

Ask HN: What blog service to use for software/electronic side-projects? - tonteldoos

Good day fellow HNers,<p>I&#x27;ve been looking at alternatives to increase my online presence a little (in ways other than a StackOverflow and GitHub account).  I have a number of small side projects that I&#x27;d like to write about (on various topics, but mostly electronic and software).  I don&#x27;t expect daily articles, but the ones that will be posted should be reasonably high quality (some howtos, experimental projects, research projects, etc).<p>It also turns out that there are MUCH more blogging platform options available than I thought, including various technical tradeoffs:<p>- Self hosted vs Free cloud based vs Premium cloud based<p>- Static vs Dynamic engines<p>- Varying degrees of interactiveness<p>- etc<p>For those of you who do similar things, what were the things you considered when you made your choice, and what has turned out to be important, ie:<p>- Is user comments and feedback valuable, or a nice to have?<p>- How important is social media integration for a reasonably niche topic?<p>- Is self hosting more trouble than it&#x27;s worth? (cost and timewise)<p>- Impact on search engine exposure<p>- ....<p>Is it a viable option to self host (just because I want to play around with it) with links to those articles from a more mainstream blogging site?<p>As always, your feedback is much appreciated!
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TD-Linux
I currently use a self-hosted Wordpress instance on CentOS. It's the most
obvious solution and works well. The comment feature is really important, I
get feedback on several of my articles, and it's rewarding to see that someone
has read your page. Example:
[http://thomasdaede.com/wordpress/?p=167](http://thomasdaede.com/wordpress/?p=167)

Wordpress also gets hit with tons of zero days, so make sure to stay on top of
updating, and backup your database. I also don't like how inserting pictures
works, but it got a lot better with Wordpress 4.0.

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KararCBB
This should give you a really good idea for what you are trying to do and read
the comments: [http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/08/16/best-blogging-
services...](http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/08/16/best-blogging-services/)

It will be hard to get visibility with free services and if you are serious
then buy a WP Theme (my favorite site is www.prophoto.com it is for
photographers but you can tweak a lot and give it a professional look). Yes,
adding social sharing features and specially having comments section a must,
we wouldn't have been talking if HN didn't provide us this feature, right? I
would also suggest that you submit your posts to techcrunch.com
www.themuse.com and see if you can contribute in their blogs and get your name
out there and then go on your own, good luck!

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avinassh
User feedback is must for me. If you are publishing How To guides and tutorial
articles, users will always want to interact with you. So it makes sense to
enable comments.

Either static or dynamic, you can have commenting system. I host my static
blog on Github pages and commenting is handled by Isso [0]. Alternatively you
can use Disqus, but I don't like it.

For dynamic blog, I hosted Wordpress on Openshift. It's free for small blogs.

I don't really integrate any social media (like login with G+ or Comment using
FB etc), really don't like it.

[0] - [https://github.com/posativ/isso](https://github.com/posativ/isso)

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matthewjames
Hello friend.

I would highly recommend taking a look at www.ghost.org

I use it for my online presence to essentially talk about the same thing that
you are. It is very simple to use and made for a great, clean reading
experience. I am just using the default theme provided because I like the
simplicity and elegance of it. Feel free to browse to my website to get a feel
for it.

P.S. It requires a dedicated capable of running node.js apps, I recommend
Digital Ocean for this. You can get just what you need to start at $5 a month.

Hope this helps! :D

www.matthewreichardt.com

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lalwanivikas
Jekyll will be perfect for your needs. \- It's super light, beautiful and easy
to maintain. \- Free hosting via GitHub pages. You can use any of the existing
themes. \- Add Disqus comments - that's also free and beautiful. \- Add GA for
analytics. Write your posts in md and GH Pages will publish it instantaneously
for you.

