Ask HN: What are good blogging platforms for programmers?

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).

Cant +1 this enough. Jekyll is damn easy to get started with and host on github. To start off, you can simply clone any of the existing blogs[0] or create a new one and get started. I also have a few rake and grunt tasks written to help you manage asset packaging (all of this totally optional, btw).

[0] - https://github.com/prakhar1989/prakhar1989.github.com, http://getpoole.com/

What makes Jekyll (and other static blogging engines) so great is that they give you far more flexibility than CMSes in certain areas. Just the other day, to see if I could do it, I wrote a Jekyll plugin to parse LilyPond music notation inside a custom Liquid tag[1]. After a day or two of research and fiddling — including learning basic Ruby — I can now have beautiful sheet music in my blog posts without any actual binary dependencies server-side. (In other words, the generated site is unencumbered by my build pipeline, and I don't have to worry about maintaining LilyPond/Inkscape on my server.) If I want to change the output in the future — PNG, SVG, even HTML/CSS — I don't have to touch my original Markdown content at all; it's just another render pass. And the best part is, Github will host the HTML files for free, regardless of whether Jekyll is actually running server-side or not. All your site updates are just a git push away.

The idea that your Markdown articles are definitive, that you can add custom grammar, and that your blog is strictly a view into your writing rather than a separate content platform, should be very appealing to programmers!

[1]: http://a-jekyll-blog.archagon.net/programming/2014/06/23/sec...

Jekyll with GitHub Pages is a great solution, but it's worth mentioning that other static site generators serve the same purpose and may be a better fit for you, depending on your preferences. Hyde is a very flexible static site generator based on Django, and Metalsmith is a very promising static site generator built on Node. Whatever static site generator you use, hosting on S3 is easy and cheap, and it's easy to automate deployments via Grunt or Gulp.

Were you using caching at all? There's a decent plugin called wp super cache that builds flat html files of all your posts and serves those instead of hitting PHP.

As an alternative, you could consider Hugo (http://hugo.spf13.com/overview/introduction), which gives more flexibility regarding the organisation of files and urls.

I use this same exact setup and for the same exact reasons. Jekyll + GitHub pages is a godsend.

And you can use prose.io (or even GitHub's own editor) to edit posts on the go.

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.)

Some people probably don't find blogging platforms all that interesting and would really rather just say what they have to say and get back to whatever else they were working on. If someone asked me what's a good kitchen knife, I wouldn't say, "make your own" (even if that's what I would rather do).

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/.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

you can also host ghost statically on github pages

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.

You can still do that, but it is a little complicated.

https://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/665057-synt...

Too much work if you want anything modern.

As in don't you want some tags to organize the posts? Don't you want an index of your tags, and an index of your posts? You'd need to edit by hand 10 files just to add a new post if you wanted those necessary features and yeah they are necessary if you're not just writing a diary for yourself. If that's the case you don't need a blog at all just a folder with text files on your machine.

But I agree with you in that I like to just open up a text editor and start writing, so I use a script called "Bash Blog" which lets me do just that.

The website it produces are static html files, and it uses a shell script to reassemble itself after every new post I created so I don't need to end up editing 10 files, but I still get all the useful features I mentioned above.

http://cfenollosa.github.io/bashblog/

Doesn't Ghost use a database though? It was using SQLite last time I looked at it.

+ 1 for svbtle, it is a nice minimalistic design that really concentrates on the content.

Octopress / Jekyll are sort of annoying at times specifically if you don't use ruby. For example, on my mac, i've had to deal with weird ruby related issues when upgrading OS X.

I'm using Silvrback and I love it: http://silvrback.com

I was madly loving svbtle until one day someone pointed out that you can't access or even export your list of email subscribers, so essentially you are building a mailing list for Svbtle not you.

I rolled every page for a while. But after I had fifty pages (most migrated from old blog), changing the template was a waste of my time. Strictly speaking, a tool like laser[0] could have helped, but I am young in clojure-fu.

I currently use piecrust[1] to statically generate my markdown through twig (templates) and push these to my site host nearlyfreespeech via ssh. It's pay as you go; I've not needed a dB or CGI, and those are not forced on me. Perhaps I'll be punished if I ever get front paged, but YNGNI.

I am trying out metalsmith[2] instead, as I'm more familiar with javascript than php and hence can make plugins for the various bits I need.

0. https://github.com/Raynes/laser

1. http://bolt80.com/piecrust/

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7361824

I agree. The amount of flexibity is huge, especially if you deliberately want a different look on various pages.

And yeah, it feels good.

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

+1. great for sharing snippets and i almost learn something new everytime i visit.