I have been looking for a platform to blog. It should support...

• templates,
• comments,
• tags,
• archive,
• feeds (RSS or Atom) and
• search.

On the technical side, I want it to...

• be open source,
• allow me to edit the posts locally in any editor I please (which requires flat-file input),
• support Org-mode input,
• maintain version history of the content,
• deploy to Github Pages (which requires output a site without backend),
• be as free of tracking, ads or vendor lock-in as possible.

I have looked into e.g. Nikola, org-publish, Jekyll and the likes, but never really liked one.

So now I have decided to see if I can start one from scratch, based on Gatsby:

1. I started off with this excellent tutorial.
2. I added a Github pages publish workflow (inspired by gatsby-starter-olga). I also needed to create a personal access token and store it as a secret.
3. I added comments, using utteranc.es through react-utterances.
4. I added tags, archive and pinned pages myself.
5. I added RSS feeds using gatsby-plugin-feed.

Based on the Gatsby page about adding search it seems you need some backend for search. As I don't want a backend, the blog will not have a search feature for now.

Update Feb 2, 2020: I migrated to org mode.

Feel free to check Github for all the gory details.