CMS suggestions for personal blog

General
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So, I want to start a personal blog.

It’s been a while, and in the past I mostly worked with WordPress. I don’t know why — maybe I’m just a special snowflake, maybe I’m overexposed and bored by it, maybe it’s the result of some weird planetary alignment — but I want to give something different a shot.

The blog would be a mix of light-hearted personal stuff, commentary on the marketing industry (my line of work), and essays on whatever happens to spark my interest.

I looked into Ghost, but it seems like it’s aimed more at the “I want to monetize my writing” crowd. I don’t know, maybe it’s also fine for a simple blog? I just feel it might be overkill.

My next thought was static site generators. I tinkered with Jekyll and, I’m not gonna lie, the idea of running my blog straight from the Linux terminal and VIM sounds like a blast. But I’m worried the novelty will wear off. And as I understand it, in order to customize the theme I’d need to learn Ruby on Rails?

As far as static site generators go, I also tested Publii. I really liked what I saw, and for the time being it seems like my go-to choice.

But I’m posting this because some of you may have good suggestions — something I haven’t tried, considered, or even heard of? Or maybe just some general tips and tricks?

As far as my tech savviness goes, I’m far from a programmer, but I know my way around FTP, HTML+CSS, and general web basics. That said, I’m leaning more and more towards plug-and-play, off-the-shelf solutions, and I’m willing to pay (not much really, since this will just be a small personal blog) — especially since I recently welcomed a newborn into my home, so don’t really have too much time for tinkering. (And even without taking it into consideration, it seems the older I get, the more I want to leverage what others have already built, rather than bathing in the pride of "I set this up myself!”).

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Yo! I’m using micro.blog myself for my blog, Shadowban. It let’s you pick a template and fiddle with the internal HTML/CSS. But it handles everything else, including reposting to other social media and a basic newsletter functionality.

If you want even more straightforward, check out bearblog.dev

Excited to see what you write!

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What do you like about Publii? I hadn’t heard of it before seeing your post.

Congratulations on the birth of your newborn! As a fellow parent, I share your sentiment on not having time to tinker on a custom setup. Leveraging what’s already out there is also my modus operandi.

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What do you like about Publii? I hadn’t heard of it before seeing your post.

It is surprisingly robust and easy to use at the same time. I’m still really surprised by how much is ready out of the box. If you need a simple blog, nothing gets in your way. But if you want to tinker with custom HTML or CSS, there are built-in editors for that. I don’t know how far you can push the design (and I don’t really care), but I’ve seen websites published with this CMS that have gone further than the basics I would normally expect from such platforms.

The UI is simple and intuitive. Everything is clean and easy to use. There are occasional bugs and hiccups (I’m using version 0.46.5, so that’s to be expected), but nothing that a simple closing and reopening of the application couldn’t fix ;).

I actually published my blog and first article yesterday. I just had to provide FTP credentials for my hosting (although there are other options, like GitHub Pages or Netlify), click the “sync” button and… well, that was it. That was it. The blog was live on my domain. I’m still shocked at how easy it was.

You can set practically any SEO-relevant setting there is, and, as someone working in the SEO industry since 2018, I can be really picky about this. While I don’t intend my blog to be SEO-heavy—in fact I want it to be a bit of a breather from writing SEO-optimized texts—the wealth of options in Publii is really impressive, and I’m in awe of how much attention has been paid to SEO.

You get sitemap and robots.txt settings ready to configure. You have Open Graph, HTML compression, lazy loading, RSS and JSON feeds. All built into the settings. I think it’s easily comparable to WordPress with the YoastSEO plugin (well, I didn’t see schema microdata settings, but I don’t really care in my case). Actually, I just tested schema.org validation on my blog, and there’s Organization schema on the homepage and Article schema on my posts, so there is something built-in—I probably just haven’t found the settings for it yet.

There’s also the option to write using a block editor, WYSIWYG, or straight-up Markdown. Although once you pick an editor type for a post, you can’t change it for that specific post (you can mix and match across different posts). A little strange, but there’s probably some backend reason for this.

I could go on, but in short—I’m just surprised how good it is, especially since I also hadn’t heard about it until recently.

Congratulations on the birth of your newborn! As a fellow parent, I share your sentiment about not having time to tinker with a custom setup. Leveraging what’s already out there is also my modus operandi.

Yeah, that’s right! Also, I actually discovered a new kind of Pomodoro-like productivity method: do as much as possible in the three-hour window between each round of changing diapers, feeding, and putting her to sleep :smile:.

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Thanks for the detailed response! I will definitely check it out the next time I decide I need to spin up some sort of blog :slightly_smiling_face:

Back to your original question about other possible static site generators, it seems like Publii has you covered on all fronts with its flexibility and depth. Are there any features that you wish it had?

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My biggest piece of advice is - use what you’re going to use.

And this probably applies across the board to software.

But there are a thousand options, and each one has its benefits and drawbacks. But the only one that matters is the one you’re going to use every day - or want to use every day.

In practical terms, the CMS choice for me came down to either Ghost or Beehiiv. I went with Beehiiv because it offered better content moderation support, and I had a rough incident earlier this year with someone buying a pro subscription just to drop a bunch of offensive comments all over the blog, and with Ghost it was actually very difficult to clean it all up.

That said - I’m always a believer in something simple like Medium if the goal is just to start.

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I’ve never used Publii. Interesting…

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@karolpieknik what’s the link to the post? Keen to read

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I’m here to second micro.blog. Manton’s done an awesome job, and the built-in cross posting to Mastodon x Threads x Bluesky is pretty good.

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I ama Next.js developer and even more specific to this discussion, a huge advocate of Sanity.io

The downside is that you do need some developer skills and time to get a CMS up and running (in my case, 30 minutes) and in reality in can take a month or so to get everything figured out. The positive, is that you can do it all for free, even the hosting, and at the most US$20 for pro hosting on Vercel. But, to use a critical thinking method, keeping it simple is probably your best choice right now in terms of time and effort.

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Well, I don’t know yet. I’m still learning, and since I haven’t had a personal blog in a decade, I probably don’t really know what I do or don’t need. At the moment, it actually feels like overkill for my needs — but who knows, I might grow into it.

I made the original post because I’m genuinely curious about what people recommend these days. I’ve heard a lot about the resurgence of “small personal blogs” on the web, so I figured there might be a bit of a renaissance in the small blog CMS space. Just wanted to look around and see what’s out there.

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Oooh, I know this one. Hopefully, my days of software-hopping are behind me. I’ve probably tested almost every well-known project management and note-taking tool on the market. Honestly, I’d love to get all those hours of my life back.

But that’s also why I’m asking around. While I consider myself fairly resistant to chasing the next shiny thing, I don’t want to invest my time into a CMS that will later reveal limitations or stubborn quirks. I seriously don’t want to migrate anything digital in my life ever again ;).

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Well, here it is. I write in Polish, so I can’t really guarantee how the translators will handle it. Honestly, even in Polish it might not be that great. But that’s kind of the whole point of the post: my hiatus from writing. I’m really rusty when it comes to personal blogging — so, fair warning!

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I’m a big fan of Pika for a basic blog. It’s simple, quick and has delightfully few things to tinker with. I use it for my very silly basketball blog and it’s perfect for jotting out quick posts.

I’m looking for something to move my “more serious” newsletter, which is long languishing. It’s using Ghost atm, which I don’t love. And I also don’t really enjoy using Beehiiv. I’m looking at Pagecord, since it’s a simple blog with email backed in (and Pika is also rolling out newsletter functionality).

I do miss tinkering around with static-site generators, though. I used to play around with Jekyll a lot – I never got particularly adept but futzing around with templates, styles and CSS was fun.

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I completely relate to the way you’re talking about your 30’s.

Exactly how I’ve felt.

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Never used Pika! Will have a look.

Curious why you don’t like Ghost?

I’ll be honest, after migrating to Beehiiv, I don’t love Beehiiv either…

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I use Ghost for a self-hosted low-volume blog, and I am happy with it. I disabled all the subscription, newsletter, and so on functionality. Before that, I used WordPress for a long time, tried micro.blog and Bear blog. I wanted to run it self-hosted somewhere in Europe, so Ghost was the best choice for me. May be this helps.

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I mostly find Ghost dull (which is fine), unwieldy or too much at different times.

Really, it’s too much software for what I need right now overall (unless I really dig into making the newsletter A Thing) and I’ve found it hard to find any themes that I like that don’t involve me spending way too much money. Broadly, it’s fine? I’ve probably just spent too much time getting irked at how I can’t tinker with the bits I enjoy tinkering with – which is more a me thing than a platform thing.

Still, I like it more than Beehiiv, which I’ve bounced off multiple times (even though its free tier makes more sense for what I do). Their new website builder is better but the whole interface makes me feel like I’m wading through low-grade mayonnaise.

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One thing I’ll say for Beehiiv - their pace of development is wild. They’re building and releasing at a very impressive pace…

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For someone just starting out, I’d also recommend https://write.as which is extremely easy to use and a nice starting point with native Fediverse integration (ie. people can read & reply on Mastodon). Then if you’re convinced, you can run it yourself or look into more feature-rich stuff like all the platforms quoted above.

(Personally, I’ve been running my blog on Wordpress since 2012, just because my hosting provider has one-click install and because it’s what I’m used to. I enjoy the flexibility, even at the cost of it being wayyyy too big for what I do with it.)

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