Ask HN: Best blogging platform?

I'll +1 everyone who is recommending Jekyll. I've rolled my own blog engines (first one was Java/Struts 10 years ago) but I'm loving the zen of blogging via creating and pushing Markdown files to GitHub.

It's simple, provides me with a versioned and easily portable archive and doesn't require constant security updates. Here are some tips from migrating from WP: http://decafbad.com/blog/2011/06/08/moved-to-jekyll

What is a blogging "platform"? For that matter, what exactly does "blogging" consist of? Many answers below don't provide what I would call a platform - many aspects of what one might call "bloggin" have not been thought through (e.g. archiving and exporting of entries and comments, how are comments integrated, security features, hosting...) These are all part of the design of a platform. Whatever you think of it, Wordpress is certainly a platform. Many of the answers (e.g. jekyll, rolling your own...) are not.

It would be good to actually define "blogging" and "blogging platform", which I think would be somewhat difficult to do.

I used to host my own Wordpress blog, but it got hacked after I hadn't updated my blog in several months and, as a result, failed to install the security updates. I then decided to switch to Tumblr, which I liked overall, but this was back when they were having erratic downtimes, so I ended up switching to Posterous. I was pretty happy with Posterous for a while, mostly because it let me just email my posts in from anywhere. However, I really don't like the control panel in Posterous. It's such a pain to use for various reasons. I recently switched to running my blog with Jekyll on GitHub, which I am so far very happy with. It's simple, fast, and secure. I can write my posts in any text editor, and just push the changes to github.

Overall, if you're a hacker, definitely look at Jekyll (https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/). The easiest way to get started is to fork an existing jekyll blog and start customizing.

If you're not a hacker, I'd probably recommend Tumblr. It offers the best balance of features and ease of use, and they seem to have solved their downtime problems. If for, some reason, you don't like Tumblr, check out Posterous. If that still doesn't suit your needs, Wordpress.com would be my third recommendation.

I would not bother with self-hosted blogs unless you really have a need for that level of control, since the cloud-based or static options are so powerful these days.

I also recently discovered OhLife (http://ohlife.com/), which is a great way to keep a private journal. It'll send you an email at your chosen frequency (daily or weekly) asking "How did your day go?" and you just reply with your journal entry.

The number one focus of Wordpress is features. Shiny new features. Performance and security come a very distant second and third in this picture.

Wordpress still has no unit testing. It still forces you to upgrade a version to get bugfixes and security patches. It relies entirely on beta testers to find data-destroying bugs. And it's increasingly being transformed into a catspaw for Automattic.

I've been administering Wordpress for 6 or 7 years. And I hate its guts. I hate its developers. And I hate that it's an absolute triumph of Worse is Better.

Don't use any 'blogging platform'. Use a static blogging system. The best one currently is probably Octopress[1] which is based on Jekyll[2]. But you could roll your own, and it would still be much better than blogger, wordpress, walmart.com, google+, facebook, tubmlr, etc.

Such systems just render your conveniently created post content into a static HTML website than can be published on various free systems (github pages etc) or $2/month VPS. Or an Amazon S3 bucket.

Why?

1. It is not anyore significantly harder or more inconvenient than using a 'platform' like wordpress.com

2. A static site is 10000000% more resistant to idiotic exploits (which unless you are some kind of PROFESSIONAL blogger, keeping up with is more trouble than its worth on any dynamic 'blogging platform' type of system)

3. A static blog system can serve your blogs with any web server in 2012, and will be able to in 2112, whereas none of the free or even for-money 'blogging platforms' is likely to exist in 2112. Which in terms of your life (unless we are lucky and get the gerontological life-extending technology soon) is essentially 'forever.

4. Why on earth would you cede control of your personal output to walmart.com or google+ or similar?

[1]: http://octopress.org/

[2]: http://jekyllrb.com/

EDIT: meant to mention somewhere in there that comments, one of the raisons d'être for these dynamic blogging systems, can now be superbly handled by off-site add ons like disqus.