I want to start my own blog but the vast number of choices overwhelms me. Deciding between Astro/Hugo/Jekyll right now. Can anyone share their experiences if they have built their blogs using these tools?
I haven't tried Astro, but I moved my blog from Jekyll to Hugo.
I did it because I remember having issues with jekyll installation from time to time, like it suddenly broke out of nowhere, and trying to fix it became a pain.
Then I looked for alternatives and found Hugo, changed the template and installed in all my systems (Windows, Linux, macOS) and it has worked like a charm. Also, the speed boost was super noticeable, like, several times faster.
So if I were to choose again between Jekyll and Hugo, I'd go with Hugo.
Yeah, seems like the way to go here. To get something up and running first and then deciding if a different and shiny tool really would make much of a difference.
Honestly, the overwhelming number of tool choices and themes is the biggest hurdle these days.
I will shamelessly plug my solution: md2blog. You just plop Markdown files into folders and it does the rest, without letting you get distracted by themes.
Edit: addressing the article, md2blog does not support email subscriptions, but it does generate an Atom feed. It also requires using a command line (but the tool is a single binary, so no installation or dependencies to deal with).
I want to do the same and integrate it with my existing hobby e-com website. I was thinking of finding something that just turns markdown into HTML and using that. On the other-hand, a wysiwyg editor would be nice. I have no desire to use something heavy like wordpress or anything that requires a database. My little e-com website has no database backend which i'm kind of proud of :)
edit: on the third hand... i need a place to practice and stay in shape with full stack dev as i'm more of a manager/therapist these days. So maybe something from the ground up is in my future
Exactly my problem. With what you've described, I think Astro + some headless CMS would be the way to go here. I say Astro because having JS is a nice thing and it will let you do things that would require more effort with Jekyll/Hugo. (since you say want to integrate with your existing hobby e-com website)
Plus, it has the added benefit of keeping your front-end skills upto date.
I've been using Jekyll for a nuclear education site for many years, after doing it for even more in just manual text-edited HTML. It's great, and I'm impressed with all the little things I can do with it, such as highlighting the current page in the menu and having little back/forth buttons from page to page. No complaints.
I also use self-hosted WordPress for a hobby blog and like the graphical editor and easy drag drop of images.
I moved from jekyll (to hakyll) to hugo years ago since I found working with Ruby and its libraries slightly annoying and Hugo (packaged as a simple binary) more straightforward to use.
That said, I haven't updated my blog in years, and at this point I'm not sure I still know how to! But the good thing about a static site generator, is it just sits there in S3, costing me just $0.14/month.
I migrated from Jekyll to Astro a few weeks ago. It only took me a few hours to replicate the site, more or less. Here's the website and the post about the experience.
Jekyll is more oldschool. For me, Hugo seems to have a more active community and gets a lot of points for being a static binary (basically never fails and compiles very quickly). Haven't used Astro.
