Resources

Author's tools

I'm a developer and I build tooling for myself to help with my own blog. If you're also a dev and a writer you may or may not find these useful.

seams: Run seams . from any directory and get a beautiful rich markdown editor in your browser for files in that dir.
Teeny: A hand-written static site generator with plugins, hot reloading, and a few more things in 400 lines of code. This site is built with it.
neusletter: One command to setup a system to collect emails for a newsletter on static websites using free Cloudflare service offerings.

If you don't want to write your own code (or have an LLM do it) you can use one of the following platforms to get a blog up in five or so minutes.

WordPress: By far the most popular platform for hosting a website or a blog. It's open-source so you can self-host it or use a managed offering. Famous for having so many plugins. Not as simple as some of the ones listed below.
Substack: Newsletter platform that let's you have paid subscribers for exclusive content.
Beehiiv: Substack-like platform with a strong focus on analytics and helping writers get advertising deals.
Medium: Publishing platform where writers in their Partner Program get a share of member subscriptions based on how much of their reading time was spent on your page.
Ghost: Modern open source platform for blogs and newsletters.
Bear Blog: Minimal blogging platform with no tracking, styling, or JavaScript.

If you want to manage the code and deployment yourself.

Hugo: Focused on speed, written in Go.
Gatsby: React-based, has tons of plugins.
Next.js: React-based, broader framework for building websites but that can be used for blogs, particularly if you want to run some server-side stuff in a serverless environment.
Astro: Modern JavaScript framework focused on speed, framework-agnostic.
Jekyll: The OG static site generator, minimalistic, written in Ruby. GitHub Pages has native support for deploying Jekyll website from a repo with zero config.
Eleventy (11ty): Focused on simplicity, get started fast.
Teeny: Built by yours truly. 350 lines of hand-written JavaScript. Opinionated but extensible.

Good places to find interesting personal websites and blogs.

IndieWeb: Community of independent and personal websites.
Marginalia Search: A search engine that indexes small and independent websites.
The Forest : Get redirected to random personal websites on the web.
512kb Club: A collection of websites under 512kb.
Blogroll.org: A list of 1000+ blogs curated by humans.
Hacker News: Occasionally has "Ask HN: Share your personal website" threads.

RSS readers are a way to follow content from websites around the web (provided they expose an RSS feed).

iA Writer: Distraction-free Markdown editor with a focus mode that hides everything but the sentence you're on.
Obsidian: Local-first Notion-like note-taking app built around Markdown files.
Typora: Minimal Markdown editor.
seams: By yours truly. Run seams . on any directory and get an Obsidian-like Markdown editor in your browser for files in that directory.