14 ms·

Ask HN: What are good blogging platforms for programmers?

• eddie_31003 12y ago
  +1 for Github Pages and Jekyll. I used a Bootstrap theme that I tweaked a bit.
• brianbarker 12y ago
  You can share snippets on any platform using either github snippets or an html/js code formatter like https://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/downloads/list https://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/downloads/lis.... Rather than host your own, I prefer just going with tumblr or something slick. I do like tumblr for its social connectedness, easy sharing and liking. Whatever floats your boat, though.
• minimaxir 12y ago
  Using Jekyll (w/ a good theme) + GitHub Pages is more than sufficient. More importantly, it's free, fast, and can handle large amounts of traffic, such as the front page of Hacker News. A year ago, I used Wordpress on shared hosting, then my service was terminated once I hit the front page of HN (~300 concurrent users). I've been using Jekyll + GitHub Pages since, and I've had no issues whatsoever, aside from the occasional GitHub outages.
  • a-priori 12y ago
    A variation of this is to push your Jekyll site to S3 and put CloudFront in front of it. It'll cost you a small amount of money each month (my sorely neglected blog costs me about $0.02/month).
    • hamstu 12y ago
      Wow, that's crazy cheap. What would a day on HN do I wonder?
      • gjreda 12y ago
        I spent a Sunday at the top of Hacker News about a year ago and I don't recall ever paying more than $5 a month for my S3 hosting. For context, last month I had ~20,000 pageviews and my S3 + Data Transfer charges were $2.43.
      • a-priori 12y ago
        Maybe a few dollars? This is crazy cheap... there's a reason Github can offer Pages for free.
    • pron 12y ago
      Or CloudFlare.
    • Jhsto 12y ago
      http://blogging.alastair.is/how-i-served-100k-users-without-crashing-and-only-spent-0-32/ http://blogging.alastair.is/how-i-served-100k-users-without-...
  • rubiquity 12y ago
    I use this same exact setup and for the same exact reasons. Jekyll + GitHub pages is a godsend.
  • krat0sprakhar 12y ago
    Cant +1 this enough. Jekyll is damn easy to get started with and host on github. To start off, you can simply clone any of the existing blogs[0] or create a new one and get started. I also have a few rake and grunt tasks written to help you manage asset packaging (all of this totally optional, btw). [0] - https://github.com/prakhar1989/prakhar1989.github.com https://github.com/prakhar1989/prakhar1989.github.com, http://getpoole.com/ http://getpoole.com/
  • billmalarky 12y ago
    Were you using caching at all? There's a decent plugin called wp super cache that builds flat html files of all your posts and serves those instead of hitting PHP.
    • minimaxir 12y ago
      Yep, I was using WP Super Cache and CloudFlare. Whether or not it was actually working as intended on the shared environment, I'm not sure.
  • srom 12y ago
    As an alternative, you could consider Hugo (http://hugo.spf13.com/overview/introduction http://hugo.spf13.com/overview/introduction), which gives more flexibility regarding the organisation of files and urls.
  • pron 12y ago
    And you can use prose.io (or even GitHub's own editor) to edit posts on the go.
  • shebson 12y ago
    Jekyll with GitHub Pages is a great solution, but it's worth mentioning that other static site generators serve the same purpose and may be a better fit for you, depending on your preferences. Hyde is a very flexible static site generator based on Django, and Metalsmith is a very promising static site generator built on Node. Whatever static site generator you use, hosting on S3 is easy and cheap, and it's easy to automate deployments via Grunt or Gulp.
  • archagon 12y ago
    What makes Jekyll (and other static blogging engines) so great is that they give you far more flexibility than CMSes in certain areas. Just the other day, to see if I could do it, I wrote a Jekyll plugin to parse LilyPond music notation inside a custom Liquid tag[1]. After a day or two of research and fiddling — including learning basic Ruby — I can now have beautiful sheet music in my blog posts without any actual binary dependencies server-side. (In other words, the generated site is unencumbered by my build pipeline, and I don't have to worry about maintaining LilyPond/Inkscape on my server.) If I want to change the output in the future — PNG, SVG, even HTML/CSS — I don't have to touch my original Markdown content at all; it's just another render pass. And the best part is, Github will host the HTML files for free, regardless of whether Jekyll is actually running server-side or not. All your site updates are just a git push away. The idea that your Markdown articles are definitive, that you can add custom grammar, and that your blog is strictly a view into your writing rather than a separate content platform, should be very appealing to programmers! [1]: http://a-jekyll-blog.archagon.net/programming/2014/06/23/second-post/ http://a-jekyll-blog.archagon.net/programming/2014/06/23/sec...
• duiker101 12y ago
  I am not sure it's really what you need but coderwall.com is nice
  • bosky101 12y ago
    +1. great for sharing snippets and i almost learn something new everytime i visit.
• JelteF 12y ago
  You should try Ghost. I've had a good experiences with it. It still has some quirks though like mobile editing (viewing works fine). But it's officially still in beta so that is to be expected. It uses markdown, has lots of themes (some paid, some free, some OSS), you can host it yourself. https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/
  • fredgrott 12y ago
    you can also host ghost statically on github pages
    • baconhigh 12y ago
      how? link? i'd be interested in this.
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
• Deusdies 12y ago
  I was using Nikola for some time, but Github Pages + Jekyll is a good alternative. Though I am currently using WordPress (not that anyone is visiting it), I think I may look into Ghost.
• oddevan 12y ago
  I definitely recommend deploying static pages (either GitHub pages as people have mentioned or a static website through Amazon S3/CloudFront). Personally, I use Ghost and Hipstadeploy: http://ghost.org/ http://ghost.org/ https://github.com/proudlygeek/hipstadeploy https://github.com/proudlygeek/hipstadeploy And demo: http://www.oddevan.com/ http://www.oddevan.com/
  • rubiquity 12y ago
    Doesn't Ghost use a database though? It was using SQLite last time I looked at it.
    • oddevan 12y ago
      It does. I run it on my local machine and use Hipstadeploy to render it to static HTML and send it to Amazon S3. (I'm the kind of weird person that actually likes using a database and fancy backend to write/organize my posts, so I didn't want to use Jekyll.)
• medwezys 12y ago
  http://svbtle.com http://svbtle.com is nice. You can use GitHub flavoured markdown. The code highlighting is not ideal, but other than that it's a very nice platform.
  • evolve2k 12y ago
    I was madly loving svbtle until one day someone pointed out that you can't access or even export your list of email subscribers, so essentially you are building a mailing list for Svbtle not you.
• datamoshr 12y ago
  I am partial to Ghost (https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/). It's a super easy platform to use. You can host it yourself or get paid hosting. Also it's open-source so you can contribute to it's development which is something that you can also learn on. Default theme supports code-snippets out-of-the-box too.
• yummyfajitas 12y ago
  I use Pelican (roughly the Python version of Jekyll, a successor to Hyde). I just write markdown in emacs, publish and it's good to go. Everything is stored in git. See the pelican folder here for code examples - feel free to steal the theme, just write your own content. https://github.com/stucchio/Homepage https://github.com/stucchio/Homepage
  • gjreda 12y ago
    Another fan of Pelican here. I've also written a theme for it [1]. One let's you use IPython Notebook for your Markdown + code. I use S3 to host my blog. It's super cheap and it's really easy to push out changes with S3cmd [2]. Just a simple: s3cmd put mydir/* s3://mybucket/ 1. https://github.com/gjreda/gregreda.com/tree/master/theme https://github.com/gjreda/gregreda.com/tree/master/theme 2. http://s3tools.org/s3cmd http://s3tools.org/s3cmd
    • yummyfajitas 12y ago
      S3 is great. You can also use this shell script if you like to make the site faster (minify your css/js, compress images, gzip html): https://github.com/stucchio/Homepage/blob/master/pelican/deploy.sh https://github.com/stucchio/Homepage/blob/master/pelican/dep...
    • Pewqazz 12y ago
      Greg's blog is what inspired me to use Pelican. I'm currently using Travis CI to automatically build and push changes made to files in the source branch to the GitHub Pages branch (see this post [1] for further details). [1]: http://kevinyap.ca/2014/06/deploying-pelican-sites-using-travis-ci/ http://kevinyap.ca/2014/06/deploying-pelican-sites-using-tra...
• s992 12y ago
  I use Octopress on GH pages. Switched from a full blown CMS and haven't looked back - it works great for me.
• swah 12y ago
  TIL we are all now mature and educated in the perils of the Not Invented Here syndrome so nobody will be telling you to go write your own. (and this makes me sad)
  • oddevan 12y ago
    Fair, but I think most of the things being suggested here are open source, so the truly curious can use them as a starting point. Alternatively: it's good to see what's out there so that when you do (inevitably) write your own, you know /what you want/.
    • thaumaturgy 12y ago
      > Alternatively: it's good to see what's out there so that when you do (inevitably) write your own, you know /what you want/. Just as a counterpoint, I've realized recently that using other things before making your own changes what you'd make, and not necessarily in a positive way. You find yourself thinking in terms of the constraints and features of what you've used, rather than starting with a blank canvas and coming up with something you haven't seen before.
  • kd0amg 12y ago
    Some people probably don't find blogging platforms all that interesting and would really rather just say what they have to say and get back to whatever else they were working on. If someone asked me what's a good kitchen knife, I wouldn't say, "make your own" (even if that's what I would rather do).
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  • justinpaulson 12y ago
    TIL what TIL means. You are too lazy to type "Today I Learned" and your answer to someone asking for a blog platform is to build it themselves?
• billmalarky 12y ago
  Is everyone shying away from wordpress for security reasons? I like the simplicity of wordpress, but in the back of my mind I am concerned that one day I'll visit my site and it will have viagra ads all over it. It would be less of a concern if I blogged daily, but I go to it rarely enough that it could be hosting malware (and making me look like an idiot) for quite a while before I realized it.
  • SheepSlapper 12y ago
    I like WordPress for the basic use case, and if you're self hosting it's super easy to get up and running. The downside is that it's popular (thus a target), and left unpatched or unprotected it's easy to mess something up and become part of those Viagra ad rings ;) I've hosted, set up, or fixed dozens of WordPress blogs, and a few have been compromised for one reason or another (you find lots of PHP shells in upload directories). Not to mention the fact that once you get outside the basic use case (blogging), and/or you start using plugins, things get convoluted FAST. There're a million plugins for WP, and if you're lucky the one you pick will do exactly what you want. But chances are it won't, and you'll spend hours digging through spaghetti code to get it to work for you.
    • billmalarky 12y ago
      Yeah I've actually had several wordpress sites I've been involved with in years past get hacked before. One was the guy I built the site for refusing to keep it updated (this was before auto-update). The other if I recall correctly wasn't the fault of our site but some other site got compromised on the shared server and the attacker was able to hit all the sites on the server. You can see why I'm always a bit wary of WP even if it is irrational.
  • TezzellEnt 12y ago
    Typically these advertisements find their way onto a site through vulnerable plugins. To minimize this, you can install the Wordfence Plugin and it will email you when to update. Another good plugin is rename-wp-login.php which will move the site.com/wp-login/ to site.com/somethingDifficultToGuess and have Wordfence not cache and robots not index that page.
• blooberr 12y ago
  Ghost was super easy to setup on digital ocean (pretty much one-click install)
• jordanlev 12y ago
  If you wind up going with a static site generator (like Jekyll, for example), one thing to watch out for which I experienced on my own technical blog is that if you want comments functionality then your only realistic choice is Disqus... and Disqus is absolutely horrible for comments on technical blogs because it does not allow code snippets! It used to (a few years ago), and then they changed it... now I have to create a pastie or gist for every little piece of code I want to put in a comment response... very annoying. Not a dealbreaker, just something to be aware of. (And if anyone knows of other embeddable comment systems that can be used on static sites, I'd love to hear about them!)
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • NaNaN 12y ago
    You can still do that, but it is a little complicated. https://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/665057-syntax-highlighting https://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/665057-synt...
  • greggman 12y ago
    Disqus does code comments just fine. See other response. Other things missing from a static site generator though include being able to post from a multitude of devices. To post to a static site generator you generally need a full desktop. Or at least that's my experience.
    • pocket 12y ago
      Not exactly true. I use jekyll on a VPS, store my site's content in a Dropbox folder kept in sync on the server, then use inotifywait to watch for new posts/updates to existing posts and kick off a site regeneration. This means I can update or post using any mobile/tablet text-editing app that supports Dropbox.
• quotient 12y ago
  Honestly, I would just write my own HTML/CSS and buy hosting on a server somewhere. This is cheap, and gives you a great deal of control, while also honing your web development skills. (And doing it yourself feels good!)
  • Nzen 12y ago
    I rolled every page for a while. But after I had fifty pages (most migrated from old blog), changing the template was a waste of my time. Strictly speaking, a tool like laser[0] could have helped, but I am young in clojure-fu. I currently use piecrust[1] to statically generate my markdown through twig (templates) and push these to my site host nearlyfreespeech via ssh. It's pay as you go; I've not needed a dB or CGI, and those are not forced on me. Perhaps I'll be punished if I ever get front paged, but YNGNI. I am trying out metalsmith[2] instead, as I'm more familiar with javascript than php and hence can make plugins for the various bits I need. 0. https://github.com/Raynes/laser https://github.com/Raynes/laser 1. http://bolt80.com/piecrust/ http://bolt80.com/piecrust/ 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7361824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7361824
  • zhte415 12y ago
    I agree. The amount of flexibity is huge, especially if you deliberately want a different look on various pages. And yeah, it feels good.
• austinl 12y ago
  Here's a list of resources, mentioned in this thread and elsewhere. Some of these are better at sharing code snippets than others, but you might find the features of the platform more enjoyable. - Jekyll + GitHub Pages (https://help.github.com/articles/using-jekyll-with-pages https://help.github.com/articles/using-jekyll-with-pages) - Octopress/Jekyll + GitHub Pages (http://octopress.org/ http://octopress.org/) - Svbtle (https://svbtle.com/ https://svbtle.com/) - Medium (https://medium.com/ https://medium.com/) - Ghost (https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/)
  • omgitstom 12y ago
    + 1 for svbtle, it is a nice minimalistic design that really concentrates on the content. Octopress / Jekyll are sort of annoying at times specifically if you don't use ruby. For example, on my mac, i've had to deal with weird ruby related issues when upgrading OS X.
  • startjumper 12y ago
    I'm using Silvrback and I love it: http://silvrback.com http://silvrback.com
• arikrak 12y ago
  You can install Wordpress for free and easily on OpenShift. Setup some simple caching (or even just cloudflare) and it will be able to handle basically any amount of traffic. Install a plugin to display code nicely, or embed the code from elsewhere. (for more tips, see my kickstarter project: http://kck.st/1sYmezD http://kck.st/1sYmezD )
• wirrbel 12y ago
  I really like python-based http://tinkerer.me/ http://tinkerer.me/ It uses Sphinx markup which is great for embedding source code snippets and extending the blog with own extensions or pre-built ones.
• programminggeek 12y ago
  It doesn't matter what tool you use. Write things, share with people. Platform isn't important. You can do what you are trying to do on ANY platform.
  • pocket 12y ago
    perfectly valid and admirable advice - although not actually an answer to the question ;-)
• jMyles 12y ago
  Mezzanine (Django blogging platform) with Pygments for code samples. Not a bad choice.
• saj1th 12y ago
  Hugo lacks a couple of features that are present in Octopress or Jekyll but is much more performant. Hosting Hugo blog on GitHub Pages ~ http://hugo.spf13.com/tutorials/github_pages_blog http://hugo.spf13.com/tutorials/github_pages_blog
• lrichardson 12y ago
  Depending on whether by "platform" you mean the actual software package or not, I will throw http://tech.pro http://tech.pro into the mix. (Full disclosure: I am the founder) Tech.pro is a blogging platform / professional network catered only to the tech world (primarily software development). Our editor is markdown-based and handles code snippets etc. quite well in addition to having support for embedded frame sites such as jsfiddle/codepen/sqlfiddle/etc. Although you're writing on the TP platform, you still retain full ownership of your data. You can even download a neatly organized archive of all your blogs (and revisions) in both Markdown and html format at any time. My Blog: http://tech.pro/leland/blog http://tech.pro/leland/blog My Profile: http://tech.pro/leland http://tech.pro/leland
• growlybeard 12y ago
  Hi there! I'm in the early stages of building a blogging platform just for programmers. My main criteria was ease-of-use and that it support code-highlighting out of the box. You can check out what I have so far at www.progblog.io. I must warn you, that it is NOT a mature app at all, and I wouldn't even call it alpha. I will be releasing (and announcing) something here on HN in about 2 or 3 weeks, with a much nicer design (similar to Medium in its simplicity) and a more natural workflow than what exists today.
• tortoises 12y ago
  I like to grab 100s of pieces of unattended plywood & two-by-fours from a junkyard or not-too-dilapidated forest horror cabin or something and drag them back to my house. Then I assemble them using hammer & nails, or I climb up a tree and nail them across some branches. You will need a hotspot for wifi & a tarp to protect u & ur laptop in case of rain while u are sitting up there. Some hip ppl might try to use a makerbot or w/e but to get any kind of height on the platform u will need a LOT of plastic.
• kazinator 12y ago
  I'm interested in this too, in particular answers which assume that: * I already have a server running under my desk, running Apache, and a git repo web-served via CGIT, where I can store any serious code snippets that require versioning. So I'm not interested in anything that uses third party hosting. * I'm the only blogger: no multi-user capabilities needed. * The publishing side doesn't even have to be web-based; the minimal requirements are that I can log in to a shell account and post a blog by creating a text file and running some command. This then updates the page nicely, including the RSS feed and whatnot. * No user comment feature required; it's okay if users mail-in comments, and there is a way to publish selections from the mailbag.
• berzniz 12y ago
  Tumblr. You could have your blog up within 10 minutes
• jason_slack 12y ago
  I'm using MDWiki (http://dynalon.github.io/mdwiki/#!index.md http://dynalon.github.io/mdwiki/#!index.md) since I am spending a lot of time in Markdown anyway. Easy to scp articles up to my VPS.
• sergiotapia 12y ago
  I use Ghost on ASmallOrange. I have the tiny yearly package. I wrote my posts using Markdown and done with it. Pretty simple. http://sergiotapia.me/ http://sergiotapia.me/
• laacz 12y ago
  I know it's already too late, but recently CodePen announced their blogging platform [1] which is nicely integrated with their base service - sharing of code snippets. [1] http://blog.codepen.io/2014/06/19/can-write-blog-posts-codepen-now/ http://blog.codepen.io/2014/06/19/can-write-blog-posts-codep...
• logn 12y ago
  HTML is built for making documents and a blog seems like a perfect case when you should just open up a text editor and write some HTML. That's how I started my own blog recently. Then I switched to ghost.io. It's a nice platform, but I might go back to hand writing it. To do code snippets, try the <code> or <pre> tags. I suppose if you want a full commenting system, then a platform makes sense. However, on low-traffic blogs I think the comments (or rather, lack thereof) make it seem like someone's talking to an empty room.
  • subverting 12y ago
    Too much work if you want anything modern. As in don't you want some tags to organize the posts? Don't you want an index of your tags, and an index of your posts? You'd need to edit by hand 10 files just to add a new post if you wanted those necessary features and yeah they are necessary if you're not just writing a diary for yourself. If that's the case you don't need a blog at all just a folder with text files on your machine. But I agree with you in that I like to just open up a text editor and start writing, so I use a script called "Bash Blog" which lets me do just that. The website it produces are static html files, and it uses a shell script to reassemble itself after every new post I created so I don't need to end up editing 10 files, but I still get all the useful features I mentioned above. http://cfenollosa.github.io/bashblog/ http://cfenollosa.github.io/bashblog/
• mostlybadfly 12y ago
  If you're saying programmer I'm assuming there is already this level of experience, but I went ahead and made my own blog set up. This was mostly really to learn Rails. Even though I am mostly doing strictly Ruby stuff at the moment, I hear of or see features I want to add to the blog so little by little I pick up more rails techniques. For just having something already set to focus on your writing, I really like what I've seen from Jekyll, I don't have a need yet but I'm definitely keeping it in mind for future projects.
• sharmi 12y ago
  I second what programminggeek says. What is important is you write. That said, I use the static site generator mynt. Host the generated website on digitalocean droplet behind an nginx server. If you want to go the static site route and want to try all the options that you like, (and lets be honest, that is a big part of the fun setting up a blog) here are some aggregated lists http://staticsitegenerators.net/ http://staticsitegenerators.net/ https://www.staticgen.com/ https://www.staticgen.com/ https://wiki.python.org/moin/StaticSiteGenerator https://wiki.python.org/moin/StaticSiteGenerator
• motyar 12y ago
  Github pages + Perl + shell script. Check mine https://github.com/motyar/motyar.github.com/blob/master/14/update https://github.com/motyar/motyar.github.com/blob/master/14/u...