How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Hosting: Cloudflare Pages vs GitHub Pages vs Others

  • Many note the workflow could be identical with GitHub Pages; Cloudflare is chosen mainly for DNS consolidation and “closer to the edge” performance.
  • GitHub’s ToS around “no free SaaS / ecommerce” is discussed; commenters think normal personal or small-company static sites are fine, especially since GitHub Pages is fronted by Fastly and handles spikes well.
  • Some prefer Netlify, S3+CloudFront, AWS Amplify, or classic VPS/nginx; one argues “zero-cost” centralizes the web and that a cheap droplet is a healthier stack to learn.

Static Site Generators vs Raw HTML vs CMS

  • Long subthread debates “Why Hugo/Jekyll instead of hand-written HTML?”
  • Pro-SSG arguments: templates for shared nav/footers, pagination, tags/RSS, consistent layout, easy bulk changes, syntax highlighting, image pipelines, graphviz/gnuplot integration, anchor management, and scaling to hundreds+ posts.
  • Raw-HTML defenders say a simple blog doesn’t need that complexity; scripting with sed or small tools edges toward “you’ve just built an SSG.”
  • Others advocate full CMS (e.g., Wagtail/Puput, Kirby, Ghost, Decap CMS) for rich-text editing, image handling, version history, and browser-based publishing.

Editors & Writing Workflow (Obsidian, IDEs, AI)

  • Obsidian is praised as a joy to write in: distraction-free, WYSIWYG-like markdown, properties/frontmatter editing, and central “vault” for all writing.
  • Some prefer VSCode/Neovim with live Hugo previews, or 11ty/Eleventy, Astro, Pelican, Zola, SvelteKit, etc.
  • Debate on AI tools: some see Copilot/LLMs as antithetical to personal blogging; others use them as “calculators for words” for formatting, restructuring, and proofreading while keeping ideas human.

“Fully Owned” and Self‑Hosting

  • The phrase “fully owned” draws heavy scrutiny: critics argue reliance on GitHub/Cloudflare and closed-source Obsidian undermines that claim.
  • Defenders say “ownership” here means: content is plain markdown, built with open tools, versioned in Git, and easily portable to any host or editor—unlike platform-locked services.
  • Several insist true control requires self-hosting (VPS or home nginx), while others push back that maintenance, security, and hardware/ISP dependence are non-trivial.

Variants, Over‑Engineering, and Practicalities

  • Many share near-identical stacks with different pieces swapped: Netlify instead of Cloudflare, Jekyll/11ty/Astro instead of Hugo, Pelican/Zola/SvelteKit frontends, Obsidian vs VSCode vs email-as-CMS.
  • Obsidian Publish is mentioned as a simpler paid alternative, though custom domains and price make DIY stacks attractive.
  • Issues raised: syncing conflicts with Dropbox/Drive, handling drafts (frontmatter vs gitignore), grammar support for dyslexic writers, image/video hosting and git-LFS, and lack of access logs on some static hosts.

Meta: Blog-Setup as a Genre & LLM-Era Learning

  • Commenters joke about endless “how I built my blog with X” posts and site rewrites that overshadow actual content, while acknowledging such tinkering is a fun “Hello World” for developers.
  • One off-topic thread reflects on the shift from libraries and forums to “ask the LLM,” worrying about losing process-oriented learning; replies counter that tools always evolve, and different people just want different depths of understanding.