In Pursuit of the Perfect Blog — Part one

Week 18 of Founding Typogram

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There has been a little bit of a churn regarding Typogram Blog lately. We had switched platforms a few times and wasted a lot of time in the process. My co-founder and I decided to solve this once and for all.

Previously, we had different priorities when making blogging platform decisions - ease of use to edit posts and onboard audiences.

Previous Priorities

• Good Editor Experience

  We wanted an easy-to-use editor. Writing content is already "hair-consuming" as it is. Ideally, we would like not to battle with a difficult editor and worry about formatting when we write. I will get hate for this, but having markdown support is not enough. I should be able to drag an image into the editor to insert it. I should be able to paste a URL onto selected text and make it into a link. 

• Newsletter Sign-Up Form

  Growing our audience is the ultimate goal, so having a newsletter sign-up form is important. If the sign-up form can be integrated with the blog and is easy to use, that would save us a lot of time.

What We Used Previously

With these two criteria, we found substack and hashnode. Both of them supported custom domains, so we set these up:

• https://blog.typogram.co/ (powered by hashnode)

• https://fontdiscovery.typogram.co/ (powered by substack)

But upon SEO research, we found out these subdomain blogs are not contributing to the SEO ranking for the main site typogram.co. Google search engine treats subdomain website as its own with SEO ranking separate from the root domain. It made sense when we consider the WordPress scenario: if subdomain and root domain are considered as the same, then the best thing we can do for SEO is to use wordpress.com to set up blogs under subdomains like typogram.workpress.com to inherit the excellent authority score of the main site — too good to be true.

The best practice for SEO is to host a blog in a subdirectory like typogram.co/blog. Unfortunately, neither substack nor hashnode supports hosting in a subdirectory. Furthermore, substack doesn't support adding canonical URL, which is essential for SEO.

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New Priority

SEO (subdirectory hosting)

For a blogging platform to support being in a subdirectory, it means it needs to be self-hosted first, which leads us to open-source blogging platforms like Jekyll, Ghost, and WordPress.

All of them can be configured to run in a subdirectory on the same server the main Typogram site resides. However, WordPress and Ghost require a specific server to run dynamic databases, which would be overkill for the Typogram app. Jekyll has a barebone editing experience that is not up to my needs — to add a simple image, I need to host the image on a server, and then add it using the image URL with markdown syntax.

What We Will Use in the Future

At the current stage, we don't know yet. The research has generally led me in the direction of static blog generators, and I found this helpful page on site generators. I am looking into WordPress but with static site generator plugins and Publii — a desktop-based CMS for creating static websites. Here is a complete diagram I made for all the choices that I have considered so far:

What are your thoughts on the perfect blogging platform? Do you have any recommendations for us? Let me know by commenting below!

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