Ask HN: Suggest a platform for programming blog | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Suggest a platform for programming blog

9 pointsXelom15 comments

Hi,

I want to start a programming blog to share my experiences nowadays. I think I've got enough experience to guide fellow new developers. There will be plenty of code in the blog too. So I was wondering which platform suits my needs.

- Ghost - Blogger - Medium - Wordpress - Github Pages with Jekyll - My custom site? - Other

Thanks :)

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How much control do you want?

No one can answer for you whether you want more control and your own site. If I can assume based on your comment history that you're focused on Win/C#, perhaps creating one with a C# blogging engine will be most rewarding?[1] If you feel it's a time sink, then you probably want to jump right into writing. In which case the stability and portability of Blogger + domain name + code formatting plugins is probably adequate.

1. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=c%23+blog&as_oq=sof... (filtered by past year)

I'm only talking the talk since I'm currently hosted on Wordpress, but I'm starting to think that a static site generator is the best option. Why? Because, a) programming blogs are a bit like academic papers in that they depend on careful markup, and b) they work a lot better when they're minimalistic, with a strong emphasis on the code. With a static site generator, the definitive version of each article can be a simple, easy-to-edit Markdown file; you don't have to reason about HTML/PHP/SQL unless you really want to. The content is perfectly decoupled from the presentation, and you can edit your articles in your favorite text editor to boot.

There's two questions here.

     Where should I host my blog?

     What software should I use?

If you have already have website, then something that works with your hosting provider makes sense. If you don't have a website, then it might make sense to find a hosting provider to host your blog.

As for software, simpler is probably better. But simpler is in the eye of the beholder. It might be optimized for setup or maintenance or aesthetics of the interface or remote posting or something else. The software choice comes down to workflow and workflow may depend on hosting choice.

I've been using Ghost with Github Pages: http://ruenzuo.github.io/, I'm running a local instance of Ghost and using this static site generator: https://github.com/axitkhurana/buster

How slick. I like the theme!

Thanks! The theme is actually open source, check it out: https://github.com/daleanthony/Uno

I run a little ember app pulling in JSON from whatever blog app I'm using at the moment. I don't know where I read that your blog is your dojo or something like that (maybe pragmatic programmer? ) but it made a good point that your blog is a place for you to train at.

All of those will work. For my blog I use ghost because it's a nice mix between bloat (Wordpress) and having to do a lot (theming, etc) yourself (Jekyll). Its also low memory compared to wordpress, in my experience, which is nice on a cheap digital ocean vps.

I use Ghost for my own blog and I'm happy with it. It's quick to set up, easy to use and beautiful. The markdown editor is great and in my experience the platform really stays out of your way and lets you focus on writing a blog post.

I second Ghost, for the same reasons, easy to use yet thorough and beautiful. The markdown in Ghost easily allows for adding in blocks of code. No experience with it, but an Octopress blog through github is probably a good project to have too.

If you like ruby on rails and want something lightweight that's easy to customize: https://github.com/natew/obtvse2

http://tech.pro/

---

Write using Markdown, reach wide audiences, awesome analytics and just a wonderful PLEASANT writing experience.

Recently had to figure that out also, and ended up going with github hosting and octopress blog framework. Very happy with both, particularly with how code-friendly they are.

I use ghost for my blog (http://kristinn.ghost.io/). I like it very much :) It just feels natural.

Jekyll! Static blog, very fast, GitHub offers free hosting.

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