Ask HN: Ideal blog platform for startups? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Ideal blog platform for startups?

8 pointsSkyMarshal7 comments

What's the ideal blog platform for a startup? Typically you want the most possible exposure, but also to own all your content and have it associated with your company domain, while being easy to use and administer. I have a few thoughts on what it might look like, did I miss anything? Are there any platforms that meet all these criteria currently?

1. Custom domain capable, so our content will be associated with [blog].mystartup.com instead of [blogplatformname].com in search engines.

2. Automated social media integration, blog posts automatically propagated to Twitter, FB, G+, etc.

2a. Corollary: integrated Disqus comments

3. Content network (Medium.com, Tumblr, Wordpress, Svbtle.com)

4. FOSS platform you can either self-host or host via the organization's P/SAAS service (Wordpress, Ghost). Ideal would be self-hosting yet still capable of #3.

5. Own all your content, whether self-hosted or SAAS hosted.

6. Editor that's both techie and non-techie friendly. Aka, Markdown support for techies, WYSIWYG editor for non-techies. Prefer all posts' source stored as Markdown for easy data portability.

7. Bylines for posts - want to publish not just under the company name, but show author names as well

8. SEO-friendly, especially url's

9. Easily theme-able

10. ...?

Go with Wordpress/Ghost(self hosted) if you want to own your content.

Another thing, many startups use Tumblr because they like it not to be hosted on the same server, so that if your website goes down, your blog will be still up. Tumblr has social features, auto posting to social networks, and all the features listed above except the fact that you're hosting your content on Tumblr servers. Which I don't think should be a problem.

Is there such a thing as an "ideal blog platform for a startup"? I don't think so. Is there even such a thing as an "ideal blog platform"? No, because "ideal" is subjective. Are you a CEO type who wants to avoid the muckiness of having to write code or do any customization? Then Wordpress might not be ideal for you - or at least you should expect to pay a few hundred dollars to someone to install + customize it for you. After that, maybe it's ideal. Are you a developer who just wants the blog to get the #### out of your way so you can blog? Then a hosted medium or ghost blog or even blogger would be perfect. Or would it be better to have a blog in which you do absolutely nothing but write? Hell, host it on github then.

There is no such thing as "ideal" but there is "ideal for you", of course. I recently settled (again) for Wordpress for my personal blog. It was a combination of "I already know it" and "I can pay $50 for a nice template that isn't overused and accomplishes what I want without any fuss". It is ideal today for me for those reasons. That may change though...

Try not to get sidetracked or hung up on this. In the end the success or failure of your startup is probably not going to be due to your blog platform choice. The product and getting users' feedback should be the focus.

What is your goal for this blog and why have you placed so many restrictions on it already, like requiring bylines? Don't forget you can iterate...

Depending on tech capability, Statamic is a good option http://statamic.com/

The team at Asana have used it to scale as we ll http://eng.asana.com/2014/02/scaling-asana-com/

That looks great, thanks, will eval it.

I used to use blogger, mapped to my domain name. Last year I switched to Jekyll which I like a lot except that I have comments turned off, which is bad and needs to be fixed.

Blogger mapped to your own domain would be a good place to start. It is easy to export content out of blogger if you change your mind.

Just go with WordPress then, you've been hinting at it yourself. Given the amount if plugins and themes out there you should be able to find one for each your needs.

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