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Comment by csbrooks | Hacker News Reader

What's a reasonable place to put up a development blog for a side project, if I want to spent as close to zero time as possible messing with configuration?

Don't say "install this blog software on your web server"; my side project doesn't need a side project, thanks. :)

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That's actually a tough question. I haven't found a place yet to put up a development blog. Code snippet are always screwed up or you don't have analytics, etc.

I took the extra mile on my blog and installed Wordpress on my server. I thought I liked it but now, I'm looking for another solution. I have yet to find what I want.

I've been using Wordpress for a few years, and I don't like it.

I had a blog hosted at MIT, on a server that they have since shut down. For my first few years of using Wordpress, I was pining for the days of my good ol' MIT blog - it was perfect!

Recently I checked out an archive of my MIT blog. Okay, so, it wasn't perfect. In fact, I think in truth Wordpress is superior. Maybe since the MIT blog was so uncustomizable I just made myself happy with it, whereas with Wordpress I can tinker endlessly, striving for some ideal of perfection that I don't even have a clear vision of.

Does this mean that there's a (small, perhaps) market for code development blogs, e.g. that integrate effortlessly with Github, Bitbucket, etc.?

Or does something like that already exist (beyond Gists)?

I actually had this thought too a few days back. I have no data to back my claim yet but there could be.

Good point, I didn't think about code snippet formatting.

If you can live without great code formatting support and you don't mind paying for it, then I really can't recommend Squarespace highly enough.

I fancied blogging, but I already have so many god-damn side projects on the go (my eternal problem is too much started - too little finished) that the last thing I want to do is keep a linux vps and a Wordpress installation up-to-date and configured securely.

With squarespace I think I pay $16 a month (less actually as discount codes are in healthy supply online) instead of $5 for, say, a vps on DigitalOcean, but I get my pick from a set of nice responsive template designs, unlimited traffic (in case I ever write something that gets HN'd) and a drag and drop interface that most of the time exactly meets my needs. They do all the updating of the back end for me and I can just write. I can inject code and other stuff onto the page if I need to, but I've kind of come to the realisation that I don't need most of that bumf anyway.

I did just have a look at the in-post code writing tool out of interest: It has HTML, CSS and Javascript formatting, which isn't much help if you do most of your work in c# like I do, but then I'm sure I'll survive. Their customer service is why I'm so damn enthusiastic about them, so no doubt if I REALLY feel I need it I could just email them and request it.

Reading this back sounds like I work in their marketing department. I promise I don't, I just really think you should check them out.

I can second this, I moved over from WordPress because it was so buggy (add on's didn't always work as promised). No regrets with squarespace - the site looks professional and I don't have to spend any time updating/maintaining it. Of course, this comes at the cost of learning but...

github gists are an ok solution for this if you don't really mind not having total control over color scheme.

jekyll on github pages https://help.github.com/categories/20/articles

or docpad on any host if you prefer node http://docpad.org

I know some people like Tumblr. Or Blogger. They aren't sexy but who cares? The important part is the writing. And as long as you have your own domain you can move later when you have a free weekend and want to migrate elsewhere.

If you want to invest a bit more time, Jekyll on GitHub pages is a really great setup and I highly recommend it.

swanson - I and many others use pelican, which is another static blog generator (like Jekyll). I use it along with github pages. Super simple.

Pelican docs:

http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.2/

My personal site as an example:

www.roycehaynes.com

Does using GitHub pages imply a connection to some project hosted on GitHub? (The side-project I'm working on isn't on GitHub.)

Not necessarily - you can have a standalone blog (e.g. https://github.com/swanson/swanson.github.com). GH Pages does allow you to easily setup a project page per repository, but it is not required.

You can also pick up a domain name and point it at your github repo. I've got wickerbox.net for $10 a year from Namecheap being served out of wicker/wicker.github.com. One of the neat features is that any time you do put in a gh-pages branch in one of your other repositories, it's accessible by wickerbox.net/name-of-repo.

Thanks for writing this, swanson. I've written on and off over the last few years but lately I've wanted to write, started to write, and then lost the nerve and never posted. Hearing "you don't have to be the next Joel On Software" helps.

I use Blogger - you can amend the HTML to include google's https://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/ in nearly no time at all. And it just works! Lovely.

I found myself in a similar position to Mr Swanson. I just started writing about things and found that good things came out of it. It makes life more interesting. And it helps other people. This is me:

http://icanmakethiswork.blogspot.com/

GitHub Pages is really great because they will host it themselves at a domain like username.github.io, and when you decide you need a new side-project, you can easily port everything over to your own server. Jekyll static-site generator can be used on GitHub Pages, or you can literally throw .html files in there. I like it purely for the flexibility it provides me.

Hosted Wordpress.

It's not tremendously cheap (WP Engine starts at $30 a month), but if you want to run a sophisticated CMS with no setup or maintainance investment, it's by far the best approach.

(It may be noted that I've tried everything from hosted free services to writing my own blogging engine in RoR, and hosted WP is what I've eventually settled on.)

I used blogger (blogspot) for many years, and liked it. Eventually though I decided to switch to hosting my blog as a menu/tab on my own main web site and use Jekyll to generate static pages. Either using Google Analytics, or on your server set up awstats (an apt-get install, and 2 minutes of setup) so that you know which blog entries people actually read.

I'm using blogger for my side project (http://higherordergo.blogspot.com). It is nothing special but it gets the job done for close to zero time configuration.

Wordpress on any decent shared hosting. It's very easy to set up, requires almost no maintenance, but you're still free to do anything you want to your blog.

Tumblr is pretty great - fully customisable layout, you can assign your own custom domain for free and the posting tools are powerful and easy to use.

There are also many ways to embed code in it in a nice way. Since they don't limit your layouts, you can stick any code-formatting JS you want on the blog.

I don't think anybody mentioned Octopress http://octopress.org/

Squarespace has a nice balance of out of the box functionality with lots of power under the hood if you ever want to dig into it.

Can't get easier than Wordpress.com (which supports code snippets), but GitHub pages are relatively easy, too.

Code snippets on Wordpress is plain awful, indentation & HTML escaping is a mess. I have to re-edit the same code snippet 2-3-4 times when writing a blog entry on WP.

I'm sure it can get easier than WP.

Have you tried embedded Github gists? Or do you want the snippet to live on your page?

Sounds like you just need to use a hosted blog service like wordpress.com, tumblr, blogger, etc.

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