

Ask HN: Thinking on creating a blog and need help (platform) - ncage

Hi everyone, i&#x27;m thinking on creating a blog and need some advice. It will be a programming based blog. I don&#x27;t know if it matters but i&#x27;m primarily a .net developer. First, my main question, is about which blog platform to choose. Here are some of my requirements:
1. Really low maintenance - I already have enough to do. I don&#x27;t want to add to the trying to maintenance on software&#x2F;hardware a blog system unless its a no brainer.<p>2. Custom Domain Name<p>3. Ability to customize look&#x2F;feel as much as i want including custom CSS<p>4. I don&#x27;t know how possible it is but i would like the ability to migrate from one platform to another if i so choose. So if i choose blog platform x i can switch to blog platform Y if i like.<p>5. Ability to put whatever scripts i choose like google analystics.<p>6 Different Comment Engines - I don&#x27;t much about it but i do want users to be able to leave comments so maybe Disqus?<p>Of course since i&#x27;m just starting i don&#x27;t know what else i should be looking for.<p>I&#x27;ve looked at a variety of them (its hard to choose with so many) like wordpress, squarespace, silvrback, Ghost, Roon, Ect... One of them i looked at is &quot;Postach&quot; was pretty cool in that the publishing platform for your blog was evernote (which i&#x27;m a big advocate of) just don&#x27;t how great it is.<p>I don&#x27;t mind paying for a platform as long as its worth it. ($5-$6 a month).<p>On an aside when creating a blog do you recommend just using your main site such as &quot;mysite.com&#x2F;blog&quot; or do you recommend creating a domain specific to a topic? For example i plan to do some post about Angular. So would it be better to create a domain like &quot;angularisgreat.com&quot;. That kind of limits you when you want to talk about something else though :P.<p>Anyways, any help&#x2F;advice would be greatly appreciated.....
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lhorie
I'm using Blogger for my personal blog (
[http://lhorie.blogspot.ca](http://lhorie.blogspot.ca) ). It doesn't provide a
whole lot customization options, but it's more of a linkblog than a
programming blog and the defaults are good enough for that purpose. It doesn't
do markdown and I don't think you can export, so I don't recommend it for your
purpose.

On my Mithril blog ( [http://lhorie.github.io/mithril-
blog](http://lhorie.github.io/mithril-blog) ), I'm using a custom build script
based on grunt+marked and Disqus (you can check the github project page if it
interests you). Some of the publishing steps are still a little manual though,
so it's probably not what you're looking for, but I've stuff like syntax
highlighting setup there if you want to steal the code for a starting
boilerplate.

Recently someone from the Mithril community showed me a simple Jekyll+Mithril
blog platform that sounds closer to what you're looking for: (
[https://github.com/eiriksm/kyll-thrill](https://github.com/eiriksm/kyll-
thrill) ). It's pretty lean, you can write posts in markdown, create a HTML
template, and use Disqus for comments (it does RSS too). I'm planning on
trying it out myself.

Re: portability, I think having the articles in markdown files is the way to
go if you want to be able to move the content to other micro-blogging tools.

As far as domains go, I use my personal blog for writing about more random
(but still programming-related) things, e.g. Angular or Velocity.js or
whatever, and I keep application-development-focused content on the Mithril
blog. You can always do a mysite.com/blog that is primarily focused on
Angular, but occasionally talk about other things. As a reader, this type of
blog feels more human, and I personally like the occasional insights that come
out of deviations from the core topic.

------
gjmulhol
Most complete is Medium -- basically minimal customizability, but you get an
in-built audience and it looks great. It is free and might be a good place to
get started.

I really like Squarespace -- slightly expensive though, and very complete,
hard to customize.

Wordpress is hard to beat -- very stable and solid, highly customizable, but
that can become dangerous/a distraction

Ghost ([https://ghost.org](https://ghost.org)) -- is newer and has been on
here a few times. I'm sure some other HN readers might have thoughts.

I would use a personal domain, but only if you can post regularly enough to
make it worth it. My old blog got stale, so now I am working on some posts on
Medium where that is mitigate by the fact that I am not the only one on the
channel.

