

Ask HN: What do you use for your tech blog and are you happy with it? - egonschiele

I'm looking for something that supports commenting and syntax highlighting out of the box, preferably something that uses static pages so it's fast and easy to manage. Any recommendations?
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bhauer
I know a lot of developers use Octopress and its many variants. Tie that
together with one of the comment services (e.g., Disqus) and you're pretty
much set. Or you can just link every post to a HN submit and direct readers to
your HN submission.

You can then deploy to Github or just some CDN.

I don't particularly find it appropriate to use WordPress as a tech blog. It
just sends the wrong message in my opinion.

That said, I am of the opinion that developers should take pride in developing
their own blog platform. It's conventional wisdom after all that building a
blog platform on a modern framework only takes (a few hours | a few days |
certainly not a week).

I put together mine [1], including the javascript in about 3 days. People tend
to hate the background, but I wanted something a little more visually engaging
and I'm not a graphic designer. :)

[1] <http://tiamat.tsotech.com/simplest-of-webapps>

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xauronx
I think your blog looks really nice, has some nice transitions. It's good to
look at but I couldn't read more than a paragraph without getting distracted.
I would put the text on a solid background, having the stuff moving behind
text while reading it breaks my concentration.

~~~
bhauer
Ah, thanks! Incidentally, you can also turn the background off using the menu
at the bottom right. I use local storage to remember a user's preference.

~~~
xauronx
But I LIKE the background! haha, just not behind the text that's all.

Edit: I added background-color: #26282a; to .bodytext and it's much more
enjoyable for me :)

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GeneralMaximus
After writing my own blogging app in Django and being unhappy with it for
months, I switched to WordPress some time ago. I blogged about my reasons for
switching here: [http://ankursethi.in/2013/03/okay-wordpress-you-win-this-
rou...](http://ankursethi.in/2013/03/okay-wordpress-you-win-this-round/)

In summary: WordPress has a neat dashboard, thousands of plugins, and
wonderful themes. Writing and maintaining a blogging app is boring. I prefer
to spend my time blogging and programming, rather than programming admin
dashboards for blogging apps.

People will tell you that WordPress is slow, which is true. To remedy the
situation, you should: (1) use a PHP opcode cache (I use php-apc) and (2) use
a caching plugin (I use W3 Total Cache). That's about it.

I'm quite happy with my setup. It's not the fastest or the hippest, but it
works great for my blogging needs. My advice would be to choose whatever makes
you happy, and then stick with it.

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pinks
I use Pelican, but a lot of people like Jekyll, too. Pelican has good
documentation, and I like that it uses a makefile because I was able to
painlessly add in my own deployment command that pushes to S3 and an option
for compressing CSS and JS.

