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Ask HN: What are good blogging platforms for programmers?

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Re: Ask HN: What are good blogging platforms for programmers?

#41

Post by gjreda »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #11

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

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

2. http://s3tools.org/s3cmd

Re: Ask HN: What are good blogging platforms for programmers?

#42

Post by greggman »

jordanlev wrote: post #24

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 cre…

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.

Re: Ask HN: What are good blogging platforms for programmers?

#43

Post by SheepSlapper »

billmalarky wrote: post #20

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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: What are good blogging platforms for programmers?

#46

Post by TezzellEnt »

billmalarky wrote: post #20

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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: What are good blogging platforms for programmers?

#47

Post by justinpaulson »

swah wrote: post #16

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)

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?

Re: Ask HN: What are good blogging platforms for programmers?

#48

Post by pc86 »

billmalarky wrote: post #20

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.

You should visit it at least often enough to keep the core and plugins updated, in which case you should be fine.
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