Hi,

I am looking for a good and lightweight blogging solution.

I imagine I can just go with a static site generator like jekyll but I’d like something else… it would be a plus if it can federate :)

Any ideas?

Thanks !

EDIT: I forgot to say that obviously wordpress does not enters in the “lightweight” category ;)

  • rice@lemmy.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    What is your reason to blog, for yourself? If so I run (used to run gitea) forgejo and just spam everything in issue threads on specific repositories

    this uses 150mb of ram, basically 0% cpu

    forgejo is actively working on federation, it is there not sure how done it is I don’t use it.

  • llama@lemmy.zipEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    I use the parsedown library with a custom PHP index page to serve markdown files as HTML.

  • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.socialEnglish
    111·
    3 days ago

    If Jekyll isn’t your jam, then Hugo probably won’t be, either.

    I have a simple workflow based on a script on my desktop called “blog”. I Cask it with “blog Some blog title” and it looks in a directory for a file named some_blog_entry.md, and if it finds it, opens it in my editor; if it doesn’t, it creates it using a template.md that has some front matter filled in by the script. When I exit the editor, the script tests the modtime and updates the changed front matter and the rsyncs the whole blog directory to my server, where Hugo picks up and regenerates the site if anything changed.

    My script is 133 lines of bash, mostly involving the file named sanitization and front matter rewriting; it’s just a big convenience function that could be three lines of typing a little thought, and a little more editing of the template.

    There’s no federation, though. I’m not sure what a “federated blog” would look like, anyway; probably something like Lemmy, where you create a community called “YourName”. What’s the value of a federated blog?

    Edit: Oh, I forgot until I just checked it: the script also does some markdown editing to create gem files for the Gemini mirror; that’s at least a third to a half of the script (yeah, 60 LOC without the Gemini stuff), which you don’t need if you’re not trying to support a network that never caught on and that no-one uses.

    • estebanlm@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      oh, Ghost is cool :)
      Not sure how much can use it, but indeed it feels like a great platform (maybe too much for some small posts :P)

    • Zak@lemmy.worldEnglish
      71·
      3 days ago

      It wants a gigabyte of RAM. Maybe that passes for lightweight in 2025, but given the fundamental things a blog has to do, I’d probably put the cutoff at less than a tenth that amount.

        • Zak@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 days ago

          Federation doesn’t inherently require large amounts of memory. Fundamentally, it’s a matter of selecting a list of unique servers (likely tens, maybe hundreds) from a larger set of followers (likely hundreds, maybe thousands) and sending an HTTP request to each when there’s a new post. There’s a speed/size tradeoff for how many to send in parallel, but it’s not a resource-intensive operation.

          Growth beyond a few tens of megabytes was a bug in Writefreely, which is a likely-suitable option several comments here recommended.

      • dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        12·
        3 days ago

        It costs like $3/mo to host it. If that’s too resource intensive then I don’t know what your limits are. Compute isn’t free—that literally breaks the laws of thermodynamics, no matter what you’re told by hosting services, and ghost does server side rendering and has a dynamic admin dashboard and can even work headless… and it costs less than $3/mo for your own personal open source cms.

        If you need something that costs less then you can just build your own I guess, but how many hours of your time is that worth when you could just be spending $3/mo. If you make minimum wage at $7/hr one hour of work gets you two months of running a website.

        • Zak@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          3 days ago

          I’m thinking like a programmer about what a basic blog has to do and the computing resources necessary to accomplish it. Software that needs more than a few tens of megabytes to accomplish that is not lightweight regardless of its merits.

          This comment seems to be arguing that one should not demand blog software be lightweight because there’s inexpensive hosting for something heavyweight. That’s a fine position to take, I guess, but OP did ask for lightweight options.

          • False@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            2 days ago

            You may be thinking like a programmer but the guy you responded to is thinking like a software engineer.

            • Zak@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              2 days ago

              I’d put it farther removed from the technical side than that; dreadbeef is thinking like a manager. OP might be better off paying a third party $3/month to handle the details and host a heavyweight, full-featured blog for them, but that’s not what they asked for.

              This is selfhosted, which I think implies a desire to self-host things even if it might seem a wiser use of resources to do something else.

          • dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            1·
            3 days ago

            Im merely making a value proposition because im an engineer and I’ve had this same exact problem and desire. Call it experience — a static blog is fine since I can build one of those in my sleep, but for me I wanted to post on it when I was away and only had my phone. Now do I put it on my git? A separate notebook that is synced somewhere? I have ADHD—if I want to write I have to write and I can’t just hope to remember it sometime later. Now what’s the point of my blog if I can’t write on it when I need to but simply don’t have my desktop nearby? Also you have to have pay for a CI to do the building anyway for a static site generator, that ain’t free and even if you found a service that provides CI for free you’re just externalizing your costs somewhere else. Laws of thermodynamics still apply. So instead of paying for CI to build your static site, I’d argue just pay for the server rendered site. Why choose to have a 1gb ram build server for a blog when you can just use that server to run the blog.

            And they want federation support. Ghost is working on that as well speak. What static site generator supports federation?

    • estebanlm@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      I’m liking them! even if they do not seem very alive (still, blogging itself is not the most “alive” activity around nowadays…)

    • haverholm@kbin.earth
      1·
      3 days ago

      Plume isn’t currently actively maintained, unfortunately. It’s right below the fold of the page you linked 😞

      As for customisability, I think writefreely has some different themes to choose from, they’re just hidden away in the docs or on github.

  • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    I’ve heard a lot of good things about Ghost. I see a lot of bloggers running it. I’m not a blogger and I doubt anyone would be interested in what I had to say…lol…so I don’t have experience in that area. However, Ghost seems to be the ticket for bloggers. It integrates with thousands of services and some really great theme templates. If I were going to start a blog, that’s what I would go with. Jeremy over at Noted.lol has a write up about it and iirc, he uses Ghost for Noted.lol itself.

  • ex_06@slrpnk.netEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    In order from little to bigger:

    • any ssg like Zola or pelican
    • mataroa.blog
    • writefreely
    • ghost
    • lemmy :)
  • SmokeyDope@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    Would something like this interest you? Gemtext formatted to html is about as light weight as it gets. lots of automatic gemtext blog software on github that also formats and mirrors an html copy. Whenever a news page article gets rendered to gemtext through newswaffle it shrinks about 95-99% of the page size while keeping text intact. Let me know if you want some more information on gemini stuff.