myself - a small dartlang-based site(as I've stated a million times, i abhor javascript with a passion and just seeing it makes me vomit), which operates with either html or markdown pages, simple href and routing. The point is that at any given time I can unlock my phone, ssh into any of my servers, add a .md file, add a link, commit and push and forget about it.
I've been meaning to open-soruce the whole thing and if someone's interested they can use it. All in all, the end result is a transpiled js file from dart, which is ~90kb gzipped, an index.html and a yml file which allows you to customize stuff.
If anyone is interested, you can have a look at http://axegon.com.
by h2odragon on 5/16/20, 10:47 PM
I don't have much traffic; the blog and email/etc runs less than $10/mo.
It's possible to lease a bare IP range and set up your own DNS servers, etc. For small amounts of traffic theres no reason you couldn't use a RasPi to serve a blog that way. There's also drawbacks and headaches that make renting someone else's stuff attractive.
by rahimnathwani on 5/16/20, 10:33 PM
Version control: GitHub
Editing: Netlify CMS or nano+git
I started setting this up from scratch using Gatsby, but then realized it would be much better and also easier to use this starter:
https://www.gatsbyjs.org/starters/alxshelepenok/gatsby-start...
It is as easy to set this up, as it is to install LAMP+WordPress on a VPS.
by teekay on 5/18/20, 9:29 AM
Eleventy is great for me because it's written in Javascript and I use Javascript every day for work. Very fast and capable. Can't say how it compares to other static site generators because it's the first one I've used.
My setup includes nginx and Letsencrypt, and that's pretty much it. The Ghost blog uses a SQLite database.
I wouldn't blog on any third-party service since they could kick me out anytime for any reason. My website is my digital garden. I don't monetize it, don't run ads there, don't sell anything. No reason to run it anywhere but on my own server.
by elamje on 5/17/20, 6:11 AM
I host my custom HTML and CSS blog there and it’s great! https://www.towardssoftware.com
More importantly it’s all just basic files I can export to another platform if repl.it gets acquired or shuts down. They can host a basic HTML, css and js blog, however I choose to use python flask because I like the templating and simple routing.
by BjoernKW on 5/18/20, 11:04 AM
There are plugins for every feature you could possibly need.
You admittedly have to put in some time for researching and comparing those and not fall for the temptation to install the first plugin you come across for a particular feature.
by XCSme on 5/20/20, 12:14 PM
by jamieweb on 5/16/20, 11:23 PM
Ansible is used to build and maintain both servers, and the actual web content is in Git.
I use `receive.denyCurrentBranch=updateInstead` in the repo config on the servers, so I just do a push to each and the new content goes live instantly.
The reason for doing it this way is that I want to fully own my platform. I have fine-grain control over all of the web server headers, PHP configuration, etc.
by doersino on 5/16/20, 7:01 PM
The domain is managed via Hover [3].
[1]: https://uberspace.de
by lukaszkups on 5/18/20, 10:31 AM
The hosting is my local provider, I sent updates via FTP (oldschool huh?) and keep my website behind cloudflare to save some bandwidth.
by ybbond on 5/17/20, 5:27 AM
Some of my subdomains hosted on netlify, because I won’t bother myself installing node.js on my server.
by wodenokoto on 5/16/20, 10:06 PM
How: github pages. How, you ask? I don’t know. I set it up once, and now when I log in to github it tells me I set it up wrong and I should set it up again correct. I don’t know what I did or how to do it correctly - but visiting my domain works, so I don’t dare to fix what isn’t really broken.
So I guess you don’t need to know what you’re doing to host a static site on your own domain :)
by vulcan01 on 5/17/20, 1:09 AM
by 8589934591 on 5/17/20, 8:10 PM
I like your blog :) Subscribed in RSS.
OTOH, writing content is a challenge for me. If I try to start writing a tutorial, there seems to exist many others, with some of them being very high quality content. In the end it becomes futile to figure out what to write.
Would appreciate any tips to start writing about something.
by nickdothutton on 5/16/20, 10:03 PM
by marssaxman on 5/16/20, 8:55 PM
by houqp on 5/16/20, 9:19 PM
You can check it out at: https://about.houqp.me/posts/
by dglass on 5/18/20, 3:43 PM
by soulchild37 on 5/18/20, 6:28 PM
Monthly server cost is $5, Domain cost $15 a year
If you are interested to check it out, https://fluffy.es (iOS development mainly)
by otras on 5/16/20, 8:33 PM
by DoreenMichele on 5/16/20, 9:25 PM
I do so for some things.
by rraghur on 5/17/20, 5:10 AM
Gitlab pages with custom domain. Ssl from lets encrypt. Domain managed by cloudflare.
Static site with Hugo and I use asciidoctor for authoring entries
Let's encrypt cert renewal is via a cron job running on rpi in my home network
by doomrobo on 5/16/20, 9:23 PM
by hopesthoughts on 5/20/20, 8:54 AM
by softwaredoug on 5/17/20, 7:34 AM
Like you I don’t want my content locked up a proprietary site or platform like medium.
by 5986043handy on 5/16/20, 10:09 PM
by cixter on 5/16/20, 11:18 PM
I run a Ghost installation on a Debian VM, reverse proxied through Nginx and set up with Let's Encrypt.
by rurban on 5/19/20, 4:28 PM
by zn44 on 5/16/20, 9:37 PM
by BorisTheBrave on 5/16/20, 9:16 PM
I used to run Drupal, but it wasn't worth the effort.
by quickthrower2 on 5/17/20, 2:58 AM