What do you use for your personal blog?
I want to create a simple, SEO friendly personal blog.
Do you have any open source and self-hosted recommendation?
As for hosting, hosting HTML pages is super easy. The lowest effort for Hugo is GitHub Pages. Netlify is another solid option. https://andrew-quinn.me/ runs on Azure Static Web Apps, but that might take more cloud familiarity than you want to invest in. Or you could just run `hugo` and SCP the resulting directory to a VM!
Ghost for my personal blog and also photography portfolio. Been happily using it for years, easy to self host. Quite surprised not to see more mentions of it here.
Astro SSG. Can easily add Tailwind and React, which I use in my day to day. Got a couple of sites ranked in top 3 for the keywords I'm targeting. Hosted on Cloudflare Pages, for free.
Use a static site generator that is written in a language that you know well, so that you will be comfortable updating it and installing extensions. I use Pelican because I am comfortable with Python. Many people use Jekyll because they are comfortable with Ruby.
I swapped away from Wordpress to Pelican, a static site generator written in Python. The theme is a heavily customized version of Octapress - and its really performant with zero third-party dependencies / network requests.
Plus I like that I can literally click a button in Obsidian which formats a note, compresses/optimizes the media, and pushes it up to my website. Frictionless blog posting FTW.
https://github.com/getpelican/pelican
https://mordenstar.com
Though... recently I've been thinking about swapping over to Astro because the grass is always greener.
Wordpress is nice for many reasons, people will pan it for security and such..
install, add firewall like wordfence, change max failed logins to low number.
turn on auto updates for WP and the plugins and themes.
Pull backups auto and free with updraft plugin.
enjoy the massive amount of themes and support around the www
https://steveiscritical.com uses base WP with default theme, I have several others that mod the themeing more.
bonus - skip tutorials that use page builders like elementor - base gutenberg does most the things out of the box these days, not need for extra bloat to be fancy.
I tried a lot, now it's just pure HTML and CSS.
Racknerd VPS running Caddy serving a Hugo generated static site. Site and content are created/edited in Emacs and rsynced to server. Took the default Hugo generated theme and tweaked it to my tastes. Forget where I sourced the original CSS I used as a starting point.
https://www.hextxt.com
For my 3 blogs (info in my profile), I use Astro with markdown on Netlify, but will move soon to my own VPS.
i use hugo for static site generation and i write blog in emacs org mode. Hosting is on cloudflare pages.
Ghost can be easily spun up as a Docker container, is relatively fast and has a good SEO out-of-the-box.
I use Zola, a static site generator written in Rust, and Github pages for hosting on my own domain.
Zola!
I'd use plain HTML+CSS, but Zola adds some nice tools (like markdown rendering). It lives in a single binary, so I don't mind it. Hosted on GitHub pages.
https://www.getzola.org/
Not personal, but I've started using bullet.so for my company blog (and website).
I like that I can just write stuff in Notion and have it magically appear on a webpage with decent formatting. Not perfect, but fairly easy to setup, customize and maintain.
Hugo as a static site generator and hosted on Netlify with a custom domain.
I like Jekyll [1]. It is simple, uses markdown, and open source. I am not sure about the SEO part though.
[1]: https://jekyllrb.com/
I’m working on and using Lamb. You can find it via the github link in my profile.
The usp is friction free super simple blogging, self-hosted.
If you don’t mind using something under construction, I’d love to head any feedback.
Still using Jekyll, keep meaning to switch to something else, but it works… www.atomic14.com
Astro with Markdown with a static host.
Quite simple and quick to get started.
Zola. Nice defaults, that's it. Also I'm biased towards Rust
Ghost, self-hosted on Fly.io free tier
github page with a custom domain
I recently created a blog website using OpenAI o1, and it’s been great for generating content with minimal effort. If you're looking for something self-hosted, you can check out my project on GitHub here: [https://github.com/mergisi/openai-o1-coded-personal-blog . Let me know if you have any questions or need more details!