Where to write technical blog posts?

Questions / Help
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Hello,

I have written a number of articles on mostly Elixir/Erlang and Phoenix on medium.com here - https://imeraj.medium.com

While medium is pretty good, I am wondering if I were to have my own website with technical blog posts, what are some better options? It should be possible to also comment on the posts and subscribe etc.

Some websites I like (but don’t know what technology is used) for example -

Thanks,
– Meraj

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fly.io free tier?

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Thanks! I edited my post a bit. I don’t have a website I want to host actually. I more want some site which is good for technical blogging. Willing to purchase a custom domain too!

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Just use one of the many thousand static site generators and host it on Vercel or Netlify?

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I think https://dev.to might be good for you.

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POSSE - host your own site on GitHub/GitLab Pages or Netlify and then copy the same article to other services while linking back to your site.

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Posting links to your blog on social medias can give you some traffic and thus the dopamine boost. However, it is a game you can’t win: in terms of amusement, a blog post is no match for a TikTok video. The natual companion of blogs is RSS, and every sane static site generator supports RSS already.

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That is why you post your article everywhere afterwards. But the canonical source is always your own site.

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I agree with you that you should keep the canonical source to your own site. I only question the wisdom of posting links everywhere, especially on social medias. Yes, you get some satisfaction by seeing the likes and reposts. However, you will also feel the unfairness that your original article only have dozens of likes but the silly cat video right next to it have thousands.

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The fact that most of humanity prefers to amuse itself and not do more education and helping the world is well-known and kinda out of scope of this topic (and forum). :stuck_out_tongue:

But yeah, you’re not wrong.

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Thanks for the suggestions. I decided to move to https://imeraj.hashnode.dev for now. Will see how that goes.

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BYOB - Build your own blog.

I highly recommend Eleventy - It’s a static site generator (SSG). Just supply the templates, build the site in a fraction of a second, then you can push it to the web using (my preferred choice at the moment) Netlify.

You can make the posts using Markdown and the SSG will convert them to HTML

Eleventy has a blog template you can use. If you just want to get up and running without being a feudal serf in the kingdom of lord Medium, that template + Netlify is the way to go. It even has syntax highlighting built in!

Eleventy does have a bit of a learning curve to get everything set up properly, but the blog starter kit that I linked is the quickest way to go from zero to one IMO.

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Maybe @zachdaniel can comment on Obsidian Publish for his personal site https://zachdaniel.dev/ – I’ve been wanting to try this as well!

For context: Obsidian is a very powerful and customizable free note-taking app (understatement), and somewhat recently introduced a premium publishing service that lets you publish certain documents natively from the app.

For an extremely low-friction setup, I can’t think of anything much better than this.

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Obsidian is nice! It misses some features like rss feeds, but it’s fun to use and it’s cool to be able to publish directly from my notes.

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Obsidian also does not have SSR (server side rendering), so there is no content unless you enable javascript. As a note taking app this is fine; however, as a blogging app this is a serious downside.

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