Ask HN: What is the preferred platform for dev blog? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the preferred platform for dev blog?

17 pointsdeepsy10 comments

Hi! I would like to start a developer blog and I'm looking for advice. The platforms that grabbed my attentions are Medium, Jekyll based-blog (hosted on github pages) or self-hosted WP blog. Is there anything else worth checking?

View on HN

I can recommend to use Hugo [0] as static website generator. They have plenty of themes [1] to choose from. You can still adjust it with basic knowledge in HTML/CSS. Afterwards you can chose where to host it. You can use Github Pages [2] for free or pay for a service like DigitalOcean [3]. I wrote a technical cheatsheet [4] on how to setup your own website with these ingredients.

- [0] https://gohugo.io/

- [1] http://themes.gohugo.io/

- [2] https://pages.github.com/

- [3] https://www.digitalocean.com/

- [4] http://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five-days/

I'd say you want whatever can get you to start writing NOW.

If your goal is content, then you should worry about being consistent with content.

The platform will only matter later in the future.

I'd go with WordPress.com and that's it. From 0 to 60 in a second.

Most people will spend time playing with platforms and tech and forget the most important part which is writing.

THIS. Cannot agree enough. People do not care what platform you write on. They don't come to critique the technicalites of your site. You do.

People that take the time to come to your site, they want to read your content. Period.

You could write it in plaintext, with nothing more than raw HTML/CSS. If it's GOOD CONTENT people will come back.

Content is KING.

You could roll your own blog; that's what I'm doing. I wasn't really satisfied with Medium or WordPress, so I just decided to write my own simple blogging software. Writing the blogging software is probably going to be easier than writing the actual blog posts for the blog.

I recommend using a static site generator and hosting on S3. It's the cheapest way to do it and will survive a hacker news storm. It's also easily managed in version control and zero maintenance. For extra points you could add a CDN in front of it but it's probably not worth it.

I'm a big golang user so I recommend Hugo for the site generator.

That's a good point! What third party tools I can use to handle the comments? Is Disqus worth it?

I would also recommend Hugo as well. I just switched over to it from Jekyll and it's really quite nice. It takes a little bit to get used to the theme structure, but once you have it down, it's pretty easy to keep track of.

Disqus is also a great way to have comments on a static blog. I use Disqus and haven't really had any issues at all with it.

I found it more important to learn to write well rather than to add a comments section. Also, to have a way to get feedback before posting.

I recommend medium.com, it has content discovery feature to help your posts reach out to others.

testing out pelican; it has plugins for latex and jupyter

Reply on news.ycombinator.com