

Ask HN: Best place for tech blog? - mminer

There&#x27;s no lack of options for a general purpose blog — Medium and Ghost and WordPress all seem great — but it&#x27;s unclear what the best choice for a tech-focused one is. In particular, I&#x27;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.<p>Is a static site (say, using GitHub Pages) the best choice? The built-in discovery and sharing features of Medium are attractive, but I&#x27;m unsure if a blog about niche programming topics will benefit from them. Any options beyond the mainstream blogging platforms that I should consider?
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dsacco
I run [http://breakingbits.net](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.

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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.

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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](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](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.

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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.

------
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](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.

