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compilerla / compiler.la

Compiler's website
https://compiler.la
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Hosting Blog on Compiler.la #114

Closed laneymangan closed 11 months ago

laneymangan commented 1 year ago

The blog committee (Meryl, Anthony, Laney) are trying to nail down the details of where our blog will live. We originally planned to use the platform "Ghost" but also threw around the idea of hosting it on our Compiler website, compiler.la/blog. Before getting too ahead of ourselves, we thought we'd check in here to see if hosting it on Compiler's website is even a feasible option. Let me know if there is any information needed to evaluate the feasibility of this.

machikoyasuda commented 1 year ago

Hey @laneymangan -

I've done both before: host Ghost on the company's private servers (which makes it free, because it doesn't require paying Ghost the company for hosting space), and also manage a blog on Jekyll. The compiler.la site uses Jekyll: https://jekyllrb.com/ - and was designed for light-weight blogging. Jekyll has a lot of free blog themes: https://jekyllthemes.io/jekyll-blog-themes - Check it out to see what Jekyll can do. Here's an example of a live demo of a Jekyll blog with Disqus comments: https://scriptor-jekyll.netlify.app/ - but of course, the engineers can code whatever theme you'd like.

The main questions I would have is:

If you don't want comments, and you don't need your own CMS, then engineers can host the blog on this Jekyll app. It would require engineers to take 5-10 minutes to upload each post. If y'all are up for it, we can even train you on how to upload your own Markdown files to create blogposts yourself.

You can see an example of Markdown here: https://github.com/cal-itp/calitp.org/blob/main/src/_press/cal-itp-announces-ods.md - Yesterday, Kegan converted Scott's Google Drive doc into a Markdown file, and that Markdown file looks like this on the web https://www.calitp.org/press/cal-itp-partners-celebrate-major-milestone-implementation-ods - Markdown is a mix of regular writing and HTML-like syntax for including links, embedding photos and adding bold/italic, etc. It's a great technical & transferrable skill that I've previously taught to Editorial/Communications teams at previous tech startups I've worked at.

Using Jekyll would bring the monthly cost of hosting a blog to $0, with whatever time spent by engineers and/or writers to upload blog posts written in Markdown to GitHub.

angela-tran commented 1 year ago

+1 to @machikoyasuda's comments that Jekyll has great support for blogging and that using it would integrate well with the current site and not have any extra hosting costs.

Do you want the blog writer themselves to be able to post using a Content Management System (CMS) like Ghost's (or WordPress or what have you), that allows users to log in (like at compiler.la/blog/admin) and post it themselves, or, are you okay with blog writers send Engineering a post (Markdown file would be best), and the engineers post it to the website?

I have experience setting up Decap CMS which is pretty lightweight and integrates with static site generators, including Jekyll. I did it in a side personal project -- see ThisDallasLife/thisdallaslife.com#9. There's a demo of Decap CMS if you want to poke around. It's basically a frontend to creating the Markdown files that get commited to our repo.

I noticed that trailangeles/trailangeles also uses Decap CMS 😄

This is just an option if we really want a CMS. I'm also fine with the approach of just uploading Markdown files in the GitHub UI if everyone else is too.

laneymangan commented 1 year ago

@machikoyasuda @angela-tran This is all extremely helpful, thank you! We have a blog committee meeting later today so I will run this all by the team, particularly the 3 questions Machiko raised, and circle back. For now, I'll speak for myself in saying this is sounding more and more like the direction we should go, and I'd be more than happy to be trained on uploading markdown/creating the blogposts.

laneymangan commented 1 year ago

Hi, all! (@machikoyasuda @angela-tran @AnthonyRollins @MerylGreen @thekaveman) The blog committee discussed this and we all agree that hosting the blog on compiler.la seems like the best course of action!

We're excited about this! We were hoping to release our first blog post in late September, but we realize this doesn't leave a lot of time to get things set up. What would a realistic timeline look like and/or what would be the recommended next steps from the engineers stand point?

machikoyasuda commented 1 year ago

@laneymangan We need the design for the blog home page and each post page at least a week before publishing.

AnthonyRollins commented 11 months ago

@laneymangan I am closing out this issue as we have moved into dev for the Blog.