I am looking for a way to blog that is effortless and have minimal maintenance on the server side (like static site generator vs WordPress), a way to write the blog that has a better writing environment on my PC. (Maybe a local CMS or something like that)
Few ways I know so far but they are not perfect
The first one: WP2Static plugin for WordPress (or other plugins by WP2Static author Leon Stafford [1]). They work, but they have some minor issues, they do not export sites perfectly. Other solutions [2] recommended by Leon I have tried: HTTrack has not been actively developed for a long time (since 2017) and does not work anymore, Wget can't crawl the site intact, Shifter, Stratti are expensive (But they run smoothly), HardyPress' cheap plan has only 500MB, Sitesauce's hosting provider Vercel was censored here. (I know, right?)
The second approach is called Headless CMS [3]. But after doing some research, it seems that running a fully local Headless CMS requires writing complex API calls (Strapi, etc). Better solutions are either expensive or free but require an account and have some limitations. I would prefer a completely local and free solution (I am so greedy :-|). NetlifyCMS seems great but it seems like it can only be hosted on Netlify?
The third way is Ghost [4]. Ghost's writing experience looks good, but if deployed to the server, it may require continuous maintenance. Ghost's static plugin [5] seems to be not working perfectly. Ghost's Headless CMS also requires writing API calls.[6][7]
Fourth way: popular services like wordpress.com, Medium, Tumblr, etc. are not accessible in my area, so I can only consider self-hosting.
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[1] https://github.com/leonstafford/
[2] https://wp2static.com/alternatives/
[3] https://jamstack.org/headless-cms/
[4] https://ghost.org
[5] https://github.com/Fried-Chicken/ghost-static-site-generator
[6] https://ghost.org/docs/jamstack/gatsby/
[7] https://www.gatsbyjs.com/docs/sourcing-from-ghost/
Extra background information
I used to use WordPress and I liked its non-technical friendliness. I used to use the export function to back up my blog (I did not know how to back up databases at the time), but one day my database was unfortunately damaged, and the import function could not import correctly, all my pictures and videos are lost. After that, I turned to static site generators. After trying hexo, pelican, hugo, I was amazed at the generation speed of hugo and the ease of "installation" (only one binary file), so I chose hugo. After using hugo for a year and a half. I started to feel bad. In the beginning I was a SSG noob, so I used the basic theme, which lacked a lot of things, such as meta description, featured images and other seo and user experience optimization, and later I changed the theme a few times, but due to the different features of different themes, I had to manually change the headers of each .md article to fit the theme(they work without changes, but please forgive me, I just hope the .md article will work with the new features of the theme).
Finally I found the Academic theme (now called Wowchemy) and it looks like an ultimate theme for me, I've been using it for a few months, but accessing the CDN the theme uses (previously Cloudflare's cdnjs later jsDelivr) from my region is slow and sometimes even inaccessible, although I could self-host CSS and JavaScript, I realized that it was time to stop, so I gave up and switched to writing notes on OneNote.
Recently, I wanted to start blogging again. I re-examined WordPress and SSG based on my earlier experience. I found that there is a relatively complete plugin called WP2Static, which can convert a website into a static website (like generated by SSG), but the latest version(7.1.7) has a problem with handling sitemaps, I found on GitHub that the problem has been fixed, but not merged from the dev branch into the stable release, my own attempt to compile the dev branch failed, and I found the exported content is missing, so I did not adopt this solution. I also learned that SSG seems to have evolved a concept called Jamstack. According to my own understanding, it seems to be a combination of dynamic and static. It separates the front and back ends and can be freely combined?
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hashnode - If you prefer having custom domain, writing for beginners, love SEO, want to build personal brand, and a bit serious about technical writing.
SSG + Github Page - If you love getting your hands dirty in coding & willing to spend sometime to learn a new tech. (plus point, you have full freedom to design it in your own way)
- My self-hosted blog built with NextJs. https://pankajtanwar.in/blogs
Host in my GKE, but I'm running that for other reasons primarily.
See https://github.com/hofstadter-io/cuetorials.com for an example