7 ms·

Ask HN: Best blogging platform?

• iworkforthem 15y ago
  The best blogging platform is the one you actually use. Pick any of the free platform WP, posterous, tumblr, etc. Most of these tools are inter-portable. It really does not matter, the one thing that really matter is the blogging platform that you actually use.
• c_t_montgomery 15y ago
  I've been using octopress on cnnr.me/b (just started it 2 days ago, so we're in the same boat), and I've really enjoyed it. http://octopress.org/ http://octopress.org/
  • minecraftman 15y ago
    Thanks so much for your help! I will definitely try it out.
• jason_shah 15y ago
  http://techpolish.com/best-blogging-platform-sites-and-software http://techpolish.com/best-blogging-platform-sites-and-softw... - here's a comparison of some popular platforms that you can personalize to get a recommendation unique to your need. I'd say it depends on your purpose (e.g. personal blogging for your day-to-day realizations, philosophical epiphanies, etc.). (Disclosure: TechPolish is my website.) EDIT: fixed typo. moved link up.
• jacobwg 15y ago
  WordPress - it has excellent usability as a core product, but its real power comes from the large library of free plugins - there's pretty much always a plugin for everything. You can sign up for a free hosted version of WordPress at http://wordpress.com http://wordpress.com, though it has paid upgrades, or you can download the self-hosted version for free at http://wordpress.org http://wordpress.org. You could even go with a webhost (like http://dreamhost.com http://dreamhost.com) and use their one-click-install for WordPress (feel free to use the coupon code JACOBWG for $97 off one year of DreamHost... disclosure: I do NOT receive any referral money or benefits from that code - all benefits have been rolled into that code's discount). If you're the "hacker" type, then check out http://jekyllrb.com/.. http://jekyllrb.com/...
  • colmmacc 15y ago
    Wordpress had 6 "mandatory security update" releases in 2011 alone - http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Versions http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Versions . It doesn't seem to have had a secure design from the outset. Worse still, ordinarily one might advise "keep up to date", but wordpress had a release backdoored (http://www.cgisecurity.com/2007/03/wordpress-websi.html http://www.cgisecurity.com/2007/03/wordpress-websi.html) once, so keeping up-to-date isn't without its risks too. I've been giving tumblr a try, and so far - so good, but the functionality is pretty minimal.
    • jacobwg 15y ago
      You're going to have security holes with every piece of software, though it is true some software is more secure than others. I personally view having security updates as a plus - it shows that the WordPress team (open source community) supports their software. The fact that WordPress is running on 70 million plus websites [1], about 15% of the web [2], means that if a security hole is found, it will be fixed, and it can be fixed by anyone without having to wait for a limited amount of employees of a particular company to write the patch (one of the benefits of open source). What you do get from Tumblr, though, is the fact that a 3rd party is responsible for keeping your website up and keeping it fast - you basically trade ownership of your website's software for a 3rd-party guarantee. This also means that if Tumblr is down or is hacked or you want to customize something beyond the theme, you are dependent on Tumblr... So, while each may have its own use-case (Tumblr is great for the following/reblogging stuff), the fact that WordPress is regularly updated is not a reason to avoid using it as a platform. [1] http://en.wordpress.com/stats/ http://en.wordpress.com/stats/ [2] http://wordpress.org/news/2011/08/state-of-the-word/ http://wordpress.org/news/2011/08/state-of-the-word/
      • rmccue 15y ago
        In addition, WordPress has a built-in updater, so it's incredibly easy to update, unlike many other platforms which require reuploading or obscure update steps.
• dvillase 15y ago
  I've been using Wordpress for a couple of years. It's easy to use and extensible. If you aren't afraid of dipping your toes into some HTML/CSS/PHP than you can find a really good free/premium theme and some good plugins to make a good blog. Just make sure you backup not only your database but themes because if you get malware, its really difficult to find out the source. Easiest thing to do is to revert to a clean copy, change passwords, and protect yourself!
• DannyPage 15y ago
  Tumblr, if you are really interested in the ability to share other blogs quickly and be shared as well. It is also very easy to set-up, maintain, and can work on custom domains as well. You can even add Disqus to most themes if you want feedback and comments. I also love the +Follow feature, as it means that people are more likely to consume your content over just bare RSS feeds. Overall, it's a more expansive Twitter. Wordpress would be the way to go if you want to have more control over your blog, but I always ended up tweaking the function of the blog more and writing less. Tumblr basically breaks that tinkering distraction and allows you to focus on your content.
• AndrewDucker 15y ago
  Depends on whether you want to handle your own bandwidth and admin, or farm it out to someone else. Personally, I'm very happy to be http://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/ http://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/ because I have control over whether things are public or just for a personal audience, lots of control over comments - and most importantly, threaded comments. I loathe non-threaded comment systems with a fiery passion.
• danneu 15y ago
  If you're learning a web framework, you could always roll your own with Rails/Django/Sinatra/Flask. I think it's the most fun option. Then you get to implement things like a sitemap, categories, comments/Disqus, page caching, and anything else you're so inspired to add. Makes for good blogging material. No slower than any static content generator like Jekyll if you just cache everything to a static directory, too.
• laurenproctor 15y ago
  I second the recommendations for Wordpress, but only if you're committed to maintaining your own domain. If you don't mind spending a little bit of money on hosting, the platform is simple, flexible, and pretty powerful. Plus, you'll have total control. If you want to farm out to someone else, tumblr is good because it's inherently social (people will follow you, share your posts, etc), but it's largely visual and a bit spammy at times. Posterous is another good platform because it's simple, has some social features, and tends toward the more content driven format. Wordpress is still my vote though, because it can grow with your blog/site and vary from the fairly simple to as advanced as you want.
• jberryman 15y ago
  Rambling, possibly-helpful non-answer: whatever you can get up and running with the fastest, and can use with minimum of friction. Blogspot, wordpress.com or posterous would probable all fit the bill. Seems like about half of the most productive people/ most interesting blog posts I read are hosted at *.wordpress.com or someplace similarly humble. But I mostly post this because I'm just finally finishing up a migration from self-hosted wordpress (which was working fine, but I wasn't happy with for various reasons) to octopress. This has taken me several months to get around to almost finishing (during which time I've gotten out of the blogging habit), and many hours of fooling with ruby environments, converting my old posts, etc., etc. Hopefully the payoff for me will be simplicity, a better work-flow, new blog format that fits what I'd like to do better, etc. but it might have been a lot of wasted time and energy.
  • dennisgorelik 15y ago
    Blogspot/Blogger is a poor choice. Original founders are long gone and middle managers destroyed the team. They are not able to deal with spam efficiently, so they overreact and delete innocent blogs. + commenting requires CAPTCHA even for authenticated users, which is silly.
• andrewcross 15y ago
  Since you are just starting out, I'd say go for Tumblr. It's incredibly easy and quick to get set up. If you are still going strong after a few weeks and feel the need for something more powerful, then look into switching to something else. I personally switched to wordpress after a couple of weeks on Tumblr, but I have a lot of friends who still use Tumblr for everything.
• morazow 15y ago
  I have been also looking for some blogging platforms for some time (before I did some writing on wordpress and posterous, never liked them). Recently, I started using Jekyll+Github Pages, it is more simple. For me blogging should be as effortless as writing some text on your favorite editor. If you like learning something new you should try them.
• latch 15y ago
  github.
• olh 15y ago
  Blogger in Draft - http://bloggerindraft.blogspot.com/ http://bloggerindraft.blogspot.com/ http://draft.blogger.com http://draft.blogger.com
• sbierwagen 15y ago
  I use nanoblogger. (http://nanoblogger.sourceforge.net http://nanoblogger.sourceforge.net) It's pretty primitive, not actively developed, and has no native commenting system. On the other hand, its exactly as secure as your HTTPd of choice, unlike Wordpress.
• mattdeboard 15y ago
  I use Armin Ronacher's RST blog (https://github.com/mitsuhiko/rstblog https://github.com/mitsuhiko/rstblog). I even wrote a guide for its use: http://mattdeboard.net/2011/05/09/more-tips-on-rstblog/ http://mattdeboard.net/2011/05/09/more-tips-on-rstblog/ minimal static site generator. Worth it if you just want to put your content up and don't need or want pre-packaged bells and whistles.
• mwexler 15y ago
  Besides full content plays like Drupal, I've enjoyed working with Textpattern (http://textpattern.com/ http://textpattern.com/). It's easy to format content with textile, and it has a nice mix of plugins and template atomics that give you great power over the look and feel.
  • Terretta 15y ago
    TextPattern is fantastic, and really encourages separation of content from presentation. That said, we use Posterous for company and personal blogs, so the hassle barrier is essentially zero.
• humbyvaldes 15y ago
  ownzee.com
• crabasa 15y ago
  I'll +1 everyone who is recommending Jekyll. I've rolled my own blog engines (first one was Java/Struts 10 years ago) but I'm loving the zen of blogging via creating and pushing Markdown files to GitHub. It's simple, provides me with a versioned and easily portable archive and doesn't require constant security updates. Here are some tips from migrating from WP: http://decafbad.com/blog/2011/06/08/moved-to-jekyll http://decafbad.com/blog/2011/06/08/moved-to-jekyll
• ubervero 15y ago
  I'm surprised nobody mentioned Squarespace (http://squarespace.com/ http://squarespace.com/), popular for portfolio sites but also good for blogging, and really powerful suite (not free, though). A geekier alternative is Calepin (http://calepin.co http://calepin.co), amazing concept: you write your posts in multimarkdown, in a Dropox folder, and you publish by clicking a button that automatically checks that folder for new stuff (no template customization yet but Disqus integration). I am seriously thinking about switching to Calepin, Tumblr feels heavy on the browser.
• mgualt 15y ago
  What is a blogging "platform"? For that matter, what exactly does "blogging" consist of? Many answers below don't provide what I would call a platform - many aspects of what one might call "bloggin" have not been thought through (e.g. archiving and exporting of entries and comments, how are comments integrated, security features, hosting...) These are all part of the design of a platform. Whatever you think of it, Wordpress is certainly a platform. Many of the answers (e.g. jekyll, rolling your own...) are not. It would be good to actually define "blogging" and "blogging platform", which I think would be somewhat difficult to do.
• guptaneil 15y ago
  I used to host my own Wordpress blog, but it got hacked after I hadn't updated my blog in several months and, as a result, failed to install the security updates. I then decided to switch to Tumblr, which I liked overall, but this was back when they were having erratic downtimes, so I ended up switching to Posterous. I was pretty happy with Posterous for a while, mostly because it let me just email my posts in from anywhere. However, I really don't like the control panel in Posterous. It's such a pain to use for various reasons. I recently switched to running my blog with Jekyll on GitHub, which I am so far very happy with. It's simple, fast, and secure. I can write my posts in any text editor, and just push the changes to github. Overall, if you're a hacker, definitely look at Jekyll (https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/ https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/). The easiest way to get started is to fork an existing jekyll blog and start customizing. If you're not a hacker, I'd probably recommend Tumblr. It offers the best balance of features and ease of use, and they seem to have solved their downtime problems. If for, some reason, you don't like Tumblr, check out Posterous. If that still doesn't suit your needs, Wordpress.com would be my third recommendation. I would not bother with self-hosted blogs unless you really have a need for that level of control, since the cloud-based or static options are so powerful these days. I also recently discovered OhLife (http://ohlife.com/ http://ohlife.com/), which is a great way to keep a private journal. It'll send you an email at your chosen frequency (daily or weekly) asking "How did your day go?" and you just reply with your journal entry.
• stock_toaster 15y ago
  Calepin[1] seems pretty neat. I have been meaning to give it a spin. Haven't yet though. If you (or anyone else) end up giving it a spin, let me know how it goes. [1]: http://calepin.co/ http://calepin.co/
• kenneth_reitz 15y ago
  Wordpress.
• veidr 15y ago
  Don't use any 'blogging platform'. Use a static blogging system. The best one currently is probably Octopress[1] which is based on Jekyll[2]. But you could roll your own, and it would still be much better than blogger, wordpress, walmart.com, google+, facebook, tubmlr, etc. Such systems just render your conveniently created post content into a static HTML website than can be published on various free systems (github pages etc) or $2/month VPS. Or an Amazon S3 bucket. Why? 1. It is not anyore significantly harder or more inconvenient than using a 'platform' like wordpress.com 2. A static site is 10000000% more resistant to idiotic exploits (which unless you are some kind of PROFESSIONAL blogger, keeping up with is more trouble than its worth on any dynamic 'blogging platform' type of system) 3. A static blog system can serve your blogs with any web server in 2012, and will be able to in 2112, whereas none of the free or even for-money 'blogging platforms' is likely to exist in 2112. Which in terms of your life (unless we are lucky and get the gerontological life-extending technology soon) is essentially 'forever. 4. Why on earth would you cede control of your personal output to walmart.com or google+ or similar? [1]: http://octopress.org/ http://octopress.org/ [2]: http://jekyllrb.com/ http://jekyllrb.com/ EDIT: meant to mention somewhere in there that comments, one of the raisons d'être for these dynamic blogging systems, can now be superbly handled by off-site add ons like disqus.
  • mgualt 15y ago
    re: comments, I strongly disagree that they are handled "superbly". For many important blogs, the comments are central to the whole endeavour. Why on earth would you cede control of your comments to disqus? Why do you keep your content and your comments separate? Will disqus be around in 2112? This is what I mean when I say that a "static blog system" is not a blog system at all. It is a partially thought-out solution which doesn't have the required functionality.
    • veidr 15y ago
      I guess that's a good point if comments are truly important to you. Which they perhaps are, for a tiny minority of blogs. (I personally don't find comments important at all, and even take advantage of the various browser extensions[1] to hide them on various sites that do have them.) [1]: e.g. http://stevenf.com/pages/shutup.css.html http://stevenf.com/pages/shutup.css.html
• bradleyland 15y ago
  The blogging platform you choose will be as much about you as it is the software. * Are you a developer? * How comfortable are you with the command line? * Do you intend to display a lot of media on your blog? * Do you intend to display code examples on your blog? There is no "best" tool in any parlance. The tool you choose will have a lot to do with your preferences. WordPress: Lots of plug-ins available; common, thus easy to get assistance for; supports a wide variety of blog types; requires diligent attention to security patches and performance tweaking (caching). Hosted platform (like Tumblr): Zero maintenance; great community; easy to apply themes. Static site generator (like Jekyll/Octopress): Very hackable; provides some level of street cred for devs; extremely minimal hosting requirements; easy to use your favorite flavor of markup (HTML, ERb, HAML, Markdown, Textile, you name it).