It seems like there’s a lot of ways to go about this that may be overkill, so I’m curious which may avoid that.
Low maintenance in this context is aiming for moderate technical knowledge/setup, lower cost, and portability in case you need to migrate your site and so minimal hassle in that process.
Plain-ass HTML with nothing but text.
Edit: I know how to put a link and a description, it’s square brackets and parentheses, plus the link and the text. It’s always the eight try that’s the right one.
Yep, I mainly used Deviantart as a quick way to move photos from home to external computers to quickly show them to others.
I have used Deviantart for 20 years or so, but this year, I got pissed off for the last time, it is just so slow, it takes ages to browse a gallery.
So I spent a few days building a menu in HTML and CSS that has a few simple effects, and importantly is easy to update, I then uploaded that to a personal webhost, and started creating HTML galleries with digiKam, uploading them there, and updating the menu.
I want to preserve my privacy, so I won’t link the site here, but if others are interested, I should be able to share the code of the menu system.
My answer assumes:
- “personal website” means you want a blog with a few static pages
- “moderate technical knowledge” means you know how to use a CLI and write some basic JS/CSS.
For this use case, I highly recommend a static site generator framework like Hugo.
Make a repository on GitHub for your Hugo website, and set up your content as markdown files inside the repository.
Then, hook your Hugo website’s repository up to a managed static site hosting solution like AWS Amplify or GitHub Pages. Finally, set up your website’s domain name and you’re done.
Once these pieces are set up your authoring workflow is:
- Open your Hugo website locally from a local copy of the Git repo and edit the markdown files to change the content of your site
- Once you’re happy, commit the result
- Amplify / Github pages will automatically pick up the change and redeploy your site with the new content
And that’s it. There’s no servers to maintain, so the only upgrade you have to do is keep Hugo and any dependencies up to date within your repo.
Thanks, the assumptions are about where I was aiming so this addresses the question pretty well I think.
An added question that this and other comments bring to mind though is, and this is admittedly a super basic question (which I’ve gone back & forth over asking in NoStupidQuestions tbh), but besides a cleaner and exclusive URL, why might someone go after a domain for a personal site, as in related to them individually?
If you don’t have SOME domain name, then people can only visit your site with an IP address.
Additionally, you pretty much have to have a domain name if you want HTTPS encryption - if you don’t have an HTTPS certificate, people’s browsers will show lots of scary warning indicators on your page.
But if you’re asking about buying your own domain name (firstname-lastname.com) vs. using a subdomain from your hosting provider (myblog.wordpress.com) then it comes down to preference. Having your own domain will make you look more professional and get you more clicks on average.
But if you’re asking about buying your own domain name (firstname-lastname.com) vs. using a subdomain from your hosting provider (myblog.wordpress.com) then it comes down to preference. Having your own domain will make you look more professional and get you more clicks on average.
Mainly the latter, and you cover the reasons for that, so appreciate it! For a more casual approach (and according to one’s preferences), it sounds like you’d be alright to stick with the subdomain-from-host approach, which is how I was leaning but I wasn’t sure if there might be more to it than that within the more managed hosting space.
Hugo as a static page generator. GitHub pages for free hosting.
Its free because the files are already public via GitHub, so it doesn’t cost GithHub much extra money to run.
Anyone can go to a public GitHub repo and see the files, right? So if the GitHub Pages website’s files are in a public repo, all GitHub has to do is slap a domain name in front of those files.
Using Jekyll for static site generation and throwing it on GitHub Pages is what I’ve been doing for a few years.
Netlify is a nice alternative to GH Pages for hosting. Cloudflare Pages also exists but never tried it before.
Definitely Jekyll or Hugo on GitHub pages.
I use Ghost CMS because I wanted an easier mobile editing experience, it is also very low maintenance in its container form.
