from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are good blogging platforms for programmers?

by hhimanshu on 7/22/14, 4:53 PM with 83 comments

• by minimaxir on 7/22/14, 4:58 PM

  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.

• by swah on 7/22/14, 5:31 PM

  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)

• by billmalarky on 7/22/14, 5:38 PM

  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.

• by yummyfajitas on 7/22/14, 5:15 PM

  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

• by JelteF on 7/22/14, 5:11 PM

  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/

• by jordanlev on 7/22/14, 5:43 PM

  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!)

• by logn on 7/23/14, 7:45 AM

  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.

• by oddevan on 7/22/14, 5:12 PM

  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/ https://github.com/proudlygeek/hipstadeploy

  And demo: http://www.oddevan.com/

• by brianbarker on 7/22/14, 5:07 PM

  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/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.

• by lrichardson on 7/22/14, 6:33 PM

  Depending on whether by "platform" you mean the actual software package or not, I will throw 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 My Profile: http://tech.pro/leland

• by austinl on 7/22/14, 5:53 PM

  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)

  - Octopress/Jekyll + GitHub Pages (http://octopress.org/)

  - Svbtle (https://svbtle.com/)

  - Medium (https://medium.com/)

  - Ghost (https://ghost.org/)

• by kazinator on 7/22/14, 9:00 PM

  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.

• by sharmi on 7/26/14, 8:01 PM

  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/

  https://www.staticgen.com/

  https://wiki.python.org/moin/StaticSiteGenerator

• by medwezys on 7/22/14, 5:14 PM

  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.

• by mostlybadfly on 7/23/14, 7:12 PM

  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.

• by growlybeard on 7/22/14, 6:39 PM

  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.

• by Deusdies on 7/22/14, 5:11 PM

  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.

• by datamoshr on 7/22/14, 5:14 PM

  I am partial to Ghost (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.

• by arikrak on 7/22/14, 6:07 PM

  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 )

• by laacz on 7/23/14, 7:20 AM

  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-codep...

• by s992 on 7/22/14, 5:20 PM

  I use Octopress on GH pages. Switched from a full blown CMS and haven't looked back - it works great for me.

• by saj1th on 7/22/14, 6:32 PM

  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

• by motyar on 8/3/14, 11:47 AM

  Github pages + Perl + shell script. Check mine https://github.com/motyar/motyar.github.com/blob/master/14/u...

• by jason_slack on 7/23/14, 12:51 AM

  I'm using MDWiki (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.

• by wirrbel on 7/22/14, 6:13 PM

  I really like python-based 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.

• by quotient on 7/22/14, 5:47 PM

  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!)

• by eddie_31003 on 7/22/14, 5:24 PM

  +1 for Github Pages and Jekyll. I used a Bootstrap theme that I tweaked a bit.

• by sergiotapia on 7/23/14, 3:08 AM

  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/

• by berzniz on 7/22/14, 9:39 PM

  Tumblr. You could have your blog up within 10 minutes

• by programminggeek on 7/22/14, 6:16 PM

  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.

• by tortoises on 7/22/14, 7:25 PM

  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.

• by jMyles on 7/22/14, 6:24 PM

  Mezzanine (Django blogging platform) with Pygments for code samples. Not a bad choice.

• by blooberr on 7/22/14, 5:42 PM

  Ghost was super easy to setup on digital ocean (pretty much one-click install)

• by duiker101 on 7/22/14, 4:58 PM

  I am not sure it's really what you need but coderwall.com is nice