HN Explorer

Ask HN: Which blog platform is your company using for public-facing content?

5 points by doubleocherry ↗ HN
I'm curious as to what platforms the HN community are using for external facing company blogs (to post news, opinion, marketing material, engineering posts etc). Obvious choices include Medium or the blogging features of a static site system (such as Jekyll + Netlify). What else?

In 2019, what blogging platforms are people using, and why?

13 comments

[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 36.7 ms ] thread
IloveHN84
Hugo statically site generator
doubleocherry
Are you deploying via Netlify, with Hugo versions stored in Git?
CM30
Self hosted WordPress. Both for my employers and my own sites.
doubleocherry
I've used Wordpress for a number of projects myself. Curious: For your use case, do you find the ease of use of WordPress' content tooling to outweigh the time needed to deal with security, updates, and deployment (especially since you self-host?)
CM30
Partially, partially because the sites use quite a few plugins and I find it more convenient to use WordPress for them than to recode everything from scratch to work with a new system.

I actually listed all the things I'd need to recreate with a migration, and it's basically:

1. The entire account system 2. Plus the admin dashboard 3. Post/content editor 4. Media library 5. Paid subscriptions setup 6. Social media integrations 7. Apple News integration 8. Permalinks/friendly URLs 9. Any systems WordPress has for data sanitisation 10. Plus the challenge of either matching the original URL setup or flawlessly redirecting about 20,000 pages.

Also budget stuff. Most companies I've worked for don't spend a lot of time building their own site/blog, and wouldn't budget for an entirely custom CMS build or migration.

codegeek
Why do you say "obvious choice include medium or static systems" ? Even though this is HN, I would argue that majority of blogs are still setup in WordPress and it works well. We host ours on Self Hosted WordPress and would never ever give control of blog to a 3rd party (so Medium is out). Using static site generators are cool and all but when it comes to asking other non technical team members to work on the blog, you again cannot beat WP. So 1 more vote for Self Hosted WordPress.
doubleocherry
Why specifically would you "never ever give control of blog to a 3rd party"?
ecesena
Hackernoon/medium. In this transition phase (hackernoon is moving out of medium) I publish on medium and usually get a day of 2 of traffic before my post is published into hackernoon.

Personally, I like the fact that I get traffic over self publishing. Interested people can click on the url in my profile and reach my website. I post very infrequently but reach 1-10k reads/post lately.

tnolet
Ghost.

I come from Hugo (hosted on S3 or Netlify) but it doesn’t scale once non technical people enter the company.

Also, I wear so many hats at my company every thing that makes writing and publishing great content easier is worth it.

I really, really love Ghost.