Ask HN: Thinking on creating a blog and need help (platform) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Thinking on creating a blog and need help (platform)

1 pointncage2 comments

Hi everyone, i'm thinking on creating a blog and need some advice. It will be a programming based blog. I don't know if it matters but i'm primarily a .net developer. First, my main question, is about which blog platform to choose. Here are some of my requirements: 1. Really low maintenance - I already have enough to do. I don't want to add to the trying to maintenance on software/hardware a blog system unless its a no brainer.

2. Custom Domain Name

3. Ability to customize look/feel as much as i want including custom CSS

4. I don't know how possible it is but i would like the ability to migrate from one platform to another if i so choose. So if i choose blog platform x i can switch to blog platform Y if i like.

5. Ability to put whatever scripts i choose like google analystics.

6 Different Comment Engines - I don't much about it but i do want users to be able to leave comments so maybe Disqus?

Of course since i'm just starting i don't know what else i should be looking for.

I've looked at a variety of them (its hard to choose with so many) like wordpress, squarespace, silvrback, Ghost, Roon, Ect... One of them i looked at is "Postach" was pretty cool in that the publishing platform for your blog was evernote (which i'm a big advocate of) just don't how great it is.

I don't mind paying for a platform as long as its worth it. ($5-$6 a month).

On an aside when creating a blog do you recommend just using your main site such as "mysite.com/blog" or do you recommend creating a domain specific to a topic? For example i plan to do some post about Angular. So would it be better to create a domain like "angularisgreat.com". That kind of limits you when you want to talk about something else though :P.

Anyways, any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.....

I'm using Blogger for my personal blog ( http://lhorie.blogspot.ca ). It doesn't provide a whole lot customization options, but it's more of a linkblog than a programming blog and the defaults are good enough for that purpose. It doesn't do markdown and I don't think you can export, so I don't recommend it for your purpose.

On my Mithril blog ( http://lhorie.github.io/mithril-blog ), I'm using a custom build script based on grunt+marked and Disqus (you can check the github project page if it interests you). Some of the publishing steps are still a little manual though, so it's probably not what you're looking for, but I've stuff like syntax highlighting setup there if you want to steal the code for a starting boilerplate.

Recently someone from the Mithril community showed me a simple Jekyll+Mithril blog platform that sounds closer to what you're looking for: ( https://github.com/eiriksm/kyll-thrill ). It's pretty lean, you can write posts in markdown, create a HTML template, and use Disqus for comments (it does RSS too). I'm planning on trying it out myself.

Re: portability, I think having the articles in markdown files is the way to go if you want to be able to move the content to other micro-blogging tools.

As far as domains go, I use my personal blog for writing about more random (but still programming-related) things, e.g. Angular or Velocity.js or whatever, and I keep application-development-focused content on the Mithril blog. You can always do a mysite.com/blog that is primarily focused on Angular, but occasionally talk about other things. As a reader, this type of blog feels more human, and I personally like the occasional insights that come out of deviations from the core topic.

Most complete is Medium -- basically minimal customizability, but you get an in-built audience and it looks great. It is free and might be a good place to get started.

I really like Squarespace -- slightly expensive though, and very complete, hard to customize.

Wordpress is hard to beat -- very stable and solid, highly customizable, but that can become dangerous/a distraction

Ghost (https://ghost.org) -- is newer and has been on here a few times. I'm sure some other HN readers might have thoughts.

I would use a personal domain, but only if you can post regularly enough to make it worth it. My old blog got stale, so now I am working on some posts on Medium where that is mitigate by the fact that I am not the only one on the channel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com