For last few week I am trying to build a blog for my programming thought. The blog is simply my programming journal and I don't want to earn money from this. I am using WordPress on my blog and I think it is overkilling. Should I switch to Github pages?
You... do realize the site you are asking this question on is a blogging platform made for developers?
Unless you have non-technical people writing posts on your site or need some kind of dynamic content, I'd definitely recommend going with a static site generator. To me, it feels like a bit of a waste to spend money on Wordpress/VPS hosting if all you're going to use it for is to display text.
I'd personally recommend Netlify instead of GitHub Pages, if you do decide to go that route. They have a few more features, a really good CDN and (most importantly, in my opinion) they support HTTPS with custom domains.
So I give a shot to Netlify to compare with github pages.
Genuine question, as I'm fairly ignorant with regards to IPv6 - in what scenarios would that be an issue?
Totally agree, try a static site generator! They're loads of fun! Here are some of the most popular ones: staticgen.com/
if you don't want to earn anything, why are you bothering yourself with nasty setups, use Medium
you can:
The one reason why I din't choose the static-site route for blogs was because I had to push commits, maintain files manually etc. It felt like I was doing some work. I wanted blogging to feel like taking a break from work instead.
You can hook quite some static site generators up with Contentful nowadays. Once you've got that setup you've got a blazing fast CMS you'll never ever have to maintain as well!
lol I knew what you meant. I kind of have a problem these days generalizing "WordPress people" and more so when people frown and say, "oh you use WordPress?"
I am very grateful for WP as a starting ground in learning to code and program websites about 10 years ago and am a contributor and defender of it today.
Some proud non-wordpress devs are not aware of the huge environment of mixed technologies in a WordPress site which WP theme developers like me use at a core level to build things things like drag and drop features and themes that can be plugged in for example.
I'm not sure I've heard yet of a clear way to lable the two types of WordPress devs short and destinctly.
"WordPresser" doesn't sound that bad now since as an advanced WP developer I wouldn't call myself that.
"Overkilling"? What do you mean by that?
Simply get a lean wordpress template and you could still hit under 3-5 seconds of page loads time or even better.
Personally, I felt using wordpress was "overkill" when I started blogging about my web experiences here. However, leveraging available plugins for certain features proved to be a very useful thing after a few months.
In summary, my answer would be NO. I've not used Github pages that much to learn how flexible it is, but WordPress has a lot packed in, and you think you might not need some of these packaged features, but you WILL pretty soon.
Do you mean that serving blog pages in 3-5 seconds can be considered acceptable? For such low requirements, I’d still prefer a static site generator. Latest full cms I’ve built from scratch with Elixir/Phoenix and PostgreSQL serves pages between 20microsecs and 100millisecs when hosted on a 5$/month DigitalOcean droplet.
Medium + custom domain (why do you want to handle the tech setup for such a trivial thing)
Wordpress as static website: dev.to/cdrrazan/auto-deploy-your-s... Altrough I would not recommend wordpress to any sane person.
Static + react if you want to also learn react: github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby
For large static websites (many pages): gohugo.io/
Any static website can be hosted on github pages.
Medium + custom domain will cost you 75$ which is more compared to other solution. And As mentioned in question I don't expect to earn money mean I want cost to maintain less as much as possible
You cannot get less maintanbility then a managed service, Medium in this case.
I forgot to mention the Medium fee, is true, but it's cheaper compared to the other solutions if you take into account (depending on the paycheck of course and available time):
Another downside of the Medium is that you have to respect their policy, that can change, so you cannot post whatever you want there.
The right blogging platform is the one that encourages you to blog more, IMO, especially if it's mostly for yourself; if dealing with customizing Wordpress is getting in the way of actually writing about stuff and it's easier to hit the ground running with Github pages, then I'd say definitely do that!
Go sign up for a free wordpress website at WordPress.com, select a theme for the site then purchase a custom domain for the website... And you are done
That's the setup for my personal blog ssmusoke.com.
I post about once a quarter, but using the legacy web based editor or the desktop app for blog posting.
I never have to manage any infrastructure... Though I too live Jekyll which I have used for some websites.
Bottom line: use Jekyll or Github pages if you see a need to use the knowledge for other projects.
I use WordPress mortoray.com. I've yet to find a simple alternative in the same price class. I enjoy the statistics I get, the simple ability to upload images, and just never worry about upgrades, downtime, and such things.
I don't use their editor for most things. I write in markdown and convert to HTML locally.
The biggest point for me is the administration. I don't want any additional technical stress with managing my provider. This also makes it unlikely I'll switch unless I find an awesome alternative. The headache of tranferring has to be well worth it.
What bugs me the most about WordPress are the poor quality templates. Virtually none of them work with all styles of articles, have header images, a decent intro page, etc. They're all half-backed and incomplete.
I used both Wordpress an jekyll to help me manage my notes and I loved jekyll more.
The main reason is the editing. The Wordpress editor is terrible. Not to mention that you have to sign in every time you want to add posts. With a static generator you would use your favorite text editor. My favorite editor happens to be sublime so writing all my content there is pure bliss (with markdown plugins and so forth)
I haven't kept up with static generators but when I used jekyll it regenerated the whole project every time I added a new post, so when I got 100+ posts it was terribly slow to build and motivation killer. This was few years back.
Also, I'd recommend you host your repository somewhere private, bitbucket and gitlab give that for free. This is so that you can write as many drafts as you like fully knowing that they are private notes, then host the site at netlify.
ps - does anyone know any static generator that generates new content without generating the entire site?
Why netlify, why not Github pages?
If you’re a dev and you just need simple blogging, then a full blown cms like wordpress is overkill (not mentioning I don’t like PHP nor mysql). There are static site generators such as Hugo or Jeckyll (there are dozens out there written in several languages). Or write your own as a good excercise if you aren’t in a hurry ;-)
Edit: Nevermind, I see that I can just save the RSS feed and then click on publish here.
Is there a wordpress plugin where after publishing an article it auto publishes to dev.to?
If not, maybe that's something we should build as I really enjoy the convenience of auto publishing to my twitter and linkedin from wordpress.
Try Jekyll, static site generator , u can use github pages or netlify , you can use Hugo it's also a static site generator, it solves the problem of content editing and it's super fast. and there's no backend so basically it's more secure.
It's really awesome to make a website with a static site genrator like jekyll or Hugo , it's fast, more secure and gives a lot of CMS functionnality, like dividing code then calling the footer ...
If it's just a journal that want and you don't need others to see or need a custom url then just do it here or just save your thoughts as markdown and back up to github repo?
For my own setup, I installed WordPress onto my aws ec2 instance that serves up my personal site. It's pretty fast and the plugins let me quickly write and publish using email and also cross publish to LinkedIn, Twitter and the like. I thought it was super easy and fast.
I think in the end it's really just whatever you feel most comfortable with.
If you want. WordPress is perfectly fine - setup right - and SHOULD be delightfully quick and easy. And you have your own personal domain name and url.
Jekyll in GitHub looks cool if you go that route, but Gatsby would be even cooler with it: gatsbyjs.org/
I would follow Quincy and post on Medium. The exposure is awesome, so you’ll have lots of readers. It’s a thousand-times more effective and easier than the horror of WordPress.
Define WordPresser not a dev.
Who cares what you have to say, as long as you use the right platform to blog it?
Personally I use github. Jekyll is super easy to work with and once you've got it configured the way you like it, you can just copy-paste the header and start writing in markdown.