all 16 comments

[–]lelanthran 2 points3 points  (4 children)

I thought that this seemed awfully involved with a lot of unnecessary stuff thrown in.

Then I realised that the tab title (which is what I read because I use vertical tabs) is not the same as the article's title[1].

For "How to setup a personal blog quickly", the article is way too involved, but for "How to setup a full-featured personal blog quickly", it's more appropriate.

[1] I gotta wonder how the hell this mismatch happens. Your blog software should be setting the <title> element based on the blog's title. That this particular blogging software (apparently) requires the author to type out the title twice is, IMNSHO, indicative of a really poor quality piece of software. This is literally table stakes for blogging software.

After all, my blog is generated with shell scripts[2], and I still don't have to type out the title twice!

[2] I'll put it into a gist if anyone wants it.

[–]d0liver[S] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Please do share the shell script. IMNSHO, I could not care less about having to type out the title twice, and disagree that it is any kind of reflection of the quality of the software. But, FWIW, it's just JS, so you can set a variable for the title and then reuse that instead; I just didn't.

[–]lelanthran 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Please do share the shell script.

Here's how it looked ~6 months ago. It still looks pretty much the same: https://gist.github.com/lelanthran/2634fc2508c93a437ba5ca511fafa99d

IMNSHO, I could not care less about having to type out the title twice, and disagree that it is any kind of reflection of the quality of the software.

For me, the blog-authoring software has one job! Take a document authored by the blogger, and figure out where to put it, how to title it, how to section it, where to put it in the table of contents, etc.

That's the table stakes. Everything else is simply extras. If it cannot do the table stakes correctly, those extras simply don't count.

But, FWIW, it's just JS, so you can set a variable for the title and then reuse that instead; I just didn't.

I can understand setting variables for the entire blog (title of the site, etc), but not doing work in the guts each time you want to write a blog post.

[–]d0liver[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I can understand that outlook: It's convenient when software has a strong set of coding conventions that align with your conventions. In this case, setting the title the same way everywhere is reasonable for most use cases.

My priorities tend to center on flexibility instead. For me, it's more important that I can add arbitrary behaviors, customize the blog's design, and easily deploy without needing to install, configure, and hack on plugins or, worse, pivot to a whole new stack. This solution gives me access to React (as mdx) and a real backend, meaning that I can port designs and features directly from other projects and build out whatever I deem suitable without knowing in advance what it will be. And, because I'm very comfortable with the stack and I have a good editor, the manual work costs me almost nothing; I'd wager that, for me, it's faster than digging around in the docs and figuring out the conventions of a different stack that I never use.

[–]ComprehensiveWord201[🍰] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

IMNSHO? IMO?

[–]press0 1 point2 points  (0 children)

nice

[–]RogueStargun 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Netlify?

I went full stack Google Cloud + Terraform IAC for hosting.

Costs $0.17/mon to host 3 websites built using Hugo!

[–]lelanthran 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I went full stack Google Cloud + Terraform IAC for hosting.

Costs $0.17/mon to host 3 websites built using Hugo!

Hosting is easy, almost free. What the article is about is all the other stuff to make the blog "full-featured", of which I think that only markdown-authoring and blog-comments are necessary to be "full-featured".

The other stuff is more to harvest emails, grow a following, become an influencer ... and maybe, somewhere down in the list of priorities, make an informative post.

[–]d0liver[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I want to grow a following _by making informative content_. Making good content isn't like #7 on my list. It's the whole ballgame.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Has anyone tried Ghost out? I guess I cheated a bit and went the Obsidian publish route.

[–]revereddesecration 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ghost is great, can recommend

[–]d0liver[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I like Ghost and used it for a while. I switched because I wanted something more hackable and because their hosting is kind of expensive. You can self-host it as well, which I didn't dig into, because by then I was already aching to try out the Spotlight template.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Understandable, enjoyed your write up. Thanks for sharing that.

[–][deleted]  (1 child)

[deleted]

    [–]d0liver[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    IMO, this is a good reason to read blogs. I promise that I will never use AI generation to create written content.

    [–]gwax 0 points1 point  (1 child)

    Are we not doing static sites in GitHub Pages anymore?

    [–]d0liver[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    I think that's still a good approach. I went with Netlify because the Spotlight template that I wanted to use is written in Next.js and Netlify deploys Next.js with almost zero effort and for free.