from Hacker News

Blogging: The Hacker Way

by bem on 11/20/11, 12:37 AM with 37 comments

  • by ezyang on 11/20/11, 1:31 AM

    My experience trying to convince my friends to start blogging is that the absolute worst thing to happen to a blogger is for them to spend an inordinate amount of time tweaking their blog setup, and not actually writing. So yes, if you blog regularly and are looking to improve your process, this may be useful, but if you're just starting off, just do something that works immediately, and worry about the words, not the code.

  • by danishkhan on 11/20/11, 1:47 AM

    Octopress is a project that uses Jekyll, but adds a lot more features that make it even easier to use as a blogging framework.

    http://octopress.org/

  • by _gd3l on 11/20/11, 3:29 AM

    For people commenting on his statements about WordPress: Yes, there are better ways than having 12 files to generate what you need. In fact, you can do it with two: an index.php and a style.css file (technically).

    But the point is that if you just want to write on the web and not deal with a bunch of nonsense, learning a whole CMS like WordPress can be a pain. I cringe when people give WP a bad name, as it really is awesome and it's pretty much how I make my living. But you can't deny that if you just want simple posting features, WordPress can be a little unnecessarily large.

  • by jyap on 11/20/11, 4:17 AM

    I had this grand idea of re-working my personal web site and having it be redirected to a GitHub hosted instance. All very clean/elite and all. And I did set it up and made 3 posts...

    But then I stumbled onto or more so realized that I had a road block. Namely that of practicality.

    I mean it meant that I needed to be on the command line to actually post and I needed to run Git commands to add files/posts and then push to the server. I couldn't post from my cell phone or iPad. Most of my browsing these days is from my iPad.

    I mean blogging from WordPress/Blogger isn’t as clean/elite but at least you can edit through the web as well as optionally via a separate application. So if the barriers to create are too high I may as well be using WordPress/Tumblr/Blogger.

    I tested out Cloud9 IDE since it ties in nicely with GitHub repositories and covers the base of being able edit througth the web... But the workflow still didn't work. Everything besides blogging 'got in the way'.

    If you want to blog like a hacker, start by writing content that doesn't suck.

    If you want to feel elite and 'static HTMLy' about it, then:

      - Set up a simple content creation site that supports your content creation workflow best.
  - Set up your elite Jekyll site.
  - Set up a cronjob and a HTML parser which downloads and reformats your posts from your simple content creation site and feeds them to Jekyll.

  • by acangiano on 11/20/11, 2:57 PM

    As many here know, I wrote a book on technical blogging for "hackers and founders" (http://pragprog.com/book/actb/technical-blogging, now complete). In it I included Jekyll/Octopress as one of the available options, but ultimately suggested WordPress to most readers. WordPress, with its unlimited number of features, allows you to set it up quickly and start writing. Jekyll/Octopress requires you to write quite a bit of code if you want to obtain the same level of customization that I recommend for professional blogs. It's a growing ecosystem, and one to monitor closely, but at this stage I feel it would be a disservice to my readers to blindly recommend a somewhat Spartan system that requires hacking if you want to add, say, a list of most popular posts in the sidebar.

  • by po on 11/20/11, 9:01 AM

    If you want a similar solution but are more comfortable in python then also check out hyde: http://ringce.com/hyde

    It's very similar in spirit but uses python and the corresponding tools to get the job done.

  • by asto on 11/20/11, 6:30 AM

    I use Wordpress with almost no modifications made. I haven't even changed the default header image that comes with Wordpress. The way I saw it when I made the blog, the content's more important than making things look pretty. I'll do up the theme later when I have a decent reader-base.

  • by numbdemon on 11/20/11, 6:46 AM

    http://octopress.org/ this one is better

  • by 8ig8 on 11/20/11, 1:44 AM

    Regarding WordPress, the author says:

    > The theme for the blog and two static pages took up 12 files of HTML and PHP layouts. Furthermore I had made several hacks to make things be just the way I wanted.

    I know WordPress is an easy target on some fronts, but this point seems like a stretch. Twelve files plus hacks?

    I don't know all your site requirements, but 2 to 4 WP theme files would probably work for what I see on your site.

    I'd be interested to see what the twelve files included. I'm no expert but maybe I could offer some tips for simplifying things?

  • by _frog on 11/20/11, 2:47 AM

    I started working on my personal site today and I've been using Jekyll for it to take advantage of GitHub pages, it's fantastically useful for someone like me who already keeps all their essays in markdown and knows their way around HTML and CSS. This post is super helpful to me, thanks for showing it to us.

  • by bothra90 on 11/20/11, 5:50 PM

    Has anyone tried blosxom(written in perl) and pyblosxom (the python alternative)? They are both pretty easy to setup and use. try :http://pyblosxom.bluesock.org/ and http://www.blosxom.com/

  • by helipad on 11/20/11, 10:06 AM

    I can recommend StaceyApp: http://staceyapp.com/

    The filesystem is built of just folders and text files, and it creates a blog automatically. Very minimal and doesn't require any kind of admin backend.

  • by josscrowcroft on 11/20/11, 9:41 AM

    That is a really, really nice looking blog. I love the clean simple approach.