Ask HN: Choices for Start Blogging | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Choices for Start Blogging

5 pointsrlmw6 comments

I'm going to start doing some startup blogging and there seems to be basically three main choices for blogging:

1. Hosted solution - I'm thinking posterous here. 2. Installed open source solution - eg Wordpress. 3. Static page generation.

I'm somewhat interested in what the effect on SEO and traffic will be for the differing options. For example, will it be easier to drive traffic to something like posterous? Do many people use their email system to signup to blogs, can you get traffic cross-pollination from being listed on there?

How good are search engines at indexing content on Wordpress and dynamic blogging sites such as posterous? Is there any disadvantage over dumping out static pages from a script?

Thanks for any advice on the matter.

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What kind of programming languages/stack are you more familiar with? Usually, Wordpress should really fit all your blogging needs. It's easy and has a lot of SEO tools to go with it.

But as I am not at all comfortable with Wordpress' issues that surfaced a while back: upgrade, security etc., so I plan to use one of the Django blog platform. But that means I'm not blogging at all, but worrying more about how to have the blog installed.

There seems to always be a trade off. But one thing is for sure, you should choose to install Wordpress or any chosen bloggin platform on your domain rather than having it redirect to another domain... like blogger, wordpress.com etc.

Good luck and good writing.

WordPress is likely to be the best option for a blog. There are cases where it won't be, but more often that not it is. It's great because it's easy to setup and get going very quickly. However, you still have the option to customize as much as you want, when you want. It can also grow as your needs change - you won't be stuck with "just a blog" if you need the site to do more later on. It's great from an SEO perspective, and there are a vast number of plugins available, many of them excellent quality.

as someone who's brought a niche blog into the mainstream (in my niche at least), just use something like WordPress. If you're already worrying about SEO, you're losing. your focus should be nothing beyond generating great content and getting readers.

i stared on Blogger, then moved to WP hosted on a dedicated host, and its never been a regret. focus on the content. if you're talking about writing scripts, you should probably be coding instead of blogging. good CMS systems exist already so don't reinvent the wheel.

Enki (http://www.enkiblog.com/) is a pretty good free, customizable and lightweight blog if you're into Ruby on Rails.

Wordpress has been great for us despite a few hiccups — but those are mostly on our end, not really because of the software.

4. Code your own solution, making it lightweight and suited to your needs.

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