submitted 1 year ago by chevy9294@monero.town to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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I want to make my own website, like a blog where I talk about tech and tutorials and such. Something like https://kerkour.com and https://lukesmith.xyz. Any ideas for simple but modern design?

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[-] snorkbubs@fedia.io 22 points 1 year ago

My answer is probably boring, but it works, and I had fun with my own. Just set up Wordpress. At this point, you can find templates for any site design imaginable, and there are a million plugins for it. It's an all-around solid platform, that has mountains of documentation. Wordpress was made for blogging, can't go wrong there, but I've used it for all kinds of stuff, including ecommerce. It's simple and effective enough that I have a hard time going any other direction.

I used to host Wordpress sites on a home LAMP server; it was a fun project that didn't cause a bunch of headaches, mainly because of the amount of available documentation. Search "wordpress self-host" and you'll find a whole lot of information.

Good luck with whatever you decide on!

[-] greybeard@lemmy.one 17 points 1 year ago

The problem with WordPress and the like is maintenance. If you don't keep it up to date, it will get taken by malware. Guaranteed. Any plugins you add increase the risk.

I moved my blog to a markdown based compiled site a long time ago so I didn't have to worry about that upkeep.

[-] clegko@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Run in docker and set auto-update on? Idk seems simple...

[-] aksdb@feddit.de 9 points 1 year ago

But why? If you don't need moving parts, don't use moving parts. Simplicity is king.

[-] rglullis@communick.news 9 points 1 year ago

I'm yet to understand why people downvote comments like yours. Your answer was on-topic, provided a reasoning, was well-written... even if I haven't fully recovered from the trauma of having two wordpress sites hacked, I still think your comment has merit.

[-] Deebster@infosec.pub 3 points 1 year ago

It turns out that people on Lemmy are no better responsibly using a downvote button than anywhere else. I think you should have to at least select a reason why you're downvoting to add some friction - maybe options something like "I don't like this", "I disagree", "This is factually incorrect", "Spam", "Abusive language", etc. Then you can filter out the first two!

[+] TCB13@lemmy.world -11 points 1 year ago

That's was some fanboy of those overly complex but allegedly simple new-age bullshit website compilers (Hugo) where you place a bunch of markdown files in a folder, install 200MB of dependencies to compile the thing into HTML that you can then deploy via a closed solution such as GitHub actions to a closed ecosystem like Cloudflare. The same guy who'll discover in a few years they won't be able to "compile" their blogs anymore because some dependency is broken, their SEO is trash, Cloudflare is no longer free, GitHub actions require a subscription etc... you know, our run-of-the-mill piece of shit developer from 2023 so up their asses who don't understand shit about what their doing and that can't even be bothered with a simple drag-and-drop to a FTP.

[-] ikidd@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

I love a good rant.

[-] TCB13@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

You're welcome :P

[-] iHUNTcriminals@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

It's necessary for the human body and mind.

[-] astraeus@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago

Wordpress is hot garbage. Full stop.

[-] TCB13@lemmy.world -4 points 1 year ago

Says the guy who never used it.

[-] astraeus@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I wish this were the case. I have to manage multiple Wordpress sites and its backend is a sticky mess of outdated PHP conventions and plugins with very little standardization and even less thorough verification. If you’ve ever had to migrate sites or move new content from one site to another, if you’ve ever had to shift domains or deal with multi-site configurations, you will realize that Wordpress makes things easy for the end-user but there’s a reason there are so many managed Wordpress offerings out there.

[-] TCB13@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm sorry, still I've and I do that from time to time. Last month or so I was upgrading old WP sites from PHP 7 to work on PHP 8.2 and yes I had to manually fix stuff here and there. As you yourself said the problem isn't WP alone, its the amounts of shit people do with it - plugins and themes very poorly coded etc.

I've had two very different experiences, websites that were properly coded back then and updates go very smoothly without intervention (or little) and then the run of the mill theme coded in India with 400 plugins that will all break.

When things are properly done by professionals they tend to work fine in the long run, you don't have to deal with shitty plugins and poorly structured code. WP itself is solid and good, what people add above tends to be garbage.

[-] AnonymousLemming@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago

If Hugo stops working down the line, you can compile your markdown with something else. Simple is king!

[-] TCB13@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Yes +1 for Wordpress, you can even make your own simple theme if you would like in no time.

[-] passepartout@feddit.de 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Those examples you listed are not really modern imo. I'm not an UI/UX expert though.

I used Hugo to build my personal website. You can also easily build blogs with it. The difference to the usual approach is that you "code" the website in markdown which makes it super easy. Hugo then generates the html and css for you, which gets statically hosted. Check out the showcases and themes if you're interested. I used a theme called papermod, it's pretty common.

[-] kill_dash_nine@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I would also second Hugo which I use for my personal site and blog which I haven’t updated for a long time. Nice thing is that it has a minimal footprint of needing to watch out for updates unlike something like Wordpress which was known for being vulnerable stable if left unmaintained. It’s mostly looking out for old themes with vulnerable javascript.

Another popular options is Jekyll and I honestly can’t remember why I picked Hugo over it but if you don’t need dynamic content, why make things more complex?

[-] chevy9294@monero.town 5 points 1 year ago

Thank you! I made my own static site generator and ony missing thing was nice theme. PaperMod is beautiful, thank you!

[-] Urist@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Agree on Hugo being easy to work with. I also think having a static website is a good idea in general due to the low resource usage. My Raspberry Pi, even though it is loaded with many web applications, always manages to serve my hugo website blazingly fast. If you need rich content, for example videos, you can always embed them in some way. Another option I tried that worked okay is Pelican, though I use Hugo now since it seems the better option for me. In general I think any static site generator with templates will do the job. Even a minimalist solution such as pandoc could do it, though it would be much more manual work to get working.

[-] Tetsuo@jlai.lu 5 points 1 year ago

Static websites are also cool for security.

So many small websites gets defaced everyday because of some vuln brought by the dynamic aspect of the site.

[-] yournamehere@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

hugo last updated their user reviews on their page in 2019.

[-] TCB13@lemmy.world -2 points 1 year ago

About Hugo and similar solutions: https://lemmy.world/comment/4957077

[-] bob@feddit.uk 19 points 1 year ago

Learn html and CSS then create a simple static website. It's a lot easier than it sounds, Mozilla has great documentation.

[-] chevy9294@monero.town 5 points 1 year ago

I'm already doing that! I have html templates using Tera and css using TailwindCSS.

[-] Holzkohlen@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago

Lots of people recommending wordpress or smth. Kinda surprising to me. HTML + CSS can be incredibly fun to work with. Web development is such a huge mess I don't ever want to touch because of the bazillion frameworks and tools. But doing the raw coding is super fun.

[-] sir_reginald@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

go with Hugo + a theme Avoid WordPress, static sites have a lot of advantages.

[-] vervein@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago

https://coolify.io/ haven't tried this but it could work for the deploy? I use netlifly so i don't know. Looks like a fun little project.

[-] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

What's "modern" supposed to mean?

[-] Dirk@lemmy.ml 28 points 1 year ago

Absurdly large fonts and lots of unused space and rounded corners maybe?

[-] doublejay1999@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

A lots of purple

[-] testfactor@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

https://www.dagusa.com/

[-] griD@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

Amazing.

[-] tuff_wizard@aussie.zone 6 points 1 year ago

You have to scroll for miles to reach different sections.

[-] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Something that has CSS and doesnt look like a page from 2001.

[-] maxmalrichtig@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 1 year ago

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

"Am I a joke to you?"

[-] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 year ago

I love that page. But this page is better and this one is even more better than the two earlier ones

[-] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

The second one took significantly longer to load with no discernible change in quality.

The third looked worse.

[-] griD@feddit.de 7 points 1 year ago

Personally, I'd use just simple HTML + precompiled CSS in the form of SASS / SCSS. Because modern CSS is actually fun when it's precompiled :)

[-] Strit@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show 5 points 1 year ago

For my blog I use Ghost. It's pretty simple to set up, but it does require a database (like most blogging software does). So it might not be what you are looking for.

[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 year ago

Make it in markdown. There are plenty of ways to doing this or you can make your own. I personally like the marked library

[-] owenfromcanada@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I've had good experiences with GetSimple. It uses a flat-file structure, and there are lots of themes available.

[-] maxmalrichtig@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 year ago

Personally, I love Bludit as it is really simple, flat-file and perfect for blogging.

However, you could also look into WriteFreely if you want something with ActivityPub (= Fediverse). Feature wise very very plain and simple, but might noch give you most of the bells and whistles as other platforms would do it. Think of it as an alternative to "Medium".

this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023

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