Modern blog site that isn't crap?

I know what a mid 2000’s thing to ask, but I want to post my articles to some more serious space so I can reference them to people or to my resume should I get a writing job.

I’m currently using Wix, or was using Wix I guess, but I wonder if theres a better site to use? Preferably one I can put a DNS address to and not pay out the rump for the ability to even do that. Preferably, not pay for that at all.

Thanks

Depends on what you want to do and how much time / money you want to spend. My go-to answer is WordPress, basic version is FOSS, you can get a setup with one-button install for almost any generic hosting account, the default themes are ok, there are decent commercial themes out there, lots of talented WP developers if you want to go the custom route and it’s extremely flexible. And options/plugins for multisite, e-commerce etc. I do recommend you follow the WP guide to hardening your site (lock down permissions, etc).

If you don’t want to deal with tech details, you can try their hosted & managed WordPress.com offering, but it’s a bit costly to add on things like custom domains. Alternatively, find a managed hosting provider like WPEngine (I highly recommend them) that offers a secure, managed WP environment, staging servers, CDN, snapshot backups, etc. They also now own the StudioPress themes company so those are available to users.

Beyond WP, if you want a templatable, hosted CMS, there’s Squarespace. I don’t have extensive experience with it, though.

There are a few static page generator tools out there like Jekyll, which parses files written in Markdown. If you don’t need dynamic site features and are comfortable rolling your own CSS this is an excellent option.

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Of everything I’ve used, modifying a template for MkDocs has been the least painful “blog” I’ve spun up. Grav is a pretty close second, and that didn’t require any tinkering.

Ghost looks appealing, though.

As for cost, google cloud does have a “free tier” option for a VPS.

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I’m going to second mkdocs. I am using mkdocs-material, on my site.

It has a yaml file for general config, then .md markdown files for the actual pages. It then compiles the files into html and whatnot, and there are options for hosting it.

You can just serve the files with apache or nginx or whatever, you can use github/gitlab pages, or you could use Netlify. Netlify is free for a basic plan, which should work just fine for your needs, and you can point your domain at it with no issues.

You can install mkdocs locally, and run mkdocs serve and see the a live updating view of the site, then when you are ready git commit and push to update it in netlify or github/lab pages.

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I’m using Wordpress in my own server at home. It’s a old laptop that has installed nginx.

It allows me to install plugins that free version doesn’t do.

Found medium just now. They seem pretty neat. Anyone have any quarrels with them recently? Any bad behaviour I should know about?

Medium are great. Not a lot of control over formatting, but I’ve written long posts on it and found it friendly enough to use. The issue is, of course, that it’s someone else’s system. I don’t know enough about how they manage blogs for custom domains if you want to integrate it into an existing site. The one thing I find a little sketchy is that they may bug you to opt certain posts into their revenue sharing program which is them monetizing your content.

Optionally, if you want to combine a blog with a newsletter archive, Substack looks quite good, I know a few folks using it. Produces pretty clean HTML emails and gives you a bare-bones but decent web archive of posts.