Ask HN: What Blogging Platform or Technology? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Blogging Platform or Technology?

8 pointsmovedx18 comments

I want to start writing more about my current day to day duties plus my transition into InfoSec (pen testing.) I'm looking for some advice.

If you currently write a blog, what platform/technologies do you use and why?

If you started writing a blog today, what platform/technologies would you use and why?

If neither of the above applies to you, then consider this: what platform/technology have you found the best reading experience for you as a consumer of (online) content?

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I still maintain a blog on Blogger that I write to on-and-off since 2004 on whatever topic I fancy.

When I launched a new project in 2012, I created a home-grown minimal blog for the project, never again. Main issue being with time requirements grow, you rather focus on developing main components of your project instead of developing features for ancillary blog, maintaining interaction with readers was more important for project than managing spam comments and links.

If I were to create a new blog I most probably will go with self-hosted WordPress. It scales as your requirements grow, lot of support, tools, and plugins. Readers are familiar with, writers are familiar with it, you can also outsource administration cheaply.

In your case, your core focus should be on learning and writing about things you are interested in and not developing and maintaining the infrastructure, software, etc. Consider starting with hosted version Wordpress.com and when your requirements grow out, migrate to self hosted version.

There's kind of two sides to your question: the reading experience and the writing experience.

The reading experience is obviously important if you're blogging for your content to get shared or at least be accessible to people. Personally, I prefer any platform that outputs static HTML because it's fast and highly customizable. Jekyll, Gatsby, Hugo, and other static site generators are good for this.

On the writing side, you want to remove friction. The more mental effort required to get started writing, the less likely you'll stick with it. So, CMSes are nice for this. I have used Netlify CMS, Strapi, and plain markdown files in git for this in the past. If the blog doesn't have guest writers, I prefer the simplest path (writing markdown in git), but if you're opening up to guest posts in the future, you might want to give people a user friendly CMS.

If it's something you're occasionally going to post to and you're more into the tech behind the site than writing go for a static site generator.

If you'd like an easy to use system, with a decent ecosystem I'd take a look at Ghost.

If you are looking to take things seriously, writing often, thinking about extended features and want to be up and running quickly Wordpress still reigns here. So long as you keep it lean it's the most batteries included system out there and you can run it on your own machines.

For my own blogs, I use a homegrown system, a hybrid static and dynamic site generator. I started writing it because I realized that nothing suited my needs:

highly accessible and compatible with ANY browser and configuration for the client,

portable and stable on the server side,

and convenient for me to use from a multitude of devices.

Starting a blog today, I would use this same platform, because I haven't seen anything better come about since I started writing it.

Thanks for the feedback.

Any chance it's open source?

Yes.

OK.

I am trying to get mine started and I'm just going with WordPress, huge existing ecosystem, and works out of the box with minimal setup on my part.

If you want to get up and running quickly, you can’t do better than https://primo.so

It’s let’s you write auto-converting markdown, outputs slim static html and lets you customize with basic HTML/CSS in the browser. It’s mostly meant for brochure sites but works great for small blogs too.

I'm currently using Bootstrap Studio for the same purpose :)

I use hashnode because I wanted to spend more time writing than configuring a blog engine. So far I'm happy as it allows a bunch of customization and you own the content (it backs up the md files to your gitbub). There's also the benefits of the community which is quite nice.

Just use Medium and keep it free. It’s fine. Don’t overthink this.

I find Medium difficult to work with. Their writing interface is fine, but their reading experience has gone down hill, frankly.

I'll pass on this option.

VuePress site hosted for free at Github or Netlify. Basically a minimalistic Vue-powered static site generator. You can write blog posts in Markdown language or using HTML.

I am using dev.to and Medium, but I also have created my own blog. My stack is Next.js + React.js :)

I use <https://yunaru.com> because I built it. It may interest you. It’s fast, simple, and has a clean UI with no ads, popups, or paywalls. The premium plan also includes custom domain/SSL and privacy-respecting analytics.

Very cool :)

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