Ask HN: Bloggers, how do you manage your content?

12 pointsfreemanjiang3mo ago14 comments

I would like to start a personal blog. I think Substack is a good option, but I would like more control over styling (potentially custom components) and want to host the blog on my own website.

I wanted to ask what the writing and hosting process is like for people who have a personal website and blog—do you just write markdown and then use a renderer?

I would like a kind of wysiwyg editor to see exactly how the content will appear once loaded. The issue with writing in a separate editor is that the line breaks, line lengths, font, etc. never appear how they will actually look. Thanks!

14 comments

krapp3mo ago

I use Nikola, a static site generator written in Python (which I don't particularly like as a language but the app does what I want almost exactly the way I want it to.)

I write new posts in Sublime Text as Markdown (I also use my blog to archive Mastodon posts which go in a different folder than my blog posts) and then it does its thing and generates an HTML site which I git push to my server. I use a plugin to integrate comments from my Mastodon account.

It doesn't have a wysiwyg editor per se but it does have a local server with hot loading so I can see how it would look.

midzer3mo ago

I use a Static Site Generator (SSG) regularly.

You will have wysiwyg when you develop locally.

Here's an overview over some tools: http://staticgen.com/

freemanjiangOP3mo ago

I see, yeah I use Next.js pretty regularly, you mean on hot reload then?

You still need to write your content as Markdown or something else, right? I feel the editors of Substack give some nice features like shortcuts for bold, italics. What do you do about that?

konradb3mo ago

You can use nextjs to statically generate a whole site, or incrementally regenerate it for slowly changing parts.

wannabebarista3mo ago

I tried several on this list a few years ago and found Jekyll the most flexible/enjoyable for my use case. It's a bit dated though.

sathyabhat3mo ago

> I wanted to ask what the writing and hosting process is like for people who have a personal website and blog—do you just write markdown and then use a renderer?

Most editors have Markdown preview. There's also products like Ghost which are pretty good

adamwong2463mo ago

https://www.npmjs.com/package/funkophile

mmarian3mo ago

I use Astro, so Markdown; organised by year-month folder.

TechSquidTV3mo ago

I hadn't considered sub organization directories. Smart. I may implment that.

pajamasam3mo ago

Currently, Markdown files + Vuepress. Finding/improving your tech stack and workflow for your blog is part of the fun!

mikewarot3mo ago

I still use Blogger. I'm amazed it hasn't been killed yet.

melwinalm23mo ago

I use Astro. It has all the features that I need.

ben_w3mo ago

I use HTML directly, with a small custom-made wrapper so all I write is the main content itself, not the head element or the visible footer. Some scripts to build the index page, the tags page, the categories page. Hosted on GitHub, but it would work just as well on my own domain. I made some stylesheets for fun, the default is deliberately minimalistic.

I've found I have so few readers I don't really need a comment section, so I've not even implemented one.

chistev3mo ago

I use a rich text editor.

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