I want to make myself a blog as somewhat of a living resume.
This is mainly because my passion for personal projects speaks more than my actual day to day at work and I'd like to document my escapades in an open source way that I could point others to if they wanted to re-create something I did.
I'm not a web guy, I can do basic HTML templates and a flask backend. I'm sure I could manage a django backend with minor CSS but I'm wondering what else is out there. I love finding weird guy blogs, I keep a list of them, and I'd like my own weird guy blog to do weird guy stuff on. I don't want it to look super fancy, but I also want something more than bare HTML on a white background.
I really just don't know what kinds of tools, frameworks, etc are out there and everything points to high level squarespace type all-in-one setups and I like to be more technical than that.
If django was seriously an option for you, consider looking at hugo. It's a static website generator so all you really need to know is HTML and CSS, it's also fast. Jekyll/Hyde may or may not be easier to use (it's 2023 so IDK) but they are not as fast. You also can't make a faster website than a static website, which django will not be. django will probably require a server which means one additional way to get hacked, and it's the kind of way that actually gets targeted.
I don't really have any tips specifically but it sounds like WordPress would be the right fit for you.
Here's a pretty good curated list of self-hosted blogs (and many other things):
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
I don't personally self-host a blog so I can't give specific recommendations unfortunately.
What's your familiarity with Docker (or concepts like containerization in general)? If you've got some experience there/are willing to learn a bit it will make it incredibly easy to spin up a container for whichever blog projects look interesting to you and trying them out to see if they fit your desired functionality.
I'm pretty good with docker and a few backend technologies, I'm sure I could churn out the backend logic for a blog in a weekend, its the front end that spooks me. That and authentication to make sure it doesn't get screwed with.
That link is pretty good, I'm gonna go through that. This is why I ask questions, people just have things on tap that would take hours to find myself.
If you don't want to mess with authentication then why not just dispense with the backend entirely and build a blog with jekyll and github? There's many bare HTML on a white background blogs built with it but apparently you can also do more with the presentation if that's what you desire.
Huh that's pretty interesting. I played around with github.io before they ended that. I thought Jekyll was just a CI platform.
I'll look into that!
I also avoid frontend code like the plague so I get it.
Also glad to provide something useful. If you find a project that you like please report back as this is possibly something I'd also do in the future.
Will do, but most likely won't link it to avoid doxing myself. I've been trying to separate out internet presences and its rough when you've had a reddit account for over a decade where you simultaneously post agitprop AND try to contribute to certain communities.
Oh I didn't mean the blog itself, just the technology behind it if you do end up using one of the projects.
- Do you actually want to host it at home, or are you OK with a third party hosting it? If third party, do you have a budget?
- Do you want to host it using fancy 'cloud' tech for the resume clout, or do you not want to care about the infrastructure?
- Do you prefer using a CMS, an existing static site builder, or do you want to build your own tool? Building your own static site generator is fun, and you can blog about the process while building the blog itself.
The simplest, zero configuration, set and forget, and free route is to use Zola with a static site host (GitHub/Lab pages, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, etc.) that deploys via a
git push.I host a website on cloudflare and it's pretty simple and allows you to do some cool stuff. As for frontend, just learn some more CSS and HTML and write it from scratch, it's really not difficult. You can make a fancy looking website with even basic CSS knowledge
I'll just make a quick plug for the very popular CMS Joomla (https://www.joomla.org/)
Depends very much what you're looking for if it's a good fit. But it's a more open-source, easy to interface, and more easily customised/technically involved than WordPress.
Second the recommendation for a static pages site. Can't link it here cuz name, but I have a little self-hosted blog+site with a professional section I'm proud of. My resume is in LaTeX, and I found a thing that would let me turn it into valid HTML that would look good with CSS from the rest of my site. So I only have to update professional stuff once.
I did it with
makeand Jinja2 (the Flask template engine) into my existing Apache server but that was stupid and I added so much stuff I should have just used an off-the-shelf static site generator to begin with.I host a site with Hugo as the static site generator. I took a basic template then totally reshaped it into what I wanted. Static content is all I host and need, so I could put these files anywhere. But I just self-host it on my server (a VM on an old laptop) and get a few dozen legit hits a month according to my server logs. And I get a free cert from Let's Encrypt.
