

Ask HN: Best blogging platform? - minecraftman

One of my New Year's Resolutions is to start blogging, but I have no idea what blogging platform to use. A free one would be great, but I could pay if needed. What blogging platform do you think I should use?
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jacobwg
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>, though it has paid upgrades, or you can download the
self-hosted version for free at <http://wordpress.org>.

You could even go with a webhost (like <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/..>.

~~~
colmmacc
Wordpress had 6 "mandatory security update" releases in 2011 alone -
<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>) 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
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/> [2]
<http://wordpress.org/news/2011/08/state-of-the-word/>

~~~
rmccue
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.

~~~
colmmacc
Doesn't WordPress' built-in updater require write permissions to the PHP
files? That's considered an insecure configuration by many.

------
guptaneil
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/>). 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/>), 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.

------
veidr
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/>

[2]: <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
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
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>

~~~
mgualt
I claim that comments are integral to the activity of blogging. In fact, most
bloggers are chomping at the bit to get more comments, often they will do
anything to get more comments, and not necessarily because there's a financial
incentive.

If you look at the best blogs, I mean top blogs in their niche such as

<http://www.thesartorialist.com/>

<http://girishshambu.blogspot.com/>

<http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/>

<http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/>

<http://terrytao.wordpress.com/>

you will see that they are comment heavy. In fact there are very interesting
discussions __in the comments __.

You may think comments are "unimportant" for most blogs, but that is not up to
you, it is up to the blogger, and I guarantee that blogger would rather have
some comments. And it might help to have a half-decent comment system.

~~~
veidr
I hear you, and I more or less understand the arguments for your position, but
I don't agree.

I personally am not much of a blogger, so my own proclivities as a blog writer
('fuck no I don't allow comments on any blog for which I am responsible for
picking up the dogshit and spam') aren't too relevant. But many of the blogs I
find most valuable do not feature comments, or if they do, they are 99.9% what
you'd expect: utterly worthless, time-wasting digital turds.

I think the whole comment thing is misguided. If you really had something
worthwhile to say, why on earth would you entrust that to whatever crap-ass
'blogging platform' that blogger in question happened to be using at the
moment?

Say it somewhere that you control, and link it. That's how the web works.

Of course, I _have_ seen worthwhile comments (especially on blogs where the
author takes the time/effort to aggressively police them). But that's far and
away the exception, and not the rule.

~~~
mgualt
The fact that you don't allow comments because of "dogshit" and "spam" means
that your comments system is broken. That's like saying "I don't do email
because of dogshit and spam". Spam is manageable in email, so the fact that
it's out of control in comments means that noone has thought through a proper
comments system.

When you say "Say it somewhere that you control, and link it. That's how the
web works." I understand where you're coming from, but this is simply not
true. Wanting something to be true doesn't make it so. The web is not made of
a collection of interlinked static HTML files. But the root of your complaint,
that by commenting on someone's blog you give away your worthwhile thoughts,
is also a failure of the bad comment system.

Comments should work a lot more like email does. Imagine if each blog entry
had an email address (or sub-address of the blog's email address) and sending
a "comment" was really sending an email to that address. The comment box below
the blog entry is really a small email composing window which sends the
comment to the blog. And it can also send it to your own email address (as a
cc for the purposes of the thought experiment). Then it would be in your email
archive and not lost, but you would still be contributing to the discussion
happening at the blog. A further benefit of this is that the spam filter for
the email address would function for comments on a blog. Why reinvent the
wheel? /end example.

I have come to this issue from the experience of working with bloggers with
quite long-running substantial blogs on Wordpress or Blogger. They have a huge
laundry list of complaints and annoyances with the software but I cannot in
good faith recommend a jekyll-octopress solution or a wikified solution, or a
"static--html" solution etc. These "solutions" are poorly thought out and
would represent a severe reduction in functionality for the sake of "that's
how it should be done". It is the result of developers who look at a hard
problem (how to best implement all these required features) and decide to get
rid of the problem by disparaging the features or the requesters themselves.

------
DannyPage
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.

------
jberryman
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
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.

------
c_t_montgomery
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/>

~~~
minecraftman
Thanks so much for your help! I will definitely try it out.

------
andrewcross
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.

------
ubervero
I'm surprised nobody mentioned Squarespace (<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>), 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.

------
crabasa
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>

------
jason_shah
[http://techpolish.com/best-blogging-platform-sites-and-
softw...](http://techpolish.com/best-blogging-platform-sites-and-software) \-
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.

------
AndrewDucker
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/> 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.

------
bradleyland
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).

------
mwexler
Besides full content plays like Drupal, I've enjoyed working with Textpattern
(<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
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.

------
laurenproctor
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.

------
mgualt
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.

------
dvillase
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!

------
mattdeboard
I use Armin Ronacher's RST blog (<https://github.com/mitsuhiko/rstblog>). I
even wrote a guide for its use: <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.

------
danneu
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.

------
morazow
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.

------
sbierwagen
I use nanoblogger. (<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.

------
iworkforthem
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.

------
stock_toaster
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/>

------
olh
Blogger in Draft - <http://bloggerindraft.blogspot.com/>
<http://draft.blogger.com>

------
latch
github.

------
kenneth_reitz
Wordpress.

------
humbyvaldes
ownzee.com

