

Hosted blogging platform - nick_swan

I'm wanting to start a personal blog to write about startup things and am considering a hosted solution for once. What are people using/recommending?
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shantanubala
I use Posterous.

I love it - it gives you enough features but also automates some of the
mundane things. It allows custom templates, uploads, and just about anything
you'd want for free.

For me, a blog is about the content more than anything. Different platforms
don't matter to me as a reader or a person who _tries_ to write stuff. That
being said, Posterous is the easiest to work with at the moment. All I have to
do is write - there is very little effort I need to put into managing it.

Some issues: If you don't like emailing posts, the WYSIWYG interface they
provide isn't amazing (I like it, but it can feel slightly clunky at times).
If you need widgets or a drag & drop interface for adding external content,
you won't feel at home. These don't really affect me, but everyone's
different.

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RossM
I like the fact that in drafting a post you simply save it to the drafts
folder in your email client. Since my workflow rotates around the Inbox it
comes nicely into it.

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barmstrong
Tumblr, Posterous, Wordpress.com (probably in that order)

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AlexMuir
Check whether it lets you export. That could be a massive pain further down
the line.

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maguay
Tumblr is awesome, and in my opinion the easiest hosted blog platform to use.
WordPress.com, though, is the most powerful, and you can actually use a couple
of the themes basically as a free hosted CMS for a small website with static
pages. Another advantage of WordPress.com is that it works almost the same as
full WordPress.org, so anything you learn on it would be knowledge you can use
with any WordPress-powered site. At the end of the day, it really depends on
what you need:

\- Tumblr is by far the easiest, and has the most features (domain mapping,
CSS/HTML editing) for free

\- WordPress.com is the most powerful, and has more advanced features (full
site with just pages, shortcodes) than most other free hosted platforms.

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js4all
I am using Posterous and can recommend it.

Whatever you choose, make sure to use your own custom domain. Doing so, you
can later change your blogging platform wherever you want.

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lfborjas
If you're a developer and want a free solution and don't mind hacking up your
own blog, I totally recommend <http://pages.github.com/> it's powered by
jekyll (<http://jekyllrb.com/>). I used to use tumblr because it's easy and
highly customizable, haven't used posterous but the fact that you can post via
mail with very granular control and integration with other sites looks
awesome. Yet, if you feel like hacking a little, github pages is a rad choice
-you can write in the markup language you like better and the text editor you
love; and can even do it offline, you just have to git push when you want to
update stuff. Also, it allows custom domains.

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cmelbye
I would've recommended Posterous a few months ago when they were in their
earlier stages, but their "switch to Posterous" campaign has left a bad taste
in my mouth, and the web interface has actually gotten incredibly confusing.
Nowadays I would use Tumblr.

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nick_swan
tumblr seems to promote itself as 'microblogging done right' but I guess it's
fine for a normal content type blog as well?

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cmelbye
Yes. You can post just text if you want to, but if there's a link, video,
quote, or picture that you want to post, it's obviously going to be pretty
easy to do that as well because of the nature of Tumblr.

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Nicolo_Borghi
I love using posterous, though I mainly use it for pictures.

