
Ask HN: Best place to host technical blog? - littlesheephtpt
I occasionally write technical articles (such as in-depth how-to&#x27;s, exploratory data analysis, etc) on topics like web, devops, and security. However they have very low traffic and I&#x27;m considering hosting on somewhere like medium, wordpress, blogspot, etc. Which hosting do you prefer?<p>Few side notes which may matter: 1) I don&#x27;t care about monetization. 2) I do care about source code highlighting, ability to add custom javascript&#x2F;css (for graphs&#x2F;visualizations).
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saluki
Even if you don't care about monetization I would recommend hosting them on
your own domain so you control the content.

Plus building your own personal brand in your own space on the web isn't a bad
idea.

Plus hosting your own gives you more flexibility for custom js/graphs, etc.

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treyhuffine
We chose to go with Medium
([https://levelup.gitconnected.com](https://levelup.gitconnected.com)), and it
has been great. It embeds gists which is good for code. I haven't experimented
with custom JS/CSS, but I believe it's also possible to embed. It's not
perfect, but it's really good in most areas.

One of the best things about Medium is the built-in network and community. I
feel confident our technical publication would not have grown as quickly
without it. One of my favorite features is the ability to co-publish articles
in publications but also retain the authorship of it on your own profile. It's
an excellent way to generate traffic to your posts and take advantage of
publications that already have readers. If you're interested in giving Medium
a try and would be interested in submitting some stories to
[https://levelup.gitconnected.com](https://levelup.gitconnected.com), we would
be happy to help get you started!

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littlesheephtpt
Sorry, I'm only familiar with the "one author, one blog" format... so, at the
risk of sounding dumb, what exactly is levelup.gitconnected.com? I see it's an
aggregation of articles from different authors, hosted on medium... Do you act
as the 'editor' for a group of regular contributers, do you go out cherry pick
articles from medium at large, is it automatically generated somehow from a
pool of articles, or ...? EDIT: n/m, I found faq on publications!

~~~
treyhuffine
So it's a combination of people in our community submitting articles and us
seeking out writers. Many of our contributors are people who write really
great content but aren't attracting a ton of views, and it is a really good
relationship for both us. I'm happy to connect outside of HN if you're
interested in learning more.

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amorphous
As already mentioned, the biggest question for you is to decide if you want to
use your own domain or not. If you don't mind having someone else control over
your content, using a site like medium can get you a lot of publicity for
free.

Personally, I want control over my audience so using my own domain is
paramount. I use Jekyll + S3 + Cloudfront and have very little cost (<2$ a
month) for ~1k visitors per month.

however, having said all that, more important is to actually write!

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itronitron
You may want to check out Observable, which is created by Mike Bostock who is
the creator of D3.js >>
[https://beta.observablehq.com/?utm_source=blocks](https://beta.observablehq.com/?utm_source=blocks)

Also there are a number of quality 'blogs' that are made available through
GitHub Pages.

Codepen is another option for hosting Javascript/CSS/HTML gists that can be
linked into a longer blog post elsewhere.

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mabynogy
You can publish your articles on dailyprog/~yourname (it's a community of
programmers). An example of someone starting a text-based blog:
[http://dailyprog.org/~tacixat/blog/posts/Problems%20With%20S...](http://dailyprog.org/~tacixat/blog/posts/Problems%20With%20Social%20Media.html)

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tomjuggler
If you are going to use Wordpress, you can host anywhere. I am with
Digitalocean, because it's only $5 a month and it seems to have the best
documentation for self hosting.

I have heard good things about the Wordpress.com hosting, and they have that
Android/Iphone app to blog on the fly.

Wherever you host, Wordpress will have multiple plugins for code highlighting
etc, although I haven't tried any yet.

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CM30
Use your own hosting with your own domain. That way you control the content,
won't likely be censored if someone on social media gets annoyed, aren't at
the mercy of corporations like Google, can run your own ads, etc.

Let's not add even more sites to the Google, WordPress.com (the hosted
version) or Medium ecosystems.

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altsyset
GitHub pages

