Comment by ksec 20 hours ago
My biggest problem so far is with cost. I dont like recurring fees. I could pay a one-time fee for say 100 pages and last an eternality ( or 50 years or something ). I also dont like subscription, and it has nothing to do with subscription fatigue, it is just the way I manage my money since before Youtube or Netflix took off.
And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I use HN comments as more like a blog post.
I use GitHub Pages for personal blogs. Connect it with your personal domain name in case later you want to run it somewhere else.
I do this too (not the personal domain bit) but one thing to be aware of is that Google doesn't seem to index these sites unless you feed it each URL manually. Doesn't autodiscover, doesn't read a submitted sitemap.
Not a showstopper for me since I don't expect anyone to be interested anyway, but might be for some.
Reliability? It took me around 15 minutes to create a site with Claude Code using GitHub Pages with custom domain and somebody else is taking care that it is always running. What is the alternative?
Believe it or not, Blogger still exists and is free. I did some research when I was looking to spin up a blog for professional purposes. I ended up just rolling it into my personal blog though, for various reasons, I haven't done a lot with it yet. Project for the new year.
You can hate on Google all you like but it hasn't been killed by Google yet and has been a long time--and is simple, adequate, and free even if it doesn't handle all the more advanced use cases.
I recently setup a little blog on tilde.club. They had a built I blogging tool in the CLI, but I wasn’t a huge fan. It gives some hosting space as well and supports php, so I vibe coded a little something that lets me throw markdown files with a date as the file name into a folder. Once created, it posts to the blog. Right now it’s just one long running page (and individual posts can be viewed/linked). I’m debating between adding an archive or just only showing a certain number of posts and letting them age out (unless linking to the specific post). I also have php generating an RSS feed based on the markdown files, so they just works without any fuss.
Of course my biggest issue is that I have started and deleted more blogs than I can count, so I don’t have any useful history, like I would if I would have stuck with one thing for the last 20 years.
In Digital Ocean you can host up to 3 static sites for free, includes HTTPS, your own domain names and automatic deployment from GitHub repos. Look for their "app platform"
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-depl...
Or put a Mac mini in your living room: https://www.contraption.co/a-mini-data-center/
>Biggest downside I know of: Wordpress is too much learning curve & overhead for a simple personal blog.
That was the conclusion I came to when I was muddling through various options last year. I had a Blogger blog already and decided to just roll in whatever professional content I wanted to add, which was the right solution for me. It helped that various folks I knew didn't bother having hard boundaries behind personal and professional content and that worked for me as well.
Thank You! This lead to me login and rediscover I actually had a blog 15 years ago.
The thing that stopped me was much like what you said, learning curve and too much friction. Right now I have bearblog, mataroa.blog and nicheless, all with their own strength and flaws.
Codeberg or GitHub pages are free. For static website hosting, NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is... well... nearly free.
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing