Ask HN: What blog service to use for software/electronic side-projects? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What blog service to use for software/electronic side-projects?

3 pointstonteldoos5 comments

Good day fellow HNers,

I've been looking at alternatives to increase my online presence a little (in ways other than a StackOverflow and GitHub account). I have a number of small side projects that I'd like to write about (on various topics, but mostly electronic and software). I don't expect daily articles, but the ones that will be posted should be reasonably high quality (some howtos, experimental projects, research projects, etc).

It also turns out that there are MUCH more blogging platform options available than I thought, including various technical tradeoffs:

- Self hosted vs Free cloud based vs Premium cloud based

- Static vs Dynamic engines

- Varying degrees of interactiveness

- etc

For those of you who do similar things, what were the things you considered when you made your choice, and what has turned out to be important, ie:

- Is user comments and feedback valuable, or a nice to have?

- How important is social media integration for a reasonably niche topic?

- Is self hosting more trouble than it's worth? (cost and timewise)

- Impact on search engine exposure

- ....

Is it a viable option to self host (just because I want to play around with it) with links to those articles from a more mainstream blogging site?

As always, your feedback is much appreciated!

I currently use a self-hosted Wordpress instance on CentOS. It's the most obvious solution and works well. The comment feature is really important, I get feedback on several of my articles, and it's rewarding to see that someone has read your page. Example: http://thomasdaede.com/wordpress/?p=167

Wordpress also gets hit with tons of zero days, so make sure to stay on top of updating, and backup your database. I also don't like how inserting pictures works, but it got a lot better with Wordpress 4.0.

This should give you a really good idea for what you are trying to do and read the comments: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/08/16/best-blogging-services...

It will be hard to get visibility with free services and if you are serious then buy a WP Theme (my favorite site is www.prophoto.com it is for photographers but you can tweak a lot and give it a professional look). Yes, adding social sharing features and specially having comments section a must, we wouldn't have been talking if HN didn't provide us this feature, right? I would also suggest that you submit your posts to techcrunch.com www.themuse.com and see if you can contribute in their blogs and get your name out there and then go on your own, good luck!

User feedback is must for me. If you are publishing How To guides and tutorial articles, users will always want to interact with you. So it makes sense to enable comments.

Either static or dynamic, you can have commenting system. I host my static blog on Github pages and commenting is handled by Isso [0]. Alternatively you can use Disqus, but I don't like it.

For dynamic blog, I hosted Wordpress on Openshift. It's free for small blogs.

I don't really integrate any social media (like login with G+ or Comment using FB etc), really don't like it.

[0] - https://github.com/posativ/isso

Hello friend.

I would highly recommend taking a look at www.ghost.org

I use it for my online presence to essentially talk about the same thing that you are. It is very simple to use and made for a great, clean reading experience. I am just using the default theme provided because I like the simplicity and elegance of it. Feel free to browse to my website to get a feel for it.

P.S. It requires a dedicated capable of running node.js apps, I recommend Digital Ocean for this. You can get just what you need to start at $5 a month.

Hope this helps! :D

www.matthewreichardt.com

Jekyll will be perfect for your needs. - It's super light, beautiful and easy to maintain. - Free hosting via GitHub pages. You can use any of the existing themes. - Add Disqus comments - that's also free and beautiful. - Add GA for analytics. Write your posts in md and GH Pages will publish it instantaneously for you.

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