How to Start Your Blog in 2023

Re:How to Start Your Blog in 2023 by boredemployee on Monday February 20, 2023 @05:36PM (#34873870)

Could you explain how do you do it? I really want to have a blog but I don't want to fuck with wordpress and all that I know is a little bit of html, python and sql.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How to Start Your Blog in 2023 by idlewords on Monday February 20, 2023 @05:57PM (#34874044)

  <head>
    <title>Title</title>
  </head>
  <body>
  <p><b>2023.02.20</b></p>
  <p>This is the first paragraph.</p>
  <p>This is the second.</p>
  </body>

Save that as "blogpost.htm" somewhere a web server can see it.

Add stylesheets and so on as you get more comfortable, but it really is that simple. All that matters in the long run is what you put between the <p> tags.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How to Start Your Blog in 2023 by lapcat on Monday February 20, 2023 @07:11PM (#34874710)

Wow, I didn't expect so much interest in my comment!

I should start by saying that I'm not averse to a little "manual labor". I know a lot of people feel compelled to automate everything, and if you're like that, then you wouldn't like my methods at all. ;-)

My entire blog is in a git repository.

I use BBEdit for text editing. https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/ It has a full set of HTML tools and templates.

Whenever I want to write a new blog post, I create one from an HTML template that already has a style sheet, header, footer, and other structured info.

All of my blog posts are listed reverse chronologically in a table in the "index.html" file. I just have to create a new table row for the new blog post at the top and fill in the date, filename, and title.

I can preview the blog post in a web browser while I'm writing it, and BBEdit accepts drag and drop of images files, automatically creating img elements.

I also have a template for the RSS feed entries. I use the Atom format FWIW. Each entry has a section where I can copy and paste the HTML from the blog post into the RSS feed:

I use the W3C feed validation service to check the RSS syntax, and I also subscribe to the local copy of the RSS feed file in my RSS reader app. https://validator.w3.org/feed/

That's about it! My system has become slightly more sophisticated over the years. When I started blogging this way, it was even more primitive. The whole point was to just start blogging, and not worry about my blogging system. It seems that worrying about the blogging system stops a lot of people from blogging in the first place.

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Re:How to Start Your Blog in 2023 by schemescape on Monday February 20, 2023 @09:23PM (#34875695)

> It seems that worrying about the blogging system stops a lot of people from blogging in the first place.

I couldn’t agree more, and I’ve been a victim of it myself. This is why I like zero-config setups now. Choosing themes is the most attractive nuisance ever…

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