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Discussion on: Which stack to use for blogging site?

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Daniel Meechan

I initially planned to write posts to a GitHub repo in Markdown and have a Hugo site generated from that, but I found it quite limiting because I needed GitHub repo access and a Markdown editor on any machine that I wanted to write from. So noting down post ideas and quick notes from my phone didn't work too well. Ultimately, I needed a solution that I could set up once then focus solely on writing (from anywhere).

So I ended up moving to self-hosted Ghost CMS (hosted on DigitalOcean). It lets me write from anywhere and use a wonderful editor. I wanted the Ghost backend separate from the public-facing front-end, so I ultimately chose Gatsby to generate a static front-end using Ghost's GraphQL API.

And finally, I wasn't keen on storing media uploads on the DigitalOcean VPS, so I'm using ghost-storage-github to send all media uploads to a GitHub repo. Then Statically's free CDN sits in front the GitHub repo.

Final stack:

Frankly, it ended up being much more complex than I'd have liked. I'm very happy with Ghost and the GitHub repo + Statically combo for writing and media uploads, but the Gatsby feels like it just adds so much... complexity. In hindsight, it would've been better to just use Ghost's front-end so I could just get on with writing.

Any ideas on how to achieve a similar end result with less complexity?