Ask HN: What blogging platform are you using these days? - simonsarris
======
dmuth
I use Drupal for my legacy website:
[http://www.dmuth.org/](http://www.dmuth.org/)

Medium for updates on my latest project: [https://medium.com/septa-
stats](https://medium.com/septa-stats)

And Jekyll on GitHub pages for a side project I did awhile ago:
[http://www.allaboutcheetahs.info/](http://www.allaboutcheetahs.info/)

The reasons behind these:

\- Drupal: My website used to have a lot of static content, and I wanted to
keep the content there while writing blog posts going forward

\- Medium: There's a lot of people on it already, and I really like the
interface

\- Jekyll: I wanted to learn a static site generator as well as brush up on my
CSS. (and the world needs more websites about cheetahs, tbh)

~~~
andrewmcwatters
Haha! After reading the site and your HN profile, I was thoroughly delighted.
Pretty neat.

------
alexgaribay
I use Ghost on Digital Ocean with a $5 VM. The writing interface is very clean
and simple. Plus it's very nice to write in Markdown and see an unstyled real-
time preview of the content. Ghost fulfills everything I'm looking for in a
blogging platform. It is also pretty easy to write your own theme.

~~~
Arcsech
Same - I might use a static site generator, but my wife wanted a blog with an
in-browser editor, and since it's very easy to host multiple Ghost blogs on a
single server with some nginx configuration, I decided to just go with that
for my own as well.

Works well since neither of them are very high traffic.

------
danso
For a long time, Wordpress...now, Jekyll - being able to just pop open my text
editor and jot notes is a behavior-changing level of friction-
reduction...Wordpress is nice, but the time it took to login, click through to
get to the posting interface, etc., meant that I really had to have wanted to
blog to go through that hassle. Nevermind doing any kind of style/design
changes, which required a mix of going through the clunky Editor UI, working
directly from FTP, and at various points, just saying "Fuck it" and writing
inline CSS.

I used Tumblr for awhile as a photoblog. It worked out nicely and I enjoyed
the social features. The main benefit was I learned not to underestimate the
psychological impact of interface and friction...I spent little time
comparatively on Tumblr, but I created around 1,500+ posts...sure, some of it
was fluff, but the ease of publishing got me more into the groove of sharing
my work and recording my thoughts. With my standard blog, the barrier to
posting made me reluctant to try new things, or to blog "just for fun".

------
andyhnj
I migrated my personal blog from Blogger to WordPress a couple of years ago.
I'm pretty happy with it.

I had originally wanted to migrate it to Drupal, but I couldn't find a good
solution for Blogger-to-Drupal import that worked for me. (At the time, I was
doing a fair amount of Drupal work at my day job, so it seemed like a good
idea, but in retrospect, I'm glad it didn't work out.)

I know there's a lot of stuff out there that's "cooler" than WordPress, but I
like it. The ecosystem for plugins and themes is huge. You can find most
anything you want, usually for free.

I'm hosting my blog on a plain vanilla shared Linux host, rather than on
WordPress.com or another managed host. I like the flexibility of doing it that
way. It's a little bit of work to keep up with plugin updates, but not much.

------
pravj
Jekyll using GitHub Pages.

I have developed a few themes and plugins for it.

Website: [http://pravj.github.io](http://pravj.github.io)

Current Theme:
[https://github.com/pravj/Etios](https://github.com/pravj/Etios)

Others:

[https://github.com/pravj/wiggle](https://github.com/pravj/wiggle)

[https://github.com/pravj/modified-lanyon](https://github.com/pravj/modified-
lanyon)

[https://github.com/pravj/Cursor](https://github.com/pravj/Cursor)

[https://github.com/pravj/Harry](https://github.com/pravj/Harry)

------
RexM
I use a static site generator called wintersmith.
[http://wintersmith.io/](http://wintersmith.io/)

It's hosted on AWS using Route53, S3, and CloudFront. My blog isn't very
popular, so hosting costs less than $1/month.

------
steeef
Hugo[0] (static site generator), site hosted with Caddy[1] (go web server with
a lot of stuff like auto-SSL from Let's Encrypt for free) running as a Docker
container on a DigitalOcean droplet:

[https://stp5.net/blog/](https://stp5.net/blog/)

Works pretty well, and I like Hugo's lightweight templating formats. I can
draft up a new blog article, test it locally, then push to GitHub, which has a
webhook to my blog host which does a pull and blam: new content.

[0] [https://gohugo.io/](https://gohugo.io/)

[1] [https://caddyserver.com/](https://caddyserver.com/)

~~~
emdd
Caddy looks great. Thanks.

------
mcjiggerlog
Poet[1], a simple node blog generator which plugged pretty nicely into my
existing node personal website. I did a quick write-up of the process of using
it.[2]

[1] [http://jsantell.github.io/poet/](http://jsantell.github.io/poet/)

[2] [https://tomjwatson.com/blog/using-poet-as-a-blog-
generator](https://tomjwatson.com/blog/using-poet-as-a-blog-generator)

------
spinningarrow
Jekyll/GitHub Pages, mostly.

------
dullroar
Home-rolled solution using Markdown, pandoc and make.

------
maglavaitss
Tinambo, single file flat-file CMS/blogging app with encrypted content.
[https://vox.space/projects/36/tinambo](https://vox.space/projects/36/tinambo)
and [https://github.com/voxspace/tinambo](https://github.com/voxspace/tinambo)

------
ShinyCyril
I'm also using the Python-based Pelican for my personal blog [1]. I was
originally using a homebrew solution, but decided to switch over to something
a little better-tested. The Fabric deployment options [2] are really great. Of
course the static nature means that a JavaScript-based comment system is
needed, for which I'm loving Isso [3] - it's self-hosted, lightweight, doesn't
have spam issues and respects user privacy.

[1] [https://mikeanthonywild.com](https://mikeanthonywild.com)

[2]
[http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.6.3/publish.html](http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.6.3/publish.html)

[3] [https://posativ.org/isso/](https://posativ.org/isso/)

------
CaptSpify
My own! [https://blog.thekyel.com/](https://blog.thekyel.com/)

I built a minimal php page that just pump out html from text files. All of the
blogging platforms that I looked at were terribly bloated. I built this in a
couple of hours. No DBs, no css, and no JS.

KISS

~~~
rufius
Code?

~~~
CaptSpify
I haven't open-sourced it, mostly because it's not even really worth it.
Basically, it's:

    
    
        foreach($entries as $entry => $data) {
          if( file_exists( "entries/$entry" ) && is_readable( "entries/$entry" ) ) {
            $post = file_get_contents("entries/$entry");
    
            echo "<a name='$entry'></a>";
            echo "<h2><a href='https://blog.thekyel.com/?anchor=$entry'>$data[title]</a></h2>";
            echo "<h4>$data[date]</h4>";
            echo "$post";
          }else{
            echo "Cannot read file: entries/$entry";
          }
        }

------
michaelmior
My personal blog[0] uses the Wintersmith[1] static site generator with content
hosted on Surge[2]. I previously used nanoc[3] but started to find it was more
complicated than necessary for my needs. If you happen to be interested, the
source[4] of my site is on GitHub.

[0] [https://michael.mior.ca/](https://michael.mior.ca/)

[1] [http://wintersmith.io/](http://wintersmith.io/)

[2] [https://surge.sh/](https://surge.sh/)

[3] [http://nanoc.ws/](http://nanoc.ws/)

[4]
[https://github.com/michaelmior/michael.mior.ca](https://github.com/michaelmior/michael.mior.ca)

------
nfriedly
Docpad (Node.js/Coffee Script), generated on Travis CI and published to Github
pages.. but I don't blog very often. Mostly I use it to keep my portfolio up
to date.

I might do something different if I were starting from scratch today, but it's
worked well enough so far.

------
krat0sprakhar
Hugo on Github Pages.

Blog: [http://prakhar.me](http://prakhar.me) Repo:
[https://github.com/prakhar1989/hugo-
blog](https://github.com/prakhar1989/hugo-blog)

------
hxm
I use Hugo, which is great for my relatively simple site:
[http://chestradiologists.org](http://chestradiologists.org)

I had substantial help with site design as I know very little about HTML/CSS,
etc. Now it's simple for me to write new posts in Markdown while previewing
the result in realtime with the built-in http server.

I deploy it easily using Cyberduck/SFTP and its synchronization feature.

For my daughter's blog— she likes to write posts using a browser-based editor
with a preview feature— I use Ghost on a Digital Ocean droplet.

------
kanche
Hugo- It's a static site generator written in Go. Quite easy to setup and
maintain.

------
genjipress
Attempting to build my own:

[https://github.com/syegulalp/MeTal/](https://github.com/syegulalp/MeTal/)

(Been dormant as I've been busy with other things, but making slow progress)

------
ericzawo
Recently moved to Wordpress from Tumblr, but I'm very interested in something
like Hexo where I can host the server myself and just push new webpages
online, which would also definitely teach me more about the web.

------
Cbeck527
Jekyll as much[0] as[1] possible.[2] The simplicity of a static site, and the
ability to host on S3 are the two biggest selling points for me.

[0]
[https://github.com/Cbeck527/becker.am](https://github.com/Cbeck527/becker.am)

[1]
[https://github.com/Cbeck527/controlc.fm](https://github.com/Cbeck527/controlc.fm)

[2] [https://github.com/Cbeck527/the-wandering-
photographers](https://github.com/Cbeck527/the-wandering-photographers)

------
joefkelley
Both components have been mentioned repeatedly, but I haven't seen the
combination commented yet:

Hugo on S3

[https://github.com/jfkelley/blog](https://github.com/jfkelley/blog)

------
partisan
I have one Wordpress blog (free hosted on wordpress.com) and several Tumblrs.

------
andrewmcwatters
Went back to GitHub Pages. Went back to Wordpress.com. Ghost just doesn't
compare to Wordpress, even still, when it comes to installation and
integration with an existing Express.js app is a joke.

------
superfckingcool
I use Hugo ([http://gohugo.io](http://gohugo.io)) to generate a static content
blog, which is then hosted using a combination of Bitbucket
([http://bitbucket.org](http://bitbucket.org)) and Aerobatic
([http://www.aerobatic.com](http://www.aerobatic.com)). Works really nice, is
fast, and requires no maintenance at all.

------
zaphar
A custom static site generator written in Go. It's tailored to me and has been
written in various different languages over the years. Can't bring myself to
stop using it :-)

~~~
pfista
Is it open source? Just curious to check it out.

~~~
zaphar
In the sense that the code is publically viewable and I don't care if people
steal it then yes.

[https://bitbucket.org/zaphar/gost/](https://bitbucket.org/zaphar/gost/)

I don't advertise or market it though so it's not what I would call ready for
public consumption at all.

------
haney
Zinnia on Django: [https://github.com/Fantomas42/django-blog-
zinnia](https://github.com/Fantomas42/django-blog-zinnia)

or Jekyll on S3

------
0x54MUR41
I have experienced using WordPress. But, I think it's overkill using WordPress
for a blog. I moved from WordPress to Jekyll. It's stored on GitLab Pages. The
use case that I need for a blog is simple, I can write posts and user can give
a thought.

I chose Jekyll as my current blog engine because I don't need a database. I
can store all of them in static contents. What about comment system? I can use
third-party software, like Disqus.

------
ryan-c
I like Pelican[0], a static site generator written in Python.

0\. [http://blog.getpelican.com/](http://blog.getpelican.com/)

------
jstanley
I use a static site generator.

------
GvS
I use Ghost. It's quite simple and clean.

------
doublerebel
Nodejs+Couch/Cloudant express app written in Iced Coffeescript, called flat-
white. I'll be open-sourcing it and its dependencies over the next few weeks.
Current running version: driverbeats.com .

Uses Redis sessions coupled with Couch authentication, so it's ready to be
clustered out-of-the-box.

------
katpas
Medium. I like that I don't have to think about styling and can focus on the
content.

I haven't used it yet for technical blogs but it supports embedding gists.
[https://medium.com/@KatAlexPas](https://medium.com/@KatAlexPas)

------
Q_the_Novice
I'm using my own static blog generator: [https://github.com/qawemlilo/node-
blogger](https://github.com/qawemlilo/node-blogger), tried WordPress for a
short-while but found it a bit too bloated.

------
aehtyb
jibber, an html publishing platform i made, accessible within IRC
[http://jollo.org/LNT/doc/jibber/screenshots.html](http://jollo.org/LNT/doc/jibber/screenshots.html)

------
thedjinn
I'm using Lektor and I'm quite happy with it. Hosting it for free on Surge.

------
franzpeterstein
For my personal blog, a very lightweight static site generator written in Go.

[https://github.com/alexanderteinum/simple-
website](https://github.com/alexanderteinum/simple-website)

------
dalerus
I've spent too much time rolling my own solutions and building stuff for
clients. Now I just use Squarespace, simple, easy and I don't have to deal
with any of the maintenance stuff.

------
mmk2410
My own blogging engine written in PHP:
[https://gitlab.com/mmk2410/rangitaki](https://gitlab.com/mmk2410/rangitaki)

------
mordocai
Static site generator in common lisp,
[https://github.com/kingcons/coleslaw](https://github.com/kingcons/coleslaw)

------
brickmort
Django Mezzanine running on an EC2 instance, for the simple reasons that I'm
familiar with python and I like having full control over all aspects of the
stack.

------
pfista
I use jekyll with Github pages. Github pages doesn't support https currently
(right?) so I'm thinking of hosting on S3. Or maybe ipfs :)

~~~
daenney
It does support https, try adding the 's' in the URL. It just doesn't default
to it/redirect to it.

If you use an extension like HTTP Anywhere it'll pick up on that and use
https.

~~~
pfista
What about for custom CNAME records though?

~~~
daenney
Right, that one is a bit more tricky. What I've done there is use Cloudflare's
services.

Have the CNAME handled by Cloudflare and have it go through their network.
Then add a Page Rule that redirects http to https once you've activated their
SSL/TLS feature. You can do all of it using their free services.

------
ramblinman2016
soon I will be switching to cloudscribe.SimpleContent (which I created myself)
for my blog because I like aspnetcore
[https://github.com/joeaudette/cloudscribe.SimpleContent](https://github.com/joeaudette/cloudscribe.SimpleContent)

------
codegeek
Personal Blog: Ghost on DigitalOcean droplet

Professional blog for product: WordPress (can't beat the functionality and
plugins)

------
thex10
I'm trying Ghost, hosted on Openshift. Free. For less personal content, I'll
probably use Medium.

------
jiyinyiyong
Hashnode, Segmentfault, I can use GitHub flavored Markdown without making
others feel noisy.

------
creshal
Hugo for work stuff, my own homebrewed mod_python abomination for my private
site.

------
wink
hugo, coming from hyde. Before that around 10 self-written and/or open source
solutions.

Also, Wordpress.com for a different "I don't want to self-host" project.

------
notduncansmith
Jekyll with GH pages (S3 at work), and working on building my own.

------
pawelwentpawel
ghost mostly

------
NeutronBoy
Hugo on S3 with Lambda to generate posts.

------
hgjfgjfg
middleman, powerful static site-gen

------
kfrz
Jekyll is cool!

------
ProAm
Jekyll

