Eggspress is a lightweight blogging platform built on Next.js and React. It's designed to help anyone launch a new website with little to no coding experience. There's no command line needed. Best of all, it's lightning fast and completely free!1
Why Eggspress?
Aside from being fast and free, Eggspress provides a core set of features that cover most authors' needs.
Use it to start your next personal blog, or share your professional know-how through a technical blog. Want to market your products and services? Eggspress can do that. Want to generate income from an affiliate marketing blog? Eggspress can do that too.
You could even use Eggspress to host documentation and step-by-step guides like the one you're reading now.
When you use Eggspress, your content belongs to you. Although this guide focuses on Github and Vercel, you're not bound to either of these platforms.
If you ever feel that it's time to move to another blogging platform, just move your files. Eggspress uses Markdown, which is a widely-used standard for styling documents on the web.
Of course, if you use Eggspress, we'd love for you to stay. If you have feedback or suggestions, create an issue with your comments or email your thoughts to eggspressblog [at] gmail.
Why not Eggspress?
Eggspress is a new platform. As a result, it doesn't have the same breadth of plugins, themes, and tools made for it. If you need more bells and whistles than what Eggspress offers, you may want to look elsewhere.
Because it's "CMS-less," Eggspress lacks a sleek interface for managing your site. Every setting and every bit of content you change on Eggspress is done by modifying a file or creating a new file.
For the best possible experience, we recommend setting up and publishing to Eggspress using a computer.
Features
- Free to deploy and host
- No-code set up and publishing
- Markdown-based
- SEO ready
- Dark/light mode
- Custom color schemes
- Supports videos (mp4 and webm)
- Custom categories, pages, and sidebars
- Multiple authors
- Excellent PageSpeed Insights benchmarks
- One-click updates
- Google Analytics
- Built-in support for affiliate links and query parameters
- Compatible with MDX and custom components
Prerequisites
To use Eggspress, you'll need a:
- Github account (sign up)
- Vercel account (sign up using "Continue with Github")
- Markdown editor (Obsidian is recommended)
Overview
This guide is lengthy, but only because we provide extensive details for every step. If you know your way around a computer, you can finish setting up a site just by skimming most of this guide.
You should be comfortable working with computers. At a minimum, you should know know how to download files to your computer and move them into different folders. You should also know how to drag and drop files.
What this guide covers
- Forking ("installing") Eggspress
- Launching your site to the web
- Setting up your content folders on your computer
- Uploading your content to Github
- Creating and editing posts, custom pages, and author profiles
- Configuring your settings and choosing a color scheme
If you have suggestions for improving this guide, please create an issue with your comments or email eggspressblog [at] gmail.
In the next part, we'll go over how to set up Github and Vercel to bring your new Eggspress site online.
