Ask HN: What do you use for your tech blog and are you happy with it? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you use for your tech blog and are you happy with it?

8 pointsegonschiele8 comments

I'm looking for something that supports commenting and syntax highlighting out of the box, preferably something that uses static pages so it's fast and easy to manage. Any recommendations?

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I know a lot of developers use Octopress and its many variants. Tie that together with one of the comment services (e.g., Disqus) and you're pretty much set. Or you can just link every post to a HN submit and direct readers to your HN submission.

You can then deploy to Github or just some CDN.

I don't particularly find it appropriate to use WordPress as a tech blog. It just sends the wrong message in my opinion.

That said, I am of the opinion that developers should take pride in developing their own blog platform. It's conventional wisdom after all that building a blog platform on a modern framework only takes (a few hours | a few days | certainly not a week).

I put together mine [1], including the javascript in about 3 days. People tend to hate the background, but I wanted something a little more visually engaging and I'm not a graphic designer. :)

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/simplest-of-webapps

+1 on Octopress (if you like the quick route), else just take some minutes and wrap up yourself with some RoR Screencasts (Railscasts for example) and do it yourself (take a look at https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/syntax_highlighting for syntax highlighting stuff) - it's fun!

And for bhauers blog: love it !

I put mine together a year ago (http://adit.io). It uses hakyll, a very flexible static site generator written in Haskell. But I want a better design, hence this post.

I think your blog looks really nice, has some nice transitions. It's good to look at but I couldn't read more than a paragraph without getting distracted. I would put the text on a solid background, having the stuff moving behind text while reading it breaks my concentration.

Ah, thanks! Incidentally, you can also turn the background off using the menu at the bottom right. I use local storage to remember a user's preference.

But I LIKE the background! haha, just not behind the text that's all.

Edit: I added background-color: #26282a; to .bodytext and it's much more enjoyable for me :)

After writing my own blogging app in Django and being unhappy with it for months, I switched to WordPress some time ago. I blogged about my reasons for switching here: http://ankursethi.in/2013/03/okay-wordpress-you-win-this-rou...

In summary: WordPress has a neat dashboard, thousands of plugins, and wonderful themes. Writing and maintaining a blogging app is boring. I prefer to spend my time blogging and programming, rather than programming admin dashboards for blogging apps.

People will tell you that WordPress is slow, which is true. To remedy the situation, you should: (1) use a PHP opcode cache (I use php-apc) and (2) use a caching plugin (I use W3 Total Cache). That's about it.

I'm quite happy with my setup. It's not the fastest or the hippest, but it works great for my blogging needs. My advice would be to choose whatever makes you happy, and then stick with it.

I use Pelican, but a lot of people like Jekyll, too. Pelican has good documentation, and I like that it uses a makefile because I was able to painlessly add in my own deployment command that pushes to S3 and an option for compressing CSS and JS.

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