Medium for updates on my latest project: https://medium.com/septa-stats
And Jekyll on GitHub pages for a side project I did awhile ago: http://www.allaboutcheetahs.info/
The reasons behind these:
- Drupal: My website used to have a lot of static content, and I wanted to keep the content there while writing blog posts going forward
- Medium: There's a lot of people on it already, and I really like the interface
- Jekyll: I wanted to learn a static site generator as well as brush up on my CSS. (and the world needs more websites about cheetahs, tbh)
Works well since neither of them are very high traffic.
I used Tumblr for awhile as a photoblog. It worked out nicely and I enjoyed the social features. The main benefit was I learned not to underestimate the psychological impact of interface and friction...I spent little time comparatively on Tumblr, but I created around 1,500+ posts...sure, some of it was fluff, but the ease of publishing got me more into the groove of sharing my work and recording my thoughts. With my standard blog, the barrier to posting made me reluctant to try new things, or to blog "just for fun".
I had originally wanted to migrate it to Drupal, but I couldn't find a good solution for Blogger-to-Drupal import that worked for me. (At the time, I was doing a fair amount of Drupal work at my day job, so it seemed like a good idea, but in retrospect, I'm glad it didn't work out.)
I know there's a lot of stuff out there that's "cooler" than WordPress, but I like it. The ecosystem for plugins and themes is huge. You can find most anything you want, usually for free.
I'm hosting my blog on a plain vanilla shared Linux host, rather than on WordPress.com or another managed host. I like the flexibility of doing it that way. It's a little bit of work to keep up with plugin updates, but not much.
I have developed a few themes and plugins for it.
Website: http://pravj.github.io
Current Theme: https://github.com/pravj/Etios
Others:
https://github.com/pravj/wiggle
https://github.com/pravj/modified-lanyon
It's hosted on AWS using Route53, S3, and CloudFront. My blog isn't very popular, so hosting costs less than $1/month.
Works pretty well, and I like Hugo's lightweight templating formats. I can draft up a new blog article, test it locally, then push to GitHub, which has a webhook to my blog host which does a pull and blam: new content.
[1] http://jsantell.github.io/poet/
[2] https://tomjwatson.com/blog/using-poet-as-a-blog-generator
[1] https://mikeanthonywild.com
I built a minimal php page that just pump out html from text files. All of the blogging platforms that I looked at were terribly bloated. I built this in a couple of hours. No DBs, no css, and no JS.
KISS
foreach($entries as $entry => $data) {
if( file_exists( "entries/$entry" ) && is_readable( "entries/$entry" ) ) {
$post = file_get_contents("entries/$entry");
echo "<a name='$entry'></a>";
echo "<h2><a href='https://blog.thekyel.com/?anchor=$entry'>$data[title]</a></h2>";
echo "<h4>$data[date]</h4>";
echo "$post";
}else{
echo "Cannot read file: entries/$entry";
}
}[3] http://nanoc.ws/
I might do something different if I were starting from scratch today, but it's worked well enough so far.
Blog: http://prakhar.me Repo: https://github.com/prakhar1989/hugo-blog
I had substantial help with site design as I know very little about HTML/CSS, etc. Now it's simple for me to write new posts in Markdown while previewing the result in realtime with the built-in http server.
I deploy it easily using Cyberduck/SFTP and its synchronization feature.
For my daughter's blog— she likes to write posts using a browser-based editor with a preview feature— I use Ghost on a Digital Ocean droplet.
https://github.com/syegulalp/MeTal/
(Been dormant as I've been busy with other things, but making slow progress)
[0] https://github.com/Cbeck527/becker.am
Hugo on S3
https://bitbucket.org/zaphar/gost/
I don't advertise or market it though so it's not what I would call ready for public consumption at all.
or Jekyll on S3
I chose Jekyll as my current blog engine because I don't need a database. I can store all of them in static contents. What about comment system? I can use third-party software, like Disqus.
Uses Redis sessions coupled with Couch authentication, so it's ready to be clustered out-of-the-box.
I haven't used it yet for technical blogs but it supports embedding gists. https://medium.com/@KatAlexPas
If you use an extension like HTTP Anywhere it'll pick up on that and use https.
Have the CNAME handled by Cloudflare and have it go through their network. Then add a Page Rule that redirects http to https once you've activated their SSL/TLS feature. You can do all of it using their free services.
Professional blog for product: WordPress (can't beat the functionality and plugins)
Also, Wordpress.com for a different "I don't want to self-host" project.