Throughout the time I have been blogging, I’ve come across many ways to blog—some through designated blogging platforms, others through unconventional means. I’ll be discussing some of them and giving some thoughts.
Neocities
This is one of the more simple but unconventional solutions. The free plan is limited in storage capacity and the site is mostly used for “art projects”. You can use it for blogging, as there are some people that I know that do use it for that, though, not very professional in its appearance, and you’ll be dealing with manually editing HTML and CSS files. The site is a resurrection of the old Geocities website and most of its user created pages reflect that, by its old 90s style aesthetics.
WordPress & Blogger
Two blogging platforms that are very popular. You can very easily sign up and start blogging, albeit with very few customization options. It’s not a wise choice as it’s unpleasant to visit. The pages will be bundled with banners, tracking scripts and all kinds of other junk. Lots of useful information is stored on them from old blogs, but you don’t know when it will disappear. All of it could be gone on the whim of the companies continuing to host the content for free. I really advise that you do not use these two.
Write.as
This is a no-frills distractionless blogging platform. You can host it yourself just like WordPress. This is my personal favorite platform, as it focuses more on content than appearances; it’s simple and robust. Has paid hosting options to further personalize it, which further aids development of the software.
GitHub/Gitlab Pages
This method works by using the provided CI/CD system to build a website using the source files in the repository and then deploying it to a page named after your username or organization name. (e.g. user.gitlab.io). Depending on what Git host you use, it offers you 10 GB or 100 GB, but if you exceed a size of 1 GB, you’ll receive an email asking you to justify your use of storage. You’ll also have a limit on the amount you can build each month, quantified in minutes.
Netlify
Fetches the files from a specific Git repository and then deploys the built website. Similar to Pages, but has more functionality.
Cloudflare Pages
It’s alike to Netlify, but instead of a limited amount of build minutes per month, it’s just an amount of individual builds. I prefer this one much more because of the aforementioned.