looking for lightweight ghost blog alternative

8 days ago by simon574 to c/selfhosted

My blog is currently running on Ghost 1.0 I'm blogging for almost 20 years, started with blogger.com I think, eventually migrated to self-hosted Ghost when it was pretty new and lightweight. I can host anything that runs on Linux, I can even use Docker.

I don't want to migrate to the latest Ghost version because it feels very enterprisey now, needs a lot of resources on the server and uses a complex data format instead of Markdown. I don't need monetization either.

My requirements are:

possible to migrate ~30-40 Markdown posts + embedded images from Ghost 1.0
future proof, i.e. simple data format so I don't get locked in
low RAM/CPU usage
easy maintenance, creating posts, backups, etc
RSS support

I'll be very grateful for any suggestions.

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notabot 10 points 8 days ago

Depending on exactly what features you actually need in term of things like commenting, you might want to look into a static site generator. Something like hugo woud probably do what you need in terms of translating the markdown into a blog. It has the advantage that you can them host the pages on a normal web server, rather than running a blogging platform, giving you a much lighter weight server footprint, and a much smaller attack surface too.

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simon574 4 points 8 days ago

I don't really need comments, only RSS. Hugo is a great piece of software, I actually use it for my personal webpage. It would be an option for the blog too, my only gripe is that it adds some friction. For example if I want to embed images, I have to upload them somewhere, and manually insert the filename. I also need regenerate the site if I add new posts. I know this can be automated using scripts.

With Ghost it's very simple, I can just write a post, upload the images, hit "Publish" and done. There was even a mobile app for writing new posts, but it doesn't work anymore.

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notabot 7 points 8 days ago

Hugo can handle images through its asset pipelines, so you should be able to just store them with your markdown. I agree it's a little more friction than a blogging pkatform, but it does mean that you can just write your posts in your editor of choice and publish them with just a command, or if you're feeling fancy, set up git to trigger publishing when you push.

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simon574 2 points 7 days ago

This is a good point actually. As others have mentioned, editors like VS Code make working with images in markdown easier. I'm also looking into Obsidian, which I already use on my phone, but it might be too much effort to setup for this purpose.

So I'm warming up to the idea of using a static site generator, just need to figure out a workflow. There is also Zola which is kind of like Hugo but smaller and written in Rust.

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eodur 1 point 8 days ago

Hugo is really easy to automate too. Just toss it on a github/codeberg repo and use one of the community's publish pipelines.

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starshipwinepineapple 2 points 8 days ago

I host my hugo site through gitlab pages (any forge "pages" could work) and images are simple. I just drop the image from my file browser into my IDE (VSCodium) in-line and it automatically puts the image in the article's folder and links to the image in the article. I push the article to gitlab and the site is automatically rebuilt with the new content.

Some hugo themes might have custom shortcodes to display images in certain ways like side by side, galleries, etc with special styling. Invoking those shortcodes is different but just a simple image upload is no trouble. And no scripts necessary

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wltr 2 points 7 days ago

Hey, I solved the issue with the media by writing a custom app (it’s a bit more advanced than just a script) that copies the media to my server and inserts the links right into my posts. I’m at the stage of testing it, but so far it works. That allows me to host my blog on Cloudflare, plus have all my media on my own bare metal server, with as much storage as I need. Which is incredibly cheap. So far, I pay only for the domain name, and electricity to run my servers. But since they’re very energy efficient, that’s negligible.

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