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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?

#51

Post by billmalarky »

TezzellEnt wrote: post #46
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.

I have basic auth protecting login and no plugins installed because I know they are usually the source of vulnerabilities.

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

#52

Post by lrichardson »

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

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

#53

Post by billmalarky »

pc86 wrote: post #48
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.

No plugins right now and I believe I have it set up to auto-update the core.

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

#54

Post by billmalarky »

SheepSlapper wrote: post #43
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…

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.

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

#55

Post by growlybeard »

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.

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

#56

Post by thaumaturgy »

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)

Don't be; I came to the comments section to suggest rolling your own. You are, after all, a programmer.

...although I might not've hit submit, since I'm not sure I'd want to participate in the argument that'd be sure to come next.

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

#57

Post by thaumaturgy »

oddevan wrote: post #23
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)

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/.

> 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.

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

#58

Post by a-priori »

hamstu wrote: post #21
a-priori wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Wow, that's crazy cheap. What would a day on HN do I wonder?

Maybe a few dollars? This is crazy cheap... there's a reason Github can offer Pages for free.

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

#59

Post by tortoises »

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.

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

#60

Post by Binky_Bob »

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.

Wordpress has some downsides: * The hosted version doesn't let you put ads in.

* If you host yourself it is a lot of maintenance to keep wordpress patched, spam cleared, etc.

* It is dynamic, so each page needs to be built based on a query to the mysql database. For a handful of users this is no big deal. If you hit the HN front page your site will be overloaded.

On the other hand, Wordpress is good if you blog on the go and want to use the ipad app or whatever to post/maintain your blog. It might also be good if you have multiple contributors, or update your blog so frequently (minutes) that rebuilding the site to deploy it is an impediment.

Octopress / Jekyll is a good alternative:

* Content is pre-formatted HTML files, no database to get in the way or slow things down.

* Tons of people use it, so it is well known.

* Lots of publishing options -- github, heroku, s3 + cloudfront, etc.

* "Features" like discussion forums can be linked in from disqus or other purpose-built services.

* Publishing is easy via running a script, although that means lugging your laptop around or using an ssh client on your tablet.

* With static HTML the attack surface is substantially less compared to a PHP site with a back-end database, so security should be significantly better and easier to deal with.

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