Question

What's best way to host a blog on DO?

Posted February 10, 2017 5.4k views
CentOS CMS Ubuntu 16.04 Open Source

I was wondering if anyone has suggestions on the best way to host a blog? I’ve used WP in the past and that would probably do the job fine but it’d be more interested to try something else. I don’t have a lot of criteria:

  1. Relatively easy to use once it’s installed.
  2. The actual blog posts can be done in HTML5 and in Markdown. For example, I’d like to be able to do some straight forward posts just using Markdown and maybe HTML for things like embedding videos. I’ve done a few demos using Screenflow that I’d like to post.
  3. It should look sharp and clean without a lot of design effort. I’m more of a techie so I’m not interested in spending a lot of time on design.

Thanks.

Neil

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marmot7
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3 answers
Bauer312 February 10, 2017

Neil,

Check out Hugo. It’s designed to generate blog-style sites in pure HTML using Markdown for the content. You can use Nginx & Let’s Encrypt to run a secure web server hosting those HTML documents. Best of all, there are existing tutorials for each of these tools.

Good Luck!

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  • marmot7 February 10, 2017

    I’ve heard of Hugo. It’s a static-site generator. I like the concept. I’ll use Nginx and Let’s Encrypt as you suggest as well. Thank you.

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Pothi February 11, 2017

It should look sharp and clean without a lot of design effort. I’m more of a techie so I’m not interested in spending a lot of time on design.

In this case, I recommend sticking with WP ecosystem due to vast variety of ready-made themes available. Some of the themes are free too.

Anyway, since the original question is about an alternative, I recommend Ghost.

Medium is famous among the techies too.

Probably, you have heard about both already!

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  • marmot7 February 12, 2017

    Yes, I’ve used WP before and it is amazing how quickly I can get a site up that looks pretty good. I’m tempted to go with that even though I was asking about alternatives, maybe setting up a blog should be kept simple. I intend to blog about technical things.

    I’ve heard about Ghost. Do you like Ghost better than WP.

    The complaint I’ve heard about Medium is that it’s closed so those who favor an open internet criticize Medium for that. Is that a fair criticism? Any idea why Medium chooses a closed system?

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leaderint April 6, 2017

If your a developer I would go with October CMS. It’s much easier to customize compared to WP and has a wonderful blog feature where you can write in markdown.

I used WP for years and still have some sites running on it but I’m slowly migrating them to October.

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