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What are the best blog solutions for a website?

4 points by skcin7 ↗ HN
Hello friends. I am getting ready to install a blog onto my personal website. However, I am unsure about the best solution and potential pitfalls. I want blog software where I can post tech related articles based on my own research, and share them for all to see. I would like for it to work well with SEO and allow readers to post comments. For the record, my website can be found here: http://www.nicholas-morgan.com/

I would greatly prefer to write my own software. Wouldn't be too difficult with PHP and JavaScript, but it would still take a lot of time to make sure it's perfect. However, I worry that this may not be the best solution, and it may just be a better idea to use an existing piece of software, such as a Wordpress. I was wondering what are the pros and cons of writing and using an existing blog software and what the best ones are for this type of thing, and if it would be worth it to create my own custom one.

I searched Google a little bit but I feel like many of the answers I receive have been "dumbed down" and I would rather ask a community such as this that knows what they are doing.

Thank you for reading and (hopefully) your input.

7 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 28.1 ms ] thread
jnorthrop
Don't write your own. That is unless you want to try a new language or simply want the experience. Blogs are a problem that has largely been solved -- at least for your intended purposes (disclaimer for this community!).

WordPress is cheap, easy-to-install and will pretty much have everything you need out-of-the-box. You can then go ahead and add in a theme and plugins if you want.

Focus on creating great content, not reinventing the wheel.

bo_Olean
I would suggest to use already existing blog service providers. Besides self hosted CMSes(wordpress, drupal), you can try creating blogs in other blog service providers like blogger, tumblr, posterous and do a simple DNS forwarding for your sub-domain like http://blog.nicholas-morgan.com

Few things:

1)Roll your own skin/theme for the blog service you use and make it similar in look to your main website.

2)Saves your website bandwith.

3)Saves your Time.

4)SEO/Analytics already implemented on most of them.

That way, you could focus more on creating content.

mcrittenden
You could spend thousands of hours and still not come anywhere close to WordPress in regards to features, ease of use, security, etc. It is only worth it to write your own blog if you want the experience, but even then it might be better to get experience while you're writing something that isn't already a solved problem.
davewasthere
One solution that I think has a ton of merit is using github-pages.

You create an account on github and add a repository that is the same as your username. You can then set up a CNAME record (which you'll point your DNS too) and can host the pages using a custom domain name.

The beauty of it, is the pages are static, super-fast. No problems if you ever get HN'd, TechCrunched, Reddited.

A beautiful example is http://zachholman.com/ and you can see his github-pages repository here: https://github.com/holman/holman.github.com

Just my 2c worth!

davewasthere
And commenting - you could just use facebook's social plugins... Nice and easy. (Or Disqus etc...)

Something that doesn't have load on your server.

Easy, free, scales...

skcin7
Sounds like a great suggestion and I am glad that you posted the example too. It would need to be integrated well into my existing page and based on the example you showed, it looks like that wouldn't be too difficult. Thanks!
skcin7
I think you are all right that I should not try to re-invent the wheel and instead focus on great content. Although writing my own would be fun and worthwhile, you are right that time can be better spend working on something else. Thanks for the comments.