Ask HN: Bloggers, how do you manage your content?

I would like to start a personal blog. I think Substack is a good option, but I would like more control over styling (potentially custom components) and want to host the blog on my own website.

I wanted to ask what the writing and hosting process is like for people who have a personal website and blog—do you just write markdown and then use a renderer?

I would like a kind of wysiwyg editor to see exactly how the content will appear once loaded. The issue with writing in a separate editor is that the line breaks, line lengths, font, etc. never appear how they will actually look. Thanks!

4 points | by freemanjiang 9 hours ago

2 comments

  • midzer 8 hours ago
    I use a Static Site Generator (SSG) regularly.

    You will have wysiwyg when you develop locally.

    Here's an overview over some tools: http://staticgen.com/

    [-]
    • freemanjiang 8 hours ago
      I see, yeah I use Next.js pretty regularly, you mean on hot reload then?

      You still need to write your content as Markdown or something else, right? I feel the editors of Substack give some nice features like shortcuts for bold, italics. What do you do about that?

    • wannabebarista 6 hours ago
      I tried several on this list a few years ago and found Jekyll the most flexible/enjoyable for my use case. It's a bit dated though.
  • ben_w 8 hours ago
    I use HTML directly, with a small custom-made wrapper so all I write is the main content itself, not the head element or the visible footer. Some scripts to build the index page, the tags page, the categories page. Hosted on GitHub, but it would work just as well on my own domain. I made some stylesheets for fun, the default is deliberately minimalistic.

    I've found I have so few readers I don't really need a comment section, so I've not even implemented one.