Ask HN: Looking for a great personal hosted blog alternative | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Looking for a great personal hosted blog alternative

6 pointsdarxius6 comments

I've been around town. I've done Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr and finally Posterous. With Posterous' recent acquisition by Twitter, I would like to move my blog once again.

I'm looking for a hosted solution (but I will settle for a self-hosted one if necessary), preferably simple but allowing you to modify the style/layout of the page/blog. I think Calepin is a cool idea, but I'm still exploring other ideas.

The blog would have code snippets and other rants. Is there anything anyone would recommend?

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Go for Jekyll-Bootstrap [1]. I think it's pretty much what you're looking for and is a breeze to use. I use it for my blog [2] too and here's why:

1. Static blog generator = blazing fast and no more managing databases.

2. Hosted on Github for free.

3. Love writing posts in Markdown!

It's pretty easy to set up and has nice documentation. In case you have trouble using it I'll be happy to help. (You could even fork into my blog's repo [3] if you like and get started.)

[1]: http://jekyllbootstrap.com/

[2]: http://blag.diwank.name/

[3]: https://github.com/creatorrr/I-Blag-Too/tree/gh-pages

This looks to be right up my alley, I'd love to give Github more of my data :)

Haha! Feel free to shoot me an email in case you get stuck somewhere (it's pretty simple but just in case.)

singh@diwank.name

Will do, I'm setting it up now. If I run into anything I'll shoot you an email. The first thing I'm seeing is a lack of pre-made themes. Maybe I'll start a repo with some community themes.

I'll second this. I recently setup Jekyll on GitHub and was pleasantly surprised by the ease of getting it up and running.

If one of the static blog generators (Jekyll etc.) fits your bill, or you write your own, you gain the freedom to use any vaguely competent web host with about one minute of setup.

(NearlyFreeSpeech works for me, is really cheap for a simple static personal blog, and supports rsync via ssh.)

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