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Ask HN: Lesser known blogging apps?

7 pointsgnosis10 comments

I've gotten a bit sick of having to constantly reinstall Wordpress, with all of its seemingly endless vulnerabilities and security upgrades. It's also a pain to constantly have to look for new plugins and themes that work with the newer versions.

So I'm looking for a replacement that's secure, elegant, and less of a hassle to maintain.

Any recommendations?

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I recently found myself in a similar position, and found Jekyll ("a blog aware, static site generator") to meet my needs perfectly. Jekyll rejects the implicit assumption of most blogging software: that the solution requires a dynamic platform.

When you approach the problem with that in mind, what you end up with is exactly the three things you are looking for, something that is inherently secure and low-maintenance, with a blogging workflow that is simplicity itself.

  vim _posts/YYYY-MM-DD-title-of-post.markdown
  git commit -a -m 'new post'
  git push

Project Page: http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll

Introductory Post by the Author: http://www.mojombo.com/2008/11/17/blogging-like-a-hacker.htm...

I like Textpattern. It’s pretty bare bones, though. You have to put some work in, but once everything is running, it’s pretty hassle free.

Link: http://textpattern.com/

By the way, the Textpattern Support Forum is one of Textpattern’s hidden treasures and always extremely helpful.

You want every feature of Wordpress, but you don't want Wordpress. Not once in the last 3 years have I had a plugin that didn't work with a newer version. I haven't had to "reinstall" it even once either. Maybe you just need to choose your plugins more wisely, or if you really care about the quality and security of your blog; write your own plugin.

You're not adverse to switching platform entirely and if the comments here are to be followed, you don't mind rolling your own platform. But you can't write your own theme that's compatible with future versions?

I'd say if you pay attention to the capabilities of Wordpress and actually use it as you're supposed to (I've not seen one major security vulnerability that affected the current version, someone can correct me if I'm wrong) you won't find a better fit for your requirements.

Where did I say I wanted every feature of Wordpress?

Where did I say I didn't mind writing my own platform?

In your rush to defend Wordpress you're assuming a bit too much.

"I've not seen one major security vulnerability that affected the current version"

But I'm not running the current version. In fact, I'm probably at least a few versions back, if not more.

"you won't find a better fit for your requirements"

My requirements are: something more secure than wordpress, something elegant, and less of a hassle to maintain.

You're telling me there's nothing like that out there? Pardon me if I'm a bit incredulous.

"Where did I say I didn't mind writing my own platform?"

My point was exactly this. Rather than writing your own platform, which will most likely be less secure (but not vulnerable to blanket attacks), you could just write the plugins you want and a theme and then Wordpress is absolutely no hassle at all to maintain. Everything is done via auto-update and after you've made a theme you never have to touch code again and you wont have to suffer feature-wise.

I have never once had auto-update fail and I run 10-15 off-the-shelf plugins.

There are things more secure, they are elegant, but they are definitely not less of a hassle to maintain. I have yet to see any platform (though I haven't studied those outside of the Rails community that thoroughly) that have an auto-update feature so complete and problem-free that Wordpress has.

If you are to say just one good thing about Wordpress, it is that it is hassle-free to maintain. This is the reason it has become popular, the only way any sort of software can become popular is when people without coding experience or knowledge of how to admin a server can maintain and update it.

Since you haven't updated it for a couple of versions, I'd strongly recommend you do so and try using it again. A lot of development happens and I'd suggest you build a new opinion on what Wordpress actually is today.

If you still don't think auto-updating everything and installing both themes and plugins from the admin-page without having to touch the filesystem manually – you can try to find something easier, but I sincerely doubt you will.

Write your own.

Use a framework (Pylons, Django, RoR, whatever) along with Disqus for commenting. It'll take only a very short amount of time, and you'll have total control.

Doing this won't make your site more or less secure, but it will prevent from being hit by blanket attacks that target popular platforms like wordpress.

(eg. 300 lines of Python on Pylons + 500 lines of css/templating (loc includes white-space and docs) = http://janitha.com with admin interface)

Just for a rough scope, mine is:

• 3000 lines of PHP (SQLite for storage)

• 500 lines of JavaScript (wysiwyg editor)

• 300 lines of CSS

• 0 code not written by me (well, ok PHP and SQLite)

That implements:

• Articles (including private drafts)

• WYSIWYG editing with XSS protection

• Comments

• Attachments.

• Account management, superuser separation.

• Search, time based navigation.

• RSS, sitemap.

Erik Smartt wrote about this[1][2], and it hit HN a while back.

[1] http://www.eriksmartt.com/blog/archives/305 [2] http://www.eriksmartt.com/blog/archives/306 * As far as I know, part 3 isn't written.

Learn Django and roll your own in one weekend.

Cushycms.com is easy...

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