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How I was looking for a kid engine for a blog



I write a lot on the Internet and I wanted to create my own personal standalon blog where you can write small notes and articles that are not suitable for other sites. The main problem of a personal blog is that I am too lazy to write posts . To scribble a couple of lines in any Wordpress, you need too many gestures. I tried several different engines and each time I caught myself feeling that I didn’t want to use them, it’s much faster and easier to write in a notebook like Evernote or Notion. So I began to look for the perfect blog engine that meets all my needs.

My requirements for the perfect engine:


  • self-hosted — , narod.ru google+ , , . - DMCA, Medium LiveJournal.
  • — - , , , .
  • — CMS , , , .
  • A full-fledged WYSIWYG editor - support for Markdown markup and its processing in real time, code highlighting, pasting pictures from the clipboard.
  • Normal comments - the ability to leave anonymous comments and log in through a maximum of social. networks for personalized comments.
  • Minimalistic appearance - I do not want to engage in layout and themes, a suitable design should be out of the box.


Inside I tell how I see the ideal CMS, the editor of posts and comments, why most of the existing engines are out of date for ten years, and compare different engines among themselves.


What is a normal WYSIWYG editor?



(Video with sound) An example of an ideal WYSIWYG editor in Notion

⇧ Video with a demonstration of the best editor in my opinion ⇧

The post editor is the most important thing in the engine, because you spend the most time in it. WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) is an editor type in which text is formatted immediately, without switching between the source code and the final version. It pains me to watch old-school devotees manually write HTML tags, BBcode, switch between previews and source code ten times, upload images separately to hosting and, as a result, spend a lot of time composing text. Editors in all sorts of Wordpress are outdated for several decades!

Update
Since 2018, Wordpress has been using the new cool Gutenberg editor, which is no worse than Notion. At the time of writing, I did not know about this.


It turns out that few people know that there are modern editors who can render markdown in real time, paste pictures from the clipboard. You can generally forget about writing code for the layout of the text.

My editorial requirements:


  • WYSIWYG - everything should be rendered right away, that is, after entering two ## lattices from a new line, the text should immediately turn into a header. No preview and source code.
  • Markdown support - basic things like headers, lists, code highlighting should work. There is no need to drag the mouse to the text formatting elements, if everything can be done from the keyboard.
  • — , Ctrl+V . .




Notion — Evernote




I love Notion . This is the most advanced tool for taking notes, maintaining a wiki, describing projects, simple task managers, a calendar and more. Notion supports teamwork, it has a huge library of templates and, if desired, it can be turned into anything, even in CRM.

But the most important thing in Notion is its editor. It is just perfect for writing posts. The video above shows an example of writing a simple post using markdown markup, pasting code, pictures from the clipboard. For comparison, the engine of Aegeus Ilya Birman is used.

Unfortunately, Notion is not well suited to a public blog. Yes, you can publish all pages on the Internet as a regular site, here is even an example siteon notion. But you can’t screw your domain to it, moving around the pages looks strange, sometimes they open in the form of windows, not separate pages.

Notion does not yet have a public API, but there are already client implementations, for example on Go . The author of this client wrote a crutch to pull pages from notion and upload them to his server. But the private API can change at any time and everything will break, this method involves constant perdoling.

Pros / cons of Notion

✓ Ideal editor
✓ Has sophisticated formatting
✓ Support for page templates
✗ No self-hosted version
✗ Poor site fit
✗You can’t connect your domain
✗ Garbage in the URL, you can not set the page address yourself
✗ Inconvenient navigation, pop-ups instead of individual pages
✗ No comments

Jekyll and Github pages - static site generator




Jekyll is a static site generator popular with programmers. It is commonly used in conjunction with Github Pages . You probably met the home pages of computer people made by this generator. On Hacker News every third site uses it. Its main point is that posts are written in your favorite IDE in markdown format and deployed via git in the same way as code, and HTML is already generated from them on the server.

I also tried to use it hub.zhovner.com

At first glance, everything seems easy, but to write a post you need to create a text file, name it in a special way in a format YEAR-MONTH-DAY-title.mdand put it in a folder_posts. Pictures must also be manually sorted into folders and prescribe links to them. It is assumed that the programmer will write snippets, hooks, macros for all this, his posts will be automatically called, moved, pictures will be laid out to folders, etc.

There are many plugins for popular IDEs like VSCode for real-time markdown rendering, image insertion, etc. There are even whole CMS made as an add-on around jekyll, here are some of them: forestry.io , cloudcannon.com , netlifycms.org/docs/jekyll/. They connect directly to the github repository and the site can be edited through their WYSIWYG editors and automatically synchronized through git. It sounds beautiful, but in fact it works poorly. Not a single editor is even close to the reference editor Notion.

After a couple of years of using Jekyll, I caught myself thinking that I was just unpleasant and difficult to work with him. I forget the snippets for creating a new post in my Sublime Text editor, I am too lazy to upload the site via Git and in most cases I just prefer not to write than going through all these procedures.

Pros / cons of Jekyll

✓ Full control over the site and design
✓ Can be hosted independently
✓ Only static HTML
✓You can connect any comment service
✗ It is difficult to publish new posts
✗ There is no normal editor
✗ Third-party crutches like CMS and plugins for IDE do not work well

Ghost - CMS for the blog




Ghost is a relatively new fashionable open source CMS. The site describes only the paid SaaS version, but there is a ready-made Docker image that can be deployed in one click.

Ghost has almost the same cool editor as Notion, I was delighted when I tried it: normal support for markdown in real time, pictures are pasted from the clipboard, pretty! After a little finishing, even syntax highlighting appears in code blocks.

I already decided that I found my ideal engine, until I began to deal with the design of the appearance of the site. It turned out that the default theme does not imply any settings, as we are all used to seeing in the same Wordpress. Those simply do not have any settings, it’s banal to turn on / off the menu, footer / header. Rummaging through the gallery of official topics , I realized that there are a dozen of them there and not one suits me. There are only a hundred and fifty themes on Theme Forest for Ghost, against 12 thousand for Wordpress. In two days of searching, I could not find a suitable topic, all either too dumb or long abandoned and not compatible with the current version of the engine. I do not understand layout and writing my own topic was not part of my plans. Therefore, I had to postpone Ghost and continue the search.

Ghost , , . Affinity . , .

Out of the box, Ghost has a lot of interesting features like paid subscriptions to closed content, like Patreon, and a bunch of ready-made plugins for integrations. Many companies use this engine for their corporate blogs . Development is very active, committing on Github every day .

Pros / cons of Ghost

✓ Excellent editor
✓ Full control over the site and design
✓ You can host by yourself
✓ You can connect any comment service
✗ Themes without settings, only edit the sources
✗ Create and edit posts only through the admin panel

Teletype.in - a minimalistic service for blogs




Teletype.in is a minimalist analog of Medium from Russian developers with markdown markup support. In style, it resembles a service from the developers of the Telegram messenger - telegra.ph , only with the ability to fully register and blog within your profile. You can connect your domain.

I really liked the idea and approach of the developers: the correct WYSIWYG editor, pictures are pasted from the clipboard, no admin panels, at least an interface, focus only on content. That’s how I imagined the perfect blog engine.

I connected the domain and tried to transfer a couple of articles from my blog to Jekyll in Teletype.in. In a couple of minutes of use, several significant bugs got out: I accidentally broke the layout and got a non-working post page. I am glad that the developers communicate in Russian and actively respond in the support chat in Telegram, they confirmed all the bugs and fixed them in a couple of days. The guys promise to add syntax highlighting in the code blocks and actively modify the editor. So far, minor inconveniences remain in it and it is not as good as the Notion editor.

Comments are not yet very functional, you can’t write anonymously, the entrance is not through all social networks. There is something to modify.

Pros / Cons Teletype.in

✓ Good editor
✓ You can connect your domain
✓Conveniently add and edit posts
✓ You can specify a URL for each post
✗ There is no control over the site, you can not host a host
✗ crude editor, there are bugs
✗ little scope for the profile design

WordPress, Aegean and all other engines


I tried a lot of engines and most of them look outdated for several decades. The main problem is the redesigned admin interface and the lack of a WYSIWYG editor. I will not analyze the popular CMS, because they all suffer from the problems described above.

The correct form of comments


I feel uncomfortable if I see an article under which you can not leave a comment. Even worse, when the possibility of commenting is fenced by a paid subscription or complex registration. The correct form of comments should allow any visitor to express themselves as easily as possible without the need to register on the site.

Disqus - poor comment service




I have a site that uses the Disqus comment service . Every third comment there Disqus marks as spam and hides it, no matter how I try to turn off spam filters. Because of this, people cannot communicate normally. The order of comments is constantly changing randomly, some comments simply disappear after a while. It pulls tons of javascript and slows down. In general, Disqus is the worst drift, and I do not recommend anyone to use it.

Remark42 - good comment service



Remark42 - an open comment engine for embedding on any site from Eugeneumputun. Available as a Docker image for deployment on your server. It supports both anonymous comments and social media login. Supports Markdown markup. There is even a notification of new comments to the admin in Telegram. A reference example of a good comment engine.

Conclusion


Now I choose between Teletype.in and Ghost. Both of these engines have their advantages and disadvantages that need to be finished. Maybe I'm missing something and there are engines that fit my needs, but I don’t know about them. If you have something to add, please tell in the comments.

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