This truly feels like <a href="https://www.aleksandra.codes/tech-content-consumer/" rel="nofollow">https://www.aleksandra.codes/tech-content-consumer/</a>, where every blog post rehashes the well tread territory of Hugo/Jenkins/Netlify/GH Pages or Wordpress/Blogger/Ghost/Medium/Neocities, or even the newish "minimal" ones like <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23313196" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23313196</a>. You can even blog to specific audiences with the rise of "send a newsletter" SaaS things!<p>IMO, very few people are at a loss on "where to blog" or "how to blog", but rather actually <i>writing</i>. If you're a dev, you've got text files you can serve (or convert to html). If you're a non-tech person, you've got a dearth of places to blog on, with nearly a decade of tutorials about how to setup a domain and site. It feels like the demand for these "where to blog" posts are mostly to bikeshed on the tools and not actually the writing part.
Thought I would pipe in about one thing mentioned. "social media is great for promoting blogs" this was a throwaway comment and not the main point of the article but just thought peeps might be curious.<p>Cause twitter/social is NOT a great place for promoting a blog.<p>Each social network has their own algorithm for what they show people. At this point, none of them show you 100% of what is posted by the people you follow. This isn't the worst things, but its annoying.<p>the question becomes, what DO they show you?<p>For the most part it's things written IN THE PLATFORM.<p>These social networks want to keep you within the network, not have you end up on some other site.<p>The issue being, because of that incentive to keep you on their site, and a preference for on platform content, your blog post that you share generally wont be shown to very many people.<p>The only real solution to that is federation - reposting the content of the blog on each network. That's what gets you the views.<p>That brings up a whole host of issues.<p>Not disagreeing with the main overall point, I have a personal blog for many of the reasons posted, but I don't want people to think that posting a link to their personal site will get much traction on social media unless they already have an absolutely massive following.
I think there's a lot of analysis paralysis on deciding where to blog, so I threw together a quick repo you can just clone, drop some Markdown files in and it'll auto-publish to Gitlab pages and Neocities whenever you push:<p><a href="https://quicksite.stavros.io/" rel="nofollow">https://quicksite.stavros.io/</a><p>It's not as plug-and-play as paying for Wordpress hosting, but you also don't have to deal with all the update pain.
Neocities is a great place to at least start if you want a static site. You can just create an account and get to making HTML/CSS or just deploy static generated pages to it. It also supports custom domains.<p>If you want something more advanced, you can easily pivot from it to some other hosting.<p><a href="https://neocities.org/" rel="nofollow">https://neocities.org/</a>
Stratechery recommends using either Wordpress.com SaaS or the LAMP Stack based Wordpress.org platform. He does not mention Static Site Generators like Jekyll which is OSS and the default option for Github Pages freely hosted on github.io.<p>A modern blog should be written in Markdown and stored in a git repository. For non-devs, wordpress.com offers a slicker first time experience but companies like Netlify are trying to provide slick WebUIs to bridge the gap.
If you are a moderately technical person there are also very low effort solutions that allow you to self host static sites from Jekyll/Hugo totally free. Eg I haven't been a professional software engineer in ~5 years and I could get up and running in ~60min. The biggest issue tends to be that you need to write in Markdown with Git. I advocate for this everywhere because my satisfaction is so high.<p>IMO Wordpress' biggest advantage is that the growth marketing community really knows how to tune it and make it sing for common use-cases. If you're going to have a team running growth strategies on your blog you'll be able to hire a strong team to run SEO, inbound marketing, and whatever else you need. It's boring technology in the best sense.
I've been using wordpress.com for my blog since 2011, plus paying for my own domain. Nothing fancy, and has worked very well. Good value for, I think, 26 dollars a year.<p><a href="https://henrikwarne.com/" rel="nofollow">https://henrikwarne.com/</a>
>The problem — at least from my perspective — is that flexibility is optionality. If one day down the road you want your site to be something other than a blog, but you are using Ghost, you need to go through the same sort of transition process I described above.<p>This may actually be a Good Thing. Honestly, I can't think of many things you want to start doing where you want to adapt your existing blog. When you start on something new, create a new sub-domain or buy a new domain, install new software and go from there. I'd much rather focus on doing what you're doing now well rather than make a trade for speculative optionality.
Someone I respect once told me that Ghost is written for its developer’s needs and to promote the hosted platform, and not intended to be an easy to manage self hosted solution. I don’t know how far that’s true, but WordPress seems to be ahead on mindshare (and likely features and plugins too). For better or worse, PHP/LAMP hosts with control panels are aplenty.<p>Writing on any platform regularly is not easy for everyone. So it’s less of a platform issue than some people perceive it to be. For most people, a “free” wordpress.com or blogger.com (or gasp, medium.com if you really hate your readers) is good enough to start.
Choosing a blogging host isn't the main obstacle for most people; it is writing consistent, high-quality articles.<p>Focusing on writing well and building an audience is the most important thing while starting out.<p>n.b.: I've been writing at <a href="https://reframing.substack.com/" rel="nofollow">https://reframing.substack.com/</a> for the past 5 weeks.
I don’t think he addresses the real problem of where to blog of where and how to blog so that readers actually find you.<p>Generating a Wordpress blog is easy compared to figuring out how to actually get it discoverable. I think that’s what a lot of these blog service providers are missing is some sort of way to find content being generated on their hosting platform.
Note that from a SEO and discovery standpoint you bring link power and authority to the domain you blog on. So if you use a platform and not your own domain, then the platform gets all the link juice. Platforms are only good for spammers as they can piggyback on others authority.
If anyone is interested in full stack self hosting, I recently started a cloud from scratch resource here.<p><a href="https://github.com/technomada/cloud-from-scratch" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/technomada/cloud-from-scratch</a>
I really wish a longform document/essay/dissertation was done on how impactful the loss of Google Reader but the thriving of Twitter and Facebook ruined the internet and allowed clickbait and shortform incendiary content to thrive.
Don't serve your posts from someones database. You can still use a CMS, but make sure the content is rendered statically. Static web sites are 100x faster, more secure, and cheaper to host.
Self-hosting WordPress is a really bad choice in fact. Every self-hosted WordPress blog I follow in my RSS reader eventually becomes a content farm. The only way to not become a content farm is to use commercial hosting (WordPress VIP, WPEngine), but at that point, why are you using WordPress instead of Square or whatever?<p>If you're a developer, just build a static site. If you're not a developer, you're going to have to pay.