Simple Blogging

I was recently asked how I host my blog. The answer is that I use a static website generator called Jekyll and the site it generates is hosted on GitHub Pages (GitHub is a repository where developers can store and share their code). This is a bit of a geeky solution however and setting it all up is not something I would recommend to someone who is not pretty tech-savvy.

The person who asked wanted a quick and simple solution so I turned to Mastodon for some suggestions.

The Suggestions

Presented in no particular order, the suggestions I got were:

• WriteFreely
• Micro.blog
• Pika
• Bear
• Matarona
• ghost
• Blogger
• Beehiiv
• Wordpress
• Hugo
• prose.sh
• Decap CMS
• Publii

My Thoughts

I’ve not looked at any of them in detail but a few jump out immediately as good suggestions and a few as needing too much technical knowledge. I’ve given each one a few words in summary but these are all my uninformed initial reactions.

Oddly, the list above was built in pretty much the exact order that the suggestions came in and it allows me to lump the first few together because they seem to be very similar in that they are lovely, focused blogging services which offer hosting so you can just get on with writing. This covers WriteFreely, Micro.blog, Pika, Bear and Matarona.

Ghost is where things start to feel a bit more corporate and the idea of mailing lists and engagement and brands start to creep in. However, if you want more than just a simple blog then Ghost looks like a nice step up without it all getting too complicated.

Blogger has a long history and is widely used and I’d be more enthusiastic about it if it weren’t part of Google’s portfolio. And this isn’t even about privacy but rather Google’s track-record of just pulling the rug out from under well-used, well-loved services. I’d not trust them to close Blogger down at some point too.

Beehiiv is maybe a bit too “engage!” than I’d personally like in a simple blogging service. If you have or want to build a brand then it would be worth looking at.

Wordpress is perhaps the best known of the suggestions but it feels a bit heavy for a simple blog. There is a great ecosystem of plugins and a huge amount of flexibility on offer but that can just lead to decision paralysis.

Hugo, like Jekyll, is a static site generator and therefore needs some technical knowledge.

Prose looks interesting but is again perhaps a bit too far up the geek scale (although if you are at the more tech-savvy end of it, pico have quite a few cool services as well as Prose).

Decap is again more complex than is reasonable for someone who just wants to put together a simple blog.

Publii is another static site generator but it is at least an installable application. However I think that this is also more than a simple blogging tool/service.

A Recommendation?

I will be pointing the person who asked me to this blog post so that they can browse the full list of options suggested but if I had to pick one right now to replace my Jekyll system then I think I would need to do more digging into it all.

Different people have different priorities and requirements and my top three are probably not the same as a lot of other people:

1. The ability to “own” my own posts and not have to worry about importers or exporters. I like having my blog consist of text files I can have on multiple computers as well as being stored in GitHub. I don’t want a database back-end or a proprietary file format to untangle at some point in the future.

2. An RSS feed. I’m a big fan of RSS for following updates across multiple sites, whether they be blogs or news web sites, so I definitely want my own blog to have an RSS feed so that others can see when I have published something new without me having to post all over social media about it (which I still sometimes do anyway).

3. I don’t have any analytics on my blog. I’m not trying to build a brand or sell anything, I just like writing for pleasure and also as a way to remind myself about things. If I had analytics I’d probably find it all soul-destroying to realise that only a couple of people read things or, if my some miracle things went the other way, I’d hate the pressure of knowing that I am writing for a huge audience. I write for me and if other people enjoy what I write then that is a bonus, not a goal.