Ask HN: Blog Platform of Choice? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Blog Platform of Choice?

2 pointsabhinav228 comments

As an occasional writer, I am a big fan of Medium. I even pay them $5 each month, not because I make any money from the site or particularly like their content, but because their writing tools are really amazing - makes writing very enjoyable.

In addition, their SEO abilities are great, one of my articles on formatting Lisp code is now the highest ranked post on Google :)

(Link: https://link.medium.com/NbSWkq4hJcb )

However, Medium has some issues:

- No syntax highlighting on code (big issue for programming blogs) - No color options (would like an accent colour) - No Mathjax or Latex support (this is a bit too niche for most blogs)

Running my own website has a lot of pluses and I’m well versed in creating static websites for free (particularly like vanilla html / css / JavaScript on GitHub Pages), but I will never get the SEO rankings or audience that Medium can give me.

I honestly can’t find much alternatives. I basically want Medium with a syntax highlighter but I don’t see any blog platform that does this?

What do you guys recommend? Not just for my use case but in general for programming blogs.

Substack looks like an option, but it requires you to bring your own audience, which, if I had, I would just do it via my own website since I have the technical skills for it (but for other writers, substack can be great as it packages up a mailing list + hosting very well).

I don't advise medium, any sites that force user accounts for their viewers/readers are a bad UX.

Same. I find it extremely difficult to find any meaningful content there, most of the content seems to be just to attract views/clicks.

Have you considered a hybrid approach where you publish to both Medium and a self-hosted solution, but set the canonical link on the Medium post to your own site?

I'm not entirely sure of the SEO implications (your own site would take precedence, but as for whether it would get the same boost from Medium views, I'm not certain), but possibly a good compromise between keeping the Medium community circulation and having it in your own space where you have more control.

Check out hackernoon.com.

It has many pros of medium, less cons imo. Beware that Hackernoon is a publication, so you can publish stories that will be reviewed, not really just anything like a press release.

Wouldn't the easiest solution be to screenshot the code in your normal IDE and embed that in the page?

Gitlab + Emacs org-mode + disqus

the speed of writing of Emacs, with the reliability of a static code generator.

of course it has code highlights... and you can create images with plantuml.

to be honest I distrust developers that decide to blog on medium...why would you limit your audience inside a paywall like medium, linked in, etc. ?

when the greatest software such as linux and emacs are "free as in freedom".

Org mode rocks :) Yes I would do that approach in most instances, what Medium brings to the table is SEO rankings and an audience.

I know that Medium gets a bad rap for poor quality developer blogs, but honestly I love the writing experience - apart from syntax highlighting - it lets me churn out 2000 word posts with pleasure. But maybe it just suits me well.

I usually create a pdf or free summary and host on GitHub if my blog post is good enough to add long term value to the community. Eg: https://github.com/ashok-khanna/common-lisp-by-example

There doesn’t seem to be a Medium equivalent for programming blogs? I would drool over having the style of raywenderlich.com for non iOS / Swift blogs

dev.to seems to be a developer-focussed community similar to Medium but without a paywall. They have lots of (mainly younger) developers posting and cross-posting there, and it seems pretty nice as a reader or contributor.

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