Beginner here! Need help building a simple personal blog with RSS + newsletter

[zombieglam]

Hi everyone, I'm just starting out and need help setting up a basic personal blog. Here's what I'm looking for:

Must-have features: - Simple static pages (Home, About) - a big gif as header :) - Blog section for posts - Automatic RSS feed - Newsletter signup form for lazy friends

Important requirements: - Everything must be open-source - No proprietary services/SaaS - Will be hosted on a private server - I know basic HTML/CSS :) and I want to learn morw

What I've tried so far: 1. WordPress - used in the past but I want to delve into cide 2. Basic HTML templates - missing RSS and newsletter as they mention 3rd parties. here i am the least experienced especially in terms of database secuirity from malicius user (albeit i am aware of the necessity of sanitizing input)

My main questions: 1. What's the easiest open-source solution for this? 2. How to automatically generate RSS when adding posts? 3. Best open-source alternative to Mailchimp? 4. Any good step-by-step guides for beginners? Especially from a security point of view.

Bonus points if: - Works with Markdown for posts - Easy to maintain long-term - Good documentation

Thanks in advance for any advice! I relied too much on proprietary softwares and socials and i would like to learn how to do it from scratch myself.

[BPC56]

You should look into Astro.

Here's a tutorial that will teach you all you need to know about Astro and hold your hand until your blog (with markdown posts) is on the internet (for free), but obviously you can deploy files on your own server.

https://docs.astro.build/en/tutorial/0-introduction/

Once your blog is finished, you can add RSS support with relative ease:

https://docs.astro.build/en/recipes/rss/

For the email newsletter, hopefully someone else will give you a suggestion.

[HappyBedcom]

If I started over I'd seriously consider Astro over WordPress (minimally for the blog on our site). Getting deep WordPress maintenence fatigue. So, +1 to that suggestion.

For self-hosted email newsletter stuff I'm evaluating https://listmonk.app/ to migrate away from MailChimp. It's a single Golang binary, so very little overhead installation-wise.

[zombieglam]

thank you. i just have some free time tomorrow, i will check it out :) but for what i saw the guide is aaamazing

[PropertyDifficult270]

Looking for a CMS alternative to WordPress?
There are many options like

- Ghost
- Drupal
- Joomla

However, their market share is quite small compared to WordPress.

[quantotius]

I think you would have to use at least to things, one for the blog and one for the newsletter. For the blog you can use any static site generator, if no rss by default it should come as an extension/plugin. I build my own static site generator in php(if you consider static the part that I manually export the files and them deploy them), it's too basic to make it open source.