Ask HN: Where do you write?

I recommend a blog with your own URL (WordPress or Ghost). Then you can syndicate to Medium and Twitter with plugins. That way your content stays yours and you remain in control, while also getting the exposure from other platforms.

I've got a blog nobody reads that I host with Netlify. It's just a simple Hugo-based static site.

I wrote a blog post about that: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/10/14/how-to-start-b...

But the short answer is: wherever is easiest. I find setting up a wordpress.com blog (free) easiest, but medium or dev.to are good as well.

Don't let your desire to find the perfect platform inhibit your writing. The hard part about writing is the writing, not the platform. As a developer, I find it easy to get tangled up in tech choices, package upgrades and deployment pipelines, which lets me avoid or defer actually writing.

I have used svbtle.com for years, and generally like it.

I am all-in on Notion these days, though, and wish I could use it for my blog. I could but I want nicer URLs and to have it be on my domain.

I was mainly using Literature & Latte's paid app Scrivener for years, but recently the free open source app Joplin has become my primary drafting environment. I still recommended both -- I use Scrivener for capturing research, organizing projects, and producing publisher-ready files.

Write Everywhere.

Write on Medium and Your Blog

Write on Substack. <=== I do. Pros: I can get paid. Cons: Formatting is simple.

Write on Amazon Publishing

fanfiction.net :D

I think the key is finding a community, if feedback and potentially an audience is what you are trying to build.

Wattpad has been popular for those who can keep up with the social requirements (frequent updates, networking, etc.)

At work we use write.as for the blog, and I like it so far.

For my personal website, I use Jekyll on Vercel (ex. Zeit). I only did it because I wanted to code a bit and own the domain and the content.

Mostly twitter, and my company's blog.

Github?

I have my own personal blog using Jekyll.

I know a couple people writing on posthaven.com, and when it comes time for me to start putting stuff online, that's what I plan to use.

Their value proposition is 1. they will keep the servers online for all time 2. low bullshit post hosting

I would use my own domain, so that I have the control of my site. Why hand over the control to Medium or Wordpress.com?

Same thing with the SEO. Why give the SEO juice to Medium instead of your own personal domain?

Building a static site with e.g. Hugo or Jekyll is an appealing choice. If you want you can use Cloudfront + S3 to host it.

OTOH, Wordpress is very convenient to work with and quick to set up. If you don’t have a VPS there are shared web hosting sites that should be good enough in the beginning at least. Shared web hosting can also be used for static sites.

Medium will be OK for this purpose.

1. It's pretty quick to start

2. It's free but you can upgrade to premium for advanced features

3. Also Medium's community is a huge advantage

It depends on how pro you want to get. If you have the means, I suggest getting both a story editor and a proof reader and ask them to give brutal feedback. The reality is that most stories that are written are low quality and thus don't get the audience that the writer would desire. Much like programming, it takes a while to get your stuff where you want it to be.

If I would start a blog, right now I would use Gatsby + Markdown + own domain. Using free repository hosting and static cloud hosting which in many places is also free. Basically for 10$/year and occasional backup you would have a platform and service independent blog which can easily be migrated wherever you want. Aware that for these you need some basic tech skills indeed.

For personal blog: 11ty + travis ci + github pages.

Its easy way to write and publish content.

Just checkout git repo, write posts with your favourite editor and push changes to github - thats all.

Previously, I've being using Wordpress and Ghost. Both were real nigtmare to manage.

Vuepress → Github actions → static site deployed to GCP/Storage. Writing Markdown in VSCode is _significantly_ better than all the online editors I've tried.

Your own blog first if not for any other reason then the fact that you own it and are not at anyone's whims but your own. I used it as an excuse to get Ghost up and running in my Kubernetes cluster. Win-win.

Then push content out to Medium, dev.to, Twitter, etc if you're looking for more of an audience.

Always always always own your own content. Don’t post on medium often (might be worth it to build a following).

I post exclusively on my own Wordpress blog hosted on vultr for $5/month. If you aren’t a developer I’d recommend some self service option.

To build a following perhaps try twitter, Reddit, and medium. There’s also probably locations to post short stories I’m unaware of

First I put it on my personal blog (11ty+netlify), so I own the rights. I wait at least a couple days before publishing or promoting elsewhere (medium, DEV, hackernoon)

I’m using ghost at https://mattbrandly.com/

I intend to write more technical content, and I don’t think ghost is that great for the purpose. I wish I were writing markdown and generating static assets locally. Having to send highlight.js to every client for syntax highlighting is unnecessary.

If you just want to write and could care less about ownership of content, pick Medium.

I keep a blog at https://vorpalhex.com and I primarily keep it as a repository of thoughts, ideas and odd projects.

I use Hugo because it's simple yet flexible, powerful and produces a static bundle that is easily hostable anywhere. I use the `hello-friend` theme with significant tweaks, mostly a lot of shortcodes for better and more-responsive friendly image handling. I wanted a markdown based flow with minimal JS that didn't require node/rails/etc toolchains. Hugo is available both as a docker image and a small compiled binary so both local builds and CI builds are very easy. Currently I'm hosted via Gitlab for ease (I can use my own CI runner and the hosting itself is free with SSL support) but I've used S3 and others with great results.

I do my drafting in my favorite notes app InkDrop, and then just take my markdown file and drop it into my repo. One git push and it's published. Still haven't found a great platform to let non-technical folks edit my posts though.

I keep my images and big files in a Digital Ocean CDN. I use rclone to manage cdn contents (it uses the s3 protocol) and have some utility scripts to pull the cdn locally and then sync up changes. I ended up having to write a small golang program to easily bulk resize images at responsive breakpoints: https://gitlab.com/vorpalhex/responsimg

For me, this setup makes it very low friction to compose blog posts and get them published and it gets good lighthouse speed scores and loads quickly on even low end devices with bad connections. No medium paywall, no facebook SDK, etc. I did end up caving and installing Google Analytics (I was very displeased with piwik).