Ask HN: Best blogging platform? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best blogging platform?

48 pointsminecraftman48 comments

One of my New Year's Resolutions is to start blogging, but I have no idea what blogging platform to use. A free one would be great, but I could pay if needed. What blogging platform do you think I should use?

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WordPress - it has excellent usability as a core product, but its real power comes from the large library of free plugins - there's pretty much always a plugin for everything.

You can sign up for a free hosted version of WordPress at http://wordpress.com, though it has paid upgrades, or you can download the self-hosted version for free at http://wordpress.org.

You could even go with a webhost (like http://dreamhost.com) and use their one-click-install for WordPress (feel free to use the coupon code JACOBWG for $97 off one year of DreamHost... disclosure: I do NOT receive any referral money or benefits from that code - all benefits have been rolled into that code's discount).

If you're the "hacker" type, then check out http://jekyllrb.com/...

Wordpress had 6 "mandatory security update" releases in 2011 alone - http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Versions .

It doesn't seem to have had a secure design from the outset. Worse still, ordinarily one might advise "keep up to date", but wordpress had a release backdoored (http://www.cgisecurity.com/2007/03/wordpress-websi.html) once, so keeping up-to-date isn't without its risks too.

I've been giving tumblr a try, and so far - so good, but the functionality is pretty minimal.

You're going to have security holes with every piece of software, though it is true some software is more secure than others.

I personally view having security updates as a plus - it shows that the WordPress team (open source community) supports their software. The fact that WordPress is running on 70 million plus websites [1], about 15% of the web [2], means that if a security hole is found, it will be fixed, and it can be fixed by anyone without having to wait for a limited amount of employees of a particular company to write the patch (one of the benefits of open source).

What you do get from Tumblr, though, is the fact that a 3rd party is responsible for keeping your website up and keeping it fast - you basically trade ownership of your website's software for a 3rd-party guarantee. This also means that if Tumblr is down or is hacked or you want to customize something beyond the theme, you are dependent on Tumblr...

So, while each may have its own use-case (Tumblr is great for the following/reblogging stuff), the fact that WordPress is regularly updated is not a reason to avoid using it as a platform.

[1] http://en.wordpress.com/stats/ [2] http://wordpress.org/news/2011/08/state-of-the-word/

In addition, WordPress has a built-in updater, so it's incredibly easy to update, unlike many other platforms which require reuploading or obscure update steps.

Doesn't WordPress' built-in updater require write permissions to the PHP files? That's considered an insecure configuration by many.

Tumblr had 42 hours of downtime in 2011 alone - http://allthingsd.com/20111215/tumblr-had-42-hours-of-downti....

A huge thing people forget with WordPress is that most .org-powered sites are on shared hosting. Simple little bugs make it easy to hack an average WP site, but just setting things up right can solve a ton of issues. I'd recommend the digwp.com security recommendations. The book has better info but is pricey.

I don't agree with wordpress. Wordpress is like a middle-ground with 'lots of features' vs 'easy to use for no tech people'. If you want something really simple to get started, tumblr rocks (You'll have something running in minutes). If you want to hack your blog with lots of custom features, just pick whatever blogging library in your favorite language.

WordPress provides both a product that can be customized by non-coders (using existing themes and plugins) and a framework for blogging in the PHP language (by writing your own themes and plugins). It is both product and framework.

My mother, who refers to her Firefox browser as "the Mozilla" uses Wordpress to maintain her neighborhood association's website. Aside from poorly formatted PDFs she sometimes has me upload, she has no problems using it.

I looked at using Tumblr when we were getting her set up, but it did not have enough functionality for what they needed.

Yeah, exactly. It's good for mothers and no tech people. But for hackers, I'd use something else.

The biggest issue I see with Wordpress is the free plugins. I've seen more Wordpress sites hacked by way of poorly written plugins than anything else. If they had some sort of robust security screening process for the plugins it might be OK... but as it stands, there's far too many plugins floating around written by people who seem to have zero knowledge of basic web app security.

Honestly, I think you're better off just writing your own blog software. Obscure it, close source it, lock down DB permissions and put it on your own VPS, you could knock out a simple platform in a weekend. And you're much less likely to get hit by hackers.

Yeah, free plugins are both a blessing and a curse, though the majority of the common WordPress plugins (the common ones) are quite secure and are regularly updated. Obviously you can't install just any plugin without doing some research.

Obviously you have to be a programmer to roll your own blogging platform so that option is not for everyone, but you'd be reinventing a wheel being run on 70 million websites for the stated reason of writing something that is more secure? You'd have to be REALLY good at what you do compared to the 1000s of WP developers contributing to WP, the dedicated security team, and the hivemind of bug-reporting WP installations. Plus, when you do encounter a security vulnerability (not if you do), it will be your sole responsibility to patch the hole.

Closed-source is not a security solution - security by obscurity is no security at all.

I do not think that rolling your own blog platform is a bad idea as it's a great learning experience, but it is not a good solution if you are concerned about blog security.

The number one focus of Wordpress is features. Shiny new features. Performance and security come a very distant second and third in this picture.

Wordpress still has no unit testing. It still forces you to upgrade a version to get bugfixes and security patches. It relies entirely on beta testers to find data-destroying bugs. And it's increasingly being transformed into a catspaw for Automattic.

I've been administering Wordpress for 6 or 7 years. And I hate its guts. I hate its developers. And I hate that it's an absolute triumph of Worse is Better.

Don't use any 'blogging platform'. Use a static blogging system. The best one currently is probably Octopress[1] which is based on Jekyll[2]. But you could roll your own, and it would still be much better than blogger, wordpress, walmart.com, google+, facebook, tubmlr, etc.

Such systems just render your conveniently created post content into a static HTML website than can be published on various free systems (github pages etc) or $2/month VPS. Or an Amazon S3 bucket.

Why?

1. It is not anyore significantly harder or more inconvenient than using a 'platform' like wordpress.com

2. A static site is 10000000% more resistant to idiotic exploits (which unless you are some kind of PROFESSIONAL blogger, keeping up with is more trouble than its worth on any dynamic 'blogging platform' type of system)

3. A static blog system can serve your blogs with any web server in 2012, and will be able to in 2112, whereas none of the free or even for-money 'blogging platforms' is likely to exist in 2112. Which in terms of your life (unless we are lucky and get the gerontological life-extending technology soon) is essentially 'forever.

4. Why on earth would you cede control of your personal output to walmart.com or google+ or similar?

[1]: http://octopress.org/

[2]: http://jekyllrb.com/

EDIT: meant to mention somewhere in there that comments, one of the raisons d'être for these dynamic blogging systems, can now be superbly handled by off-site add ons like disqus.

re: comments, I strongly disagree that they are handled "superbly". For many important blogs, the comments are central to the whole endeavour. Why on earth would you cede control of your comments to disqus? Why do you keep your content and your comments separate? Will disqus be around in 2112? This is what I mean when I say that a "static blog system" is not a blog system at all. It is a partially thought-out solution which doesn't have the required functionality.

I guess that's a good point if comments are truly important to you. Which they perhaps are, for a tiny minority of blogs.

(I personally don't find comments important at all, and even take advantage of the various browser extensions[1] to hide them on various sites that do have them.)

[1]: e.g. http://stevenf.com/pages/shutup.css.html

I claim that comments are integral to the activity of blogging. In fact, most bloggers are chomping at the bit to get more comments, often they will do anything to get more comments, and not necessarily because there's a financial incentive.

If you look at the best blogs, I mean top blogs in their niche such as

http://www.thesartorialist.com/

http://girishshambu.blogspot.com/

http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/

you will see that they are comment heavy. In fact there are very interesting discussions in the comments.

You may think comments are "unimportant" for most blogs, but that is not up to you, it is up to the blogger, and I guarantee that blogger would rather have some comments. And it might help to have a half-decent comment system.

I hear you, and I more or less understand the arguments for your position, but I don't agree.

I personally am not much of a blogger, so my own proclivities as a blog writer ('fuck no I don't allow comments on any blog for which I am responsible for picking up the dogshit and spam') aren't too relevant. But many of the blogs I find most valuable do not feature comments, or if they do, they are 99.9% what you'd expect: utterly worthless, time-wasting digital turds.

I think the whole comment thing is misguided. If you really had something worthwhile to say, why on earth would you entrust that to whatever crap-ass 'blogging platform' that blogger in question happened to be using at the moment?

Say it somewhere that you control, and link it. That's how the web works.

Of course, I have seen worthwhile comments (especially on blogs where the author takes the time/effort to aggressively police them). But that's far and away the exception, and not the rule.

Rather than a comments system, I'd prefer something which polls around for copies of the link to see if it turns up on HN or whatever, then includes those. Free moderation, better validation.

Comments can be important if you're trying to build a community or what have you and want people to stay on site longer. But most people use aggregators of one stripe or another, whether RSS or a link site or Facebook.

The fact that you don't allow comments because of "dogshit" and "spam" means that your comments system is broken. That's like saying "I don't do email because of dogshit and spam". Spam is manageable in email, so the fact that it's out of control in comments means that noone has thought through a proper comments system.

When you say "Say it somewhere that you control, and link it. That's how the web works." I understand where you're coming from, but this is simply not true. Wanting something to be true doesn't make it so. The web is not made of a collection of interlinked static HTML files. But the root of your complaint, that by commenting on someone's blog you give away your worthwhile thoughts, is also a failure of the bad comment system.

Comments should work a lot more like email does. Imagine if each blog entry had an email address (or sub-address of the blog's email address) and sending a "comment" was really sending an email to that address. The comment box below the blog entry is really a small email composing window which sends the comment to the blog. And it can also send it to your own email address (as a cc for the purposes of the thought experiment). Then it would be in your email archive and not lost, but you would still be contributing to the discussion happening at the blog. A further benefit of this is that the spam filter for the email address would function for comments on a blog. Why reinvent the wheel? /end example.

I have come to this issue from the experience of working with bloggers with quite long-running substantial blogs on Wordpress or Blogger. They have a huge laundry list of complaints and annoyances with the software but I cannot in good faith recommend a jekyll-octopress solution or a wikified solution, or a "static--html" solution etc. These "solutions" are poorly thought out and would represent a severe reduction in functionality for the sake of "that's how it should be done". It is the result of developers who look at a hard problem (how to best implement all these required features) and decide to get rid of the problem by disparaging the features or the requesters themselves.

I used to host my own Wordpress blog, but it got hacked after I hadn't updated my blog in several months and, as a result, failed to install the security updates. I then decided to switch to Tumblr, which I liked overall, but this was back when they were having erratic downtimes, so I ended up switching to Posterous. I was pretty happy with Posterous for a while, mostly because it let me just email my posts in from anywhere. However, I really don't like the control panel in Posterous. It's such a pain to use for various reasons. I recently switched to running my blog with Jekyll on GitHub, which I am so far very happy with. It's simple, fast, and secure. I can write my posts in any text editor, and just push the changes to github.

Overall, if you're a hacker, definitely look at Jekyll (https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/). The easiest way to get started is to fork an existing jekyll blog and start customizing.

If you're not a hacker, I'd probably recommend Tumblr. It offers the best balance of features and ease of use, and they seem to have solved their downtime problems. If for, some reason, you don't like Tumblr, check out Posterous. If that still doesn't suit your needs, Wordpress.com would be my third recommendation.

I would not bother with self-hosted blogs unless you really have a need for that level of control, since the cloud-based or static options are so powerful these days.

I also recently discovered OhLife (http://ohlife.com/), which is a great way to keep a private journal. It'll send you an email at your chosen frequency (daily or weekly) asking "How did your day go?" and you just reply with your journal entry.

Tumblr, if you are really interested in the ability to share other blogs quickly and be shared as well. It is also very easy to set-up, maintain, and can work on custom domains as well. You can even add Disqus to most themes if you want feedback and comments. I also love the +Follow feature, as it means that people are more likely to consume your content over just bare RSS feeds. Overall, it's a more expansive Twitter.

Wordpress would be the way to go if you want to have more control over your blog, but I always ended up tweaking the function of the blog more and writing less. Tumblr basically breaks that tinkering distraction and allows you to focus on your content.

Rambling, possibly-helpful non-answer: whatever you can get up and running with the fastest, and can use with minimum of friction. Blogspot, wordpress.com or posterous would probable all fit the bill.

Seems like about half of the most productive people/ most interesting blog posts I read are hosted at *.wordpress.com or someplace similarly humble.

But I mostly post this because I'm just finally finishing up a migration from self-hosted wordpress (which was working fine, but I wasn't happy with for various reasons) to octopress. This has taken me several months to get around to almost finishing (during which time I've gotten out of the blogging habit), and many hours of fooling with ruby environments, converting my old posts, etc., etc.

Hopefully the payoff for me will be simplicity, a better work-flow, new blog format that fits what I'd like to do better, etc. but it might have been a lot of wasted time and energy.

Blogspot/Blogger is a poor choice. Original founders are long gone and middle managers destroyed the team. They are not able to deal with spam efficiently, so they overreact and delete innocent blogs. + commenting requires CAPTCHA even for authenticated users, which is silly.

I've been using octopress on cnnr.me/b (just started it 2 days ago, so we're in the same boat), and I've really enjoyed it.

http://octopress.org/

Thanks so much for your help! I will definitely try it out.

Since you are just starting out, I'd say go for Tumblr. It's incredibly easy and quick to get set up.

If you are still going strong after a few weeks and feel the need for something more powerful, then look into switching to something else. I personally switched to wordpress after a couple of weeks on Tumblr, but I have a lot of friends who still use Tumblr for everything.

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Squarespace (http://squarespace.com/), popular for portfolio sites but also good for blogging, and really powerful suite (not free, though).

A geekier alternative is Calepin (http://calepin.co), amazing concept: you write your posts in multimarkdown, in a Dropox folder, and you publish by clicking a button that automatically checks that folder for new stuff (no template customization yet but Disqus integration). I am seriously thinking about switching to Calepin, Tumblr feels heavy on the browser.

I'll +1 everyone who is recommending Jekyll. I've rolled my own blog engines (first one was Java/Struts 10 years ago) but I'm loving the zen of blogging via creating and pushing Markdown files to GitHub.

It's simple, provides me with a versioned and easily portable archive and doesn't require constant security updates. Here are some tips from migrating from WP: http://decafbad.com/blog/2011/06/08/moved-to-jekyll

http://techpolish.com/best-blogging-platform-sites-and-softw... - here's a comparison of some popular platforms that you can personalize to get a recommendation unique to your need.

I'd say it depends on your purpose (e.g. personal blogging for your day-to-day realizations, philosophical epiphanies, etc.).

(Disclosure: TechPolish is my website.) EDIT: fixed typo. moved link up.

Depends on whether you want to handle your own bandwidth and admin, or farm it out to someone else.

Personally, I'm very happy to be http://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/ because I have control over whether things are public or just for a personal audience, lots of control over comments - and most importantly, threaded comments. I loathe non-threaded comment systems with a fiery passion.

Besides full content plays like Drupal, I've enjoyed working with Textpattern (http://textpattern.com/). It's easy to format content with textile, and it has a nice mix of plugins and template atomics that give you great power over the look and feel.

TextPattern is fantastic, and really encourages separation of content from presentation. That said, we use Posterous for company and personal blogs, so the hassle barrier is essentially zero.

The blogging platform you choose will be as much about you as it is the software.

* Are you a developer?

* How comfortable are you with the command line?

* Do you intend to display a lot of media on your blog?

* Do you intend to display code examples on your blog?

There is no "best" tool in any parlance. The tool you choose will have a lot to do with your preferences.

WordPress: Lots of plug-ins available; common, thus easy to get assistance for; supports a wide variety of blog types; requires diligent attention to security patches and performance tweaking (caching).

Hosted platform (like Tumblr): Zero maintenance; great community; easy to apply themes.

Static site generator (like Jekyll/Octopress): Very hackable; provides some level of street cred for devs; extremely minimal hosting requirements; easy to use your favorite flavor of markup (HTML, ERb, HAML, Markdown, Textile, you name it).

I second the recommendations for Wordpress, but only if you're committed to maintaining your own domain. If you don't mind spending a little bit of money on hosting, the platform is simple, flexible, and pretty powerful. Plus, you'll have total control.

If you want to farm out to someone else, tumblr is good because it's inherently social (people will follow you, share your posts, etc), but it's largely visual and a bit spammy at times.

Posterous is another good platform because it's simple, has some social features, and tends toward the more content driven format.

Wordpress is still my vote though, because it can grow with your blog/site and vary from the fairly simple to as advanced as you want.

What is a blogging "platform"? For that matter, what exactly does "blogging" consist of? Many answers below don't provide what I would call a platform - many aspects of what one might call "bloggin" have not been thought through (e.g. archiving and exporting of entries and comments, how are comments integrated, security features, hosting...) These are all part of the design of a platform. Whatever you think of it, Wordpress is certainly a platform. Many of the answers (e.g. jekyll, rolling your own...) are not.

It would be good to actually define "blogging" and "blogging platform", which I think would be somewhat difficult to do.

I've been using Wordpress for a couple of years. It's easy to use and extensible. If you aren't afraid of dipping your toes into some HTML/CSS/PHP than you can find a really good free/premium theme and some good plugins to make a good blog.

Just make sure you backup not only your database but themes because if you get malware, its really difficult to find out the source. Easiest thing to do is to revert to a clean copy, change passwords, and protect yourself!

I use Armin Ronacher's RST blog (https://github.com/mitsuhiko/rstblog). I even wrote a guide for its use: http://mattdeboard.net/2011/05/09/more-tips-on-rstblog/

minimal static site generator. Worth it if you just want to put your content up and don't need or want pre-packaged bells and whistles.

If you're learning a web framework, you could always roll your own with Rails/Django/Sinatra/Flask. I think it's the most fun option.

Then you get to implement things like a sitemap, categories, comments/Disqus, page caching, and anything else you're so inspired to add. Makes for good blogging material.

No slower than any static content generator like Jekyll if you just cache everything to a static directory, too.

I have been also looking for some blogging platforms for some time (before I did some writing on wordpress and posterous, never liked them). Recently, I started using Jekyll+Github Pages, it is more simple. For me blogging should be as effortless as writing some text on your favorite editor. If you like learning something new you should try them.

I use nanoblogger. (http://nanoblogger.sourceforge.net)

It's pretty primitive, not actively developed, and has no native commenting system. On the other hand, its exactly as secure as your HTTPd of choice, unlike Wordpress.

The best blogging platform is the one you actually use.

Pick any of the free platform WP, posterous, tumblr, etc. Most of these tools are inter-portable. It really does not matter, the one thing that really matter is the blogging platform that you actually use.

Calepin[1] seems pretty neat. I have been meaning to give it a spin. Haven't yet though.

If you (or anyone else) end up giving it a spin, let me know how it goes.

[1]: http://calepin.co/

Blogger in Draft - http://bloggerindraft.blogspot.com/ http://draft.blogger.com

github.

Wordpress.

ownzee.com

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