Ask HN: If you were going to blog what platform would you use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: If you were going to blog what platform would you use?

14 pointsevo_920 comments

I'm fighting the urge to do what I always do when I'm considering off the shelf software... turn up my nose, mutter something about having full control to do whatever the hell I want goddammit! and write my own software... 'cause it's easy and I can do it in a couple weekends of cranking' (sure you can... sure you can I hear my say as she rolls her lovely eyes...).

So what would YOU use instead of, you know, rolling your own...

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I couldn't resist the urge :)

I built http://www.utterson.me because I wanted a Jekyll blog but I wanted to post via email (like Posterous did). I'm gonna start using it to blog and see if it solves a problem for anyone else. Fortunately, I've only wasted 2 nights so far.

For me, it's not about the platform or NIH syndrome. It's about removing all friction so I'll actually write. If I have to login to WordPress and fiddle around or run `jekyll serve` then git push, I just won't do it. Sending an email seemed like the easiest way.

I deal with WordPress a lot at work so I'm sort of sick of dealing with updates, plugins, themes, etc.

I guess If I had to go with off the shelf, I'd do Tumblr or SquareSpace. Roon and Medium look interesting too.

EDIT: forgot about roon and medium

I've been really impressed with what I've seen so far from Marquee (http://marquee.by/). Be sure to read the 2 posts on their blog: (http://team.marquee.by/) and then add ?format=jsonp to the URL of one of the posts to blow your mind - They've put a lot of thought in to storing content in a semantic and re-usable way. I can see it being a bit more complicated to work with but the benefits over traditional markup far outweigh the cons for me.

Example post JSON: http://team.marquee.by/introducing-marquee/?format=jsonp (helps if you've got something to pretty-print JSON, I use a chrome extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jsonview/chklaanhf...)

I'm not affiliated with these guys, just a topic I've been thinking about for a while.. eagerly awaiting a beta invite so I can try their editor!

edit: Their platform also powers http://narrative.ly/

If markdown isn't your style: Habari or WordPress. If markdown is ok: jekyll/octopress. Pagoda (https://github.com/alagu/pagoda) seems like a nice addition to jekyll if you need/want online editing.

I started with blogger to make it as easy as painless as possible (also I didn't have time to manage or money to spend on a hosting provider or server). Now if I want to keep it as easy as possible, tumblr (although blogger has better Google indexing, even if Google denies it I have made some informal tests that kind of prove it.)

If I want to tinker as much as possible without rolling my own system, Wordpress probably (of course now I have a virtual server). If I want to tinker as much as possible, deep in the guts, rolling my own with some templating system and the simplest thing that can generate categories and previous-next. Which of course could be as simple as a small set of bash-sed-awk scripts/programs.

If you dare to go the way of hacker, then Jekyll could be one of the best options. Since i've switched from Wordpress I don't like anything else. I just need a text editor and a script to do all the job. Static files rules.

If the OP is more on the python side of things, there's Hyde, too. I played with it briefly a few months ago and, well, didn't suck at all (didn't use it enough to say it's the best ever, though)

http://roon.io has been awesome for my purposes lately. It's clean, uses markdown, has good mobile apps, and is quite pretty+responsive on the web.

Personally, I'm intending to move mine off a mostly dead Wordpress install on Dreamhost over to something hosted on S3 and generated using Awestruct: http://awestruct.org/

I've been using it to build out a major project at work and so far I've been very pleased with it. The support for partials is a particularly attractive feature, and has worked well with the ways I've been abusing it.

In my case, I rolled my own ten years ago, and I'm still using it (https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog). The hardest bit about it was parsing the request, since I wanted the ability to specify date ranges as part of the URL (for example: http://boston.conman.org/2000/8/10.2-15.5).

Use mine then ;) http://bdhf.me/bbe/

Designed for el cheapo shared hosts with php. No database, just plain text files in posts directory. Minimal features. Write in markdown. Antisocial, because no one reads mine.

Really, I am rather proud of it no matter how crappy it is. Everyone is welcome to bash it for any reason on twitter or facebook. All feedback will be considered carefully.

Jekyll + Github Pages + Prose.io Jekyll is pretty powerful and easy to setup. Github pages provide me a stable static hosting and Prose.io provides the option of writing online if I want to. I prefer writing offline in Sublime Text but having Prose.io is a good option.

Played and moved away from Tumblr, Blogger, wordpress and Posterous when it was alive and kicking. All of these take away something or the other.

http://www.squarespace.com/

My website, http://www.beckbits.com, is incredibly easy to manage, update, and add additional content to. You get to choose from the designs provided by their team, and you can then customize them to look however you choose.

Try Medium, it's the content and readability that matters.

https://medium.com/

Ghost: http://www.tryghost.org

It's not released yet but looks quite neat.

octopress which is Jekyll based.

I use tumblr for fun. Wordpress is very good, too.

I wrote my own in Go. It's not hard.

Cool story. Care to share anything about the experience?

Well, to start with I decided on a directory structure. I went with yyyy/mm/dd/n where the given post is the nth of that day.

I then wrote some code to compile an archive.html page when accessed by traversing the file tree defined above.

Because I don't like typing into little textboxes in browsers (the irony here is not lost on me), I decided I'd do post authoring by connecting to my server and running a script which would create a new file in the appropriate directory. Easier to write in vim, in my opinion.

The posts are written in Markdown and converted to html on-the-fly. I also include Disqus comments for each post, and display a comment count for each post on the archive page.

I think it all came out to about 500 lines.

wordpress

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