HN Explorer

Ask HN: Best place for tech blog?

5 points by mminer ↗ HN
There's no lack of options for a general purpose blog — Medium and Ghost and WordPress all seem great — but it's unclear what the best choice for a tech-focused one is. In particular, I'd like to include code snippets with syntax colouring and embed D3 visualizations. An enjoyable reading experience is the primary concern; ease of authoring less so.

Is a static site (say, using GitHub Pages) the best choice? The built-in discovery and sharing features of Medium are attractive, but I'm unsure if a blog about niche programming topics will benefit from them. Any options beyond the mainstream blogging platforms that I should consider?

11 comments

[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 37.7 ms ] thread
rcarmo
This is a highly unscientific sampling, but most deep-tech blogs I follow seem to be on gh-pages these days. Medium, less so - I get mostly essays from those.

Jekyll gives you a lot of bang for the buck (including making static assets relatively easy to deploy) and Github provides syntax highlighting in their hosted service.

The drawbacks (as far as I'm concerned) are that Jekyll is overly temperamental, and that even "modern" site generators like Hugo (http://gohugo.io) require switching off too many defaults or tweaking many knobs.

Besides, even if you _now_ feel ease of editing is less important, a couple of years down the line it will be paramount.

I've long felt the need for something "better" myself, and run my site off a Dropbox-synced folder using a custom engine (which I'm currently re-writing - see demo site at http://sushy.no-bolso.com).

But I'm OK with reinventing my bit of the wheel (it's been nearly 13 years now, so I know what I want from a CMS).

mminer
Regarding editing (and I think you make a good point that ease of editing is important), I often find myself frustrated with WYSIWYG editors that make such a mess of the markup that you end up modifying the raw code anyway. Ghost and GitHub Pages look like they take the right approach by making Markdown the default and not attempting to hide it behind a GUI.
dsacco
I run http://breakingbits.net, my security consulting blog, on WPEngine.

I highly recommend it. Wordpress gets a very bad rap with security but as long as you generally disable comments, are paranoid about plugins and themes, and update as soon as possible, you're about as safe as any other platform.

It also gives a very nice platform for customization and development, which unfortunately a lot of blogging platforms don't support. I can quickly sftp or ssh for whatever I need, and setting up Bigfoot.js footnotes was a breeze (among other code snippets).

I recommend WPEngine because, while they are a bit pricey, they have generally excellent customer support and take away a lot of the mental overhead of running Wordpress. I first started using them after a glowing recommendation from Patrick McKenzie (patio11). They're also great for managing backups, security updates and plugin safety. The only caveat I can name is that if you want SSL for your blog, you'll need to jump to their second plan or higher.

A bit off-topic, but good advice for this is to just generally not stress about it too much. You're not shipping blog posts, and while you'll get consulting leads or job offers from it, it's secondary to your main work. Maximize on content delivery.

Find something you're comfortable with and stick with it.

matt_s
Ease of authoring could affect your posting frequency and dedication to the blog.

I recently was in the same dilemma when looking to start a technical blog and looked at Jekyll, Octopress and Ghost. I avoided WordPress because I don't need plugins or pain of setup, etc. and I wanted to host the blog myself.

I used Octopress before and was seriously considering it. The problem I had with Octopress (and by relation Jekyll) was the effort to create or edit posts. I had Octopress files locally and would publish via sftp to my server. It just felt clunky and became a barrier.

I chose Ghost for my blog and the authoring process is awesome compared to Octopress. Ghost uses Markdown and has a live preview. I can create posts anywhere via authoring on a tablet. Since I'm hosting it myself I feel like I can put other things on my server if I need to (like D3.js, etc.)

Now I'm no expert on blogging but I do like using Ghost over the past month or so. If your blog has good content that people find value in, as long as it doesn't have a horrible design then what it looks like won't matter much.

wallflower
If you use medium or any other site without your own custom domain, you lose a potential audience. Especially if you have something interesting to say. How many people do you think will click through to the link at the bottom of your medium post?
mminer
I was afraid that the opposite would happen, that hosting on a custom domain gives up traffic that a network like Medium provides. But then, I'm not actually sure how much traffic this is, or if it's only helpful for authors that write about mainstream topics.
wallflower
Let me clarify. If your post gets popular on medium, you may get lots of views. Views that won't necessarily translate back to traffic on your own linked custom domain and accumulating SEO credibility organically. Views from viewers who might never care about the source (you) and just care about the content fix of the day. By publishing on medium, you are in many ways an unpaid freelance writer. Yes, they offer a potentially far-reaching platform. However, it is a walled garden. The equivalent of people flipping channels looking for something interesting to read or repost in social media to burnish a certain image v. people who want to subscribe to what you write and link others to your content. The Internet is about niches. Take the time to slowly build your own niche v. being one of 500 channels on Medium.

Imagine if patio11 had started posting on medium (if it existed back then).

mminer
Right, I see what you're saying, its magazine-style collections prevent you from building a dedicated following of your own. Very good point.
webmaven
Consider a tool like http://prose.io
mminer
Thanks for the link, Prose looks like it might be the perfect bridge between ease of editing and the control and flexibility that GitHub Pages provides. I'll give it a try.
akbar501
I switched to Hugo (gohugo.io). It was easy to learn, I use git for revision control, and I have complete control over formatting (including code blocks).

I plan to host it starting this week on S3 which involves me scripting the deploy process (which shouldn't be hard given everything is on the command line).

The extremely fast builds in Hugo are nice. I have one monitor with my editor and watch my site update instantly in the other.