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Comment by SonicSoul | Hacker News Reader

i've been thinking about starting a blog for sometime. There seems to be a lot of ways to achieve this.. I'm a developer but not sure if i want to host/administer my own instance of word press.. aside from working 50-60 hours, i spend 10 hours a week on personal projects, so not a lot of spare time.. what's a good streamlined way to start a blog quickly, but still have good flexibility in it's appearance?

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A few years ago, I hacked an existing blog tool so it suited me, and I recently started a Tumblr blog.

Tumblr makes it very easy to jump right in. There are hundreds of themes, I found a decent enough one within a few minutes.

I recommend going the Tumblr way first, mainly to get over the inertia of setting a blog up. This is the biggest hurdle that stops you. Get into the habit of writing a blog first, then later you can choose another tool that you prefer once you have developed your own blogging style and you know your likes and dislikes a bit better.

I highly recommend going with hosting your own WordPress. The setup is painless and allows you to quickly get your blog up and running. There are tons of themes to choose from that you can use as a foundation to get the appearance you desire. The plugin system also works great and allows you to easily add various features to your blog.

I have used WordPress for a non-technical blog for over 3 years now without any issues. I've also been thinking about starting a technical blog and have been looking into using Drupal for it.

If you're hosting your own WordPress (or any other solution, actually), you really should be keeping an eye for any updates. WP is a popular hacker target, even waiting a day after an announcement can be enough to get hacked. Thanks to Muprhy's law, such an announcement will definitely come when you're on vacation somewhere.

That's, of course, assuming that such an announcement is made in the first place. Last year the timthumb bug was being exploited and not all theme download sites bothered to alert the users that the themes were vulnerable.

Definitely. If you log in to your WP blog at least once a day, it informs you about any updates and lets you apply the update with the click of a button.

Ah, I remember reading about the timthumb bug at work and checking right away when I got home if my site was vulnerable to it (which it wasn't).

thanks, that's helpful advice. where are you hosting it? what are the hosting costs?

No problem, I have mine on shared hosting at HostGator [http://www.hostgator.com/shared.shtml]. I'm currently using the Business Plan since I need the SSL for another site I run, but their Baby Plan is plenty good at $10/month. Plus, it always helps to have your own web server available in case you want to host any other sites.

The blog I built for myself is backed by a Makefile and a bash script. New entires are individual files on the filesystem, and running "make" compiles it all together into usable form. It took no time at all to setup and hosting static files is a breeze, all while still being fairly flexible and easy to maintain going forward.

You won't have the some degree of flexibility provided by WordPress, but good old Blogger is a solid choice if you don't want to deal with the hassle of hosting your own thing.

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