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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?

#71

Post by archagon »

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)

I've often thought about doing this. But I always end up coming back to the question: do I want to spend a month (or more) writing a blogging engine, or do I instead want to focus on my actual writing? And what will a custom engine actually give me, aside from sleepless nights and headaches?

Jekyll is a great answer in this regard. You don't have to reinvent the wheel (pagination, RSS, categories, dates, etc.), but you can still customize it with great ease. (Kind of like the Backbone.js of blogging engines, I guess.)

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

#72

Post by x3sphere »

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.

Never had any security issues with WordPress, and I run it on a fairly popular site. The auto updating feature is actually great for a site you won't be working on daily.

Also I think the WP core is well secured. It's when you start adding plugins into the mix things can get dicey.

For spam, Akismet is pretty effective and comes with WP by default, just have to enable it. I consider WP very frictionless for publishing content so it's a good choice in my book.

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

#74

Post by Havvy »

justinpaulson wrote: post #47
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?

"TIL" has more memetic meaning behind it than the full phrase spelled out.

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

#75

Post by yummyfajitas »

gjreda wrote: post #41
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

S3 is great. You can also use this shell script if you like to make the site faster (minify your css/js, compress images, gzip html):

https://github.com/stucchio/Homepage/blob/master/pelican/dep...

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

#76

Post by Pewqazz »

gjreda wrote: post #41
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

Greg's blog is what inspired me to use Pelican. I'm currently using Travis CI to automatically build and push changes made to files in the source branch to the GitHub Pages branch (see this post [1] for further details).

[1]: http://kevinyap.ca/2014/06/deploying-pelican-sites-using-tra...

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

#77

Post by pocket »

greggman wrote: post #42
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.

Not exactly true. I use jekyll on a VPS, store my site's content in a Dropbox folder kept in sync on the server, then use inotifywait to watch for new posts/updates to existing posts and kick off a site regeneration. This means I can update or post using any mobile/tablet text-editing app that supports Dropbox.

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

#78

Post by pocket »

programminggeek wrote: post #45

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.

perfectly valid and admirable advice - although not actually an answer to the question ;-)

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

#80

Post by logn »

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 or 

 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.
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