Hacker News Reader

Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to. What platform should I use? Requirements:

    * No Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal
    * Easy to configure and deploy
    * Internal comments subsystem preferable

I was looking at rigging up Dokuwiki. It obviously has the ability to publish data/articles, it has plugins to give a discussions page, user/ACL support and it's pretty simple to deploy. Drawback is it's not designed by default with the "reverse chrono" ordering, tagging of articles, etc...

I'm lookin at Jekyll for static content, which is pretty much what a simple blog can be, but I keep getting errors trying to use rubygems (not a rubyist, here).

View on HN

Why not use WordPress? It's simple to install, configure, and deploy. Works on any web host. Internal comments. Auto-updates to keep you running on the latest version if you want.

wordpress as default does not handle lots of traffic without crashing. You need to use cache plugins to make it work well with lots of visitors. Not a "solid" solution out of the box.

If your blog crashes from too many hits, congratulations. Few people write that well. Their audiences tend to forgive them.

Most blogs die from loneliness- even more never launch because it's so much easier not to write.

I've seen default wordpress installations on simple vhosts crash at 50 daily visitors, basically every time two people visited at the same time. You do need caching, and you need to set it up manually, and that's probably Wordpress.com's sales pitch nowadays.

If your blog is getting 50 daily visitors, congratulations.

Really ? That's kind of low, though. I would have thought most blogs get at least a couple of hundred visits (and not bots) every day.

Here's an example from a couple of months back when I received too much traffic from HN on my wordpress install and it made the server explode: http://pandoralive.info/?p=2243

It went up to 133 simultaneous visitors and then... poof!

After that I installed a Cache plugin, and since then I've had a couple of articles hitting HN again and going over 200 simultaneous visits with the CPU remaining at low levels. So yeah, Wordpress can scale, with the right plugins :)

Assuming millions will read your articles yes.

I had a "wordpress as default" blog hosted at DreamHost and it handled up to 1.000 visits a day without crashing. More than that, and DreamHost turned it off to prevent it to impact other users.

Now it lives in a Digital Ocean's $20 VPS, fine tuned to serve WordPress and with W3 Total Cache plugin. Blitz.io tests say it could handle 80 million pages served a day. I know that's not really true, but it handles 60.000-80.000 real visits (more than 100k pages) every month without problems.

Honestly, This.

If you're really interested in /writing/, then just go with one of the hosted solutions such as Wordpress.com, blogger, whatever. It's easy enough to use, requires virtually no set up time to get running, and lets you forget about any techy details.

I know that it's often more fun and more interesting as a hacker-type to think about the optimum way to blog, rather than actually doing it... This is my problem too.

But what you want to establish is the habit of writing. Once you've got that, you can easily port your posts over to another system (and clean up any on the way).

I've recently set up a few Wordpress sites for some people. And much as I despise the insanity underneath, if you're just wanting to write, then it's a very nice platform.

Wordpress is a really good choice if you just want to blog.

Other alternatives than already mentioned:

1. Go oldschool, use serendipity: http://www.s9y.org/. Really easy to install, easy to use/configure, full support for everything blogging related. And there is a cache-plugin (which of course also exists for wordpress).

2. There are quite some new takes on the classical blogging system. Habari is an example: http://habariproject.org/en/, has an interesting backend interface. Ghost on the other hand would be too new for me.

If you want to have an internal comment system, static content blogs are the wrong way to go, afaik.

Focus on writing, not on platform. Sign up for a blogger (or whatever) account and just start writing. Once you've published a dozen posts or so and gotten into the habit or writing, then you can go back and consider what you want/need in a blogging platform going forwards. Focusing on setting up the perfect blogging platform before you've written anything is just procrastination.

I tried this many times, but could never get the enthusiasm up to finish anything. This time round I bought a domain name, paid for hosting, setup the server and customized the theme.

Now that I am much more heavily invested I am finding myself writing more and more.

Octopress [1] is a nice static site generator that builds on top of Jekyll and has nice deployment instructions.

1. http://octopress.org/docs/

Write on Medium. I know it will not be on your own land (domain name) but Medium gives you readers and that's very motivational when you are starting out. My guess is that most blogs get abondened because there are no readers. https://medium.com/blogging-information-advice/fc6cceead8ef

What errors are you running into? Jekyll is actually a great choice. Deployment to S3/Cloudfront can net you a highly performant blog at a very low cost. Comments can be brought in using a service like Disqus.

Or just deploy it to GitHub.

Yeah, I forgot about that. Github Pages work great for this.

Use Pelican then. It's built on Python. https://github.com/getpelican/pelican

Just use Jekyll, it's quite wonderful. If you use Github, Github Pages is a very straightforward way to host as well.

I'd love to write. Which pen should I use?

Short answer: it does not matter. Writing matters.

If some of the pens didn't let me keep possession of the words I wrote, or limited the number of people that could read my manuscripts, I'd choose a different pen.

Perhaps it's not terribly important, and I'm to the point where I'll capitulate, but I want something I can self-host, and I want something easy to run. You don't own what you don't host.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com