Ask HN: what hosted blogging solution would you recomend? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: what hosted blogging solution would you recomend?

14 pointscsmeder32 comments

I'm thinking of using http://blogger.com or http://posterous.com/ what else is out there? What would you recommend?

I'm looking for a hosted solution with basic functionality.

I faced the same question a few days ago. I went for Tumblr in the end, mostly because of the polished feel both of the website and of individual Tumblr blogs, the low barrier to entry, and theme customisability. I've quite liked how little I've had to change to get a basic blog working how I want it (decent look and feel, Twitter feed integrated, etc).

Only nasty surprise since has been that the Tumblr founders "don't believe in comments", so there's no built-in commenting support (instead of commenting, you're supposed to sign up for your own Tumblr account and use their "reblog" feature, which isn't a decision I want to force on any readers I may attract). They do have some integration with Disqus, which I was sort of planning to use anyway, although apparently this doesn't work so well in themes other than the default "Redux". I have had a couple of problems with comments not showing up, but I think it's probably a problem with Disqus rather than with Tumblr.

I found a couple of Mashable articles comparing Posterous and Tumblr:

http://mashable.com/2009/06/29/posterous-vs-tumblr/

http://mashable.com/2009/09/28/tumblr-vs-posterous/

the not-native comments for tumblr surprised me, too. i don't like the disqus solution, though i think anonymous comments are still possible.

i don't like the design of tumblr themes, but that's obviously personal. i guess i'm more of a word-blogger, and thus my attachment to wordpress.

Why bother with comments? All they do is add noise. I like Tumblr's approach with their Likes and Reblogs: It adds a trackable story to each of your posts.

I'm a Tumblr theme designer. Would it be whoring to point you to one of my creations? I made this one specifically for people who want to write in longform; I've seen it used on a few hundred blogs now and it does a very nice job.

http://www.tumblr.com/theme/3164

Alternatively, if you want a very minimal solution, here's a stripped-down one I made, though it's got a quirk or two I ought to get around to fixing.

http://www.tumblr.com/theme/230

Tumblr has post-by-email and customizable themes. http://www.tumblr.com/why-tumblr

Soup.io is another tumblelog platform that makes it dead simple to reblog (literally one click). http://soup.io

Tumblr is the most polished blogging platform out there. It also has built-in audience controls, meaning if you write good things, news will spread.

Posterous has an excellent feature set, but it's uglier than balls. Bad typography, bad colors, generally washed-out. If you're okay with not looking beautiful, though, it might be a better from-the-get-go choice than Tumblr. I've tried and given up on it myself.

I use Livejournal myself. Works fantastically well, best commenting system out there, support RSS, Atom and OpenID. Has a well-featured API, so you can use any number of clients to write posts.

For well-polished basics, I don't think you can do any better than posterous.

I just created a posterous account.

Is it possible to add photos to a post after its been posted? I can see it gives you text editing, but no way of uploading photos?

Do you get to decide where the photos fall in-line with the text?

Exactly! That a blogging service doesn't let you insert images into a post using the web UI boggles my mind.

I don't know if you can do that with posterous or not, but I know WordPress is used for a lot of sites whose content relies heavily on images. peopleofwalmart.com would be a example.

It's also coded like shit and has security issues constantly. Anyone who uses wordpress on a site a hacker's spider might find is asking for trouble.

one slight turn off to posterous is that there seems to be no nice way to embed math in the same style as wordpress's latex integration. Is there such a way already or forthcoming?

http://wordpress.com

it just works. for everything.

i've tried posterous and returned to wordpress.

edit: i've used wordpress both as a tech-dumb, just-want-to-blog-fast user, as well as set up and customized on my own server. curious what problems others have found with wordpress.

Here's my big Wordpress problem: It adds too much shit to a default install.

Sidebar? Archives? Tag lists? Blogroll? Datestamping? Comment numbers? When I install Wordpress I immediately have to go in and remove everything. It gives me so goddamn much to work with. Its themes are overall too bloated for my taste.

It's a good solution blogging-wise, but I wish they would make it easier to get rid of all the junk.

You get the full power of WP, hosted on their servers. It's not as flexible as rolling your own, however.

I'd also vouch for Posterous, but it's not as advanced as something like Wordpress is.

security, bloat, ugly code, annoyingly frequent updates.

He pointed out to the hosted version of wordpress (.com)

Blogger, WordPress.com, Posterous, Tumblr, Weebly, TypePad, etc... are all good choices, each with their own pluses and minuses. If you get to the point where you want more flexibility, and customization with your choice of plugins, please give Flooha a try, it's free. http://flooha.com You can upgrade later to a traditional web hosting account with control panel, ssh, email, backups, cron jobs, forwarders, statistics, file manager, and more if you like the service.

If you have questions, look me up on Google Talk as "flooha", or email me at matt [at] flooha [dot] com.

Posterous sucks because you cannot insert images where you want and you have to go through a separate interface to get your images in it. Posted one article on posterous, and don't want to post more.

If you use your e-mail program as your post editor (I use Gmail web interface), you can make it work by throwing ((nogallery)) into your title. See my recent posts for how it works: http://www.sachinagarwal.com/

Disclosure: I'm not the Sachin Agarwal that co-founded Posterous, although he's threatened to hijack my domain and redirect it to his blog. (He's kidding. Sort of. I will stab him if he does.) Because of my name, however, I get random support e-mails and have gotten pretty decent at tech support. Also, the Help section is actually rather well documented if you know what you're looking for.

what if you didn't put the images in ahead of time? Can you add them when you go to edit the post?

I wanted an easy to admin wordpress site and picked dreamhost.com as its just about as turn-key as I needed. Backups, upgrades all work seamlessly. This gave me the added benefit that for a fixed price per year, I can host other people's wordpress sites on the same plan. Turns out I have several friends that want a site but know nothing about running one, so I do it for them.

For a wp theme that looks good and has flexibility and support, I picked http://diythemes.com/thesis/

If you're looking for ease-of-use, posterous or Blogger. I'd probably go with Blogger, but there's nothing wrong with posterous either.

If you're looking to eventually do "cooler" stuff with blogging, go with WordPress or MoveableType. I've been with MT for almost five years. If I had to do it over again, I'd probably stay, but WordPress is looking awful good as well.

But for now? Just kicking around? Make it as easy as possible on yourself.

I'm using movable type because it renders to static pages, so it will scale better.

My blog and static product description pages use it http://www.gridspy.co.nz/ http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/

It is easy to use and a nice fast loading time (pre-rendered html) for visitors.

I'm writing a new blogging platform that is definitely much simpler than Blogger, Posterous or Tumblr. I'm hoping to get my first iteration out by the end of the week (yay for Thanksgiving break!) and will post it on Hacker News. But I couldn't find an email on your account so feel free to email me - abii @st anford.edu

what's your differentiator? how do you get any simpler than posterous and tumblr without becoming twitter?

I've heard great things about squarespace (http://www.squarespace.com), though I haven't used it myself.

They seem to have import/export functionality to all the other big blog platforms, so it wouldn't be hard to jump out to another platform if you wanted to.

It's not free, though (starting at $8/mo).

All of them. Register for a posterous account and you can autopost to other blogs/twitter/facebook/flickr/etc.

Why be limited?

when would that be useful? people usually have a single blog rather than duplicates at different domains...otherwise your users and comments are fragmented.

furthermore, the features are in the interfaces for writing and reading posts. you might as well choose a platform that allows you to write posts with all the image floating and code snippets you want. or whatever.

I went with tumbler for mine, the only thing I don't like is how it links to the actual post. Instead of linking the post title, like every single other blog on the planet, you have to scroll all the way down and click the "Posted 4 days ago" link

http://www.typepad.com

I love posterous.

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