from Hacker News

Ask HN: What is the preferred platform for dev blog?

by deepsy on 4/16/17, 11:28 PM with 10 comments

Hi! I would like to start a developer blog and I'm looking for advice. The platforms that grabbed my attentions are Medium, Jekyll based-blog (hosted on github pages) or self-hosted WP blog. Is there anything else worth checking?

  • by rwieruch on 4/17/17, 2:27 PM

    I can recommend to use Hugo [0] as static website generator. They have plenty of themes [1] to choose from. You can still adjust it with basic knowledge in HTML/CSS. Afterwards you can chose where to host it. You can use Github Pages [2] for free or pay for a service like DigitalOcean [3]. I wrote a technical cheatsheet [4] on how to setup your own website with these ingredients.

    - [0] https://gohugo.io/

    - [1] http://themes.gohugo.io/

    - [2] https://pages.github.com/

    - [3] https://www.digitalocean.com/

    - [4] http://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five-days/

  • by tucaz on 4/18/17, 4:01 AM

    I'd say you want whatever can get you to start writing NOW.

    If your goal is content, then you should worry about being consistent with content.

    The platform will only matter later in the future.

    I'd go with WordPress.com and that's it. From 0 to 60 in a second.

    Most people will spend time playing with platforms and tech and forget the most important part which is writing.

  • by crispytx on 4/17/17, 4:04 AM

    You could roll your own blog; that's what I'm doing. I wasn't really satisfied with Medium or WordPress, so I just decided to write my own simple blogging software. Writing the blogging software is probably going to be easier than writing the actual blog posts for the blog.

  • by diggs on 4/16/17, 11:36 PM

    I recommend using a static site generator and hosting on S3. It's the cheapest way to do it and will survive a hacker news storm. It's also easily managed in version control and zero maintenance. For extra points you could add a CDN in front of it but it's probably not worth it.

    I'm a big golang user so I recommend Hugo for the site generator.

  • by billconan on 4/17/17, 1:34 AM

    I recommend medium.com, it has content discovery feature to help your posts reach out to others.

  • by probinso on 4/19/17, 8:44 AM

    testing out pelican; it has plugins for latex and jupyter