Re:Ask HN: Thinking on creating a blog and need help (platform)
by lhorie on Wednesday May 14, 2014 @09:34PM
(#7747520)
I'm using Blogger for my personal blog ( http://lhorie.blogspot.ca ). It doesn't provide a whole lot customization options, but it's more of a linkblog than a programming blog and the defaults are good enough for that purpose. It doesn't do markdown and I don't think you can export, so I don't recommend it for your purpose.
On my Mithril blog ( http://lhorie.github.io/mithril-blog ), I'm using a custom build script based on grunt+marked and Disqus (you can check the github project page if it interests you). Some of the publishing steps are still a little manual though, so it's probably not what you're looking for, but I've stuff like syntax highlighting setup there if you want to steal the code for a starting boilerplate.
Recently someone from the Mithril community showed me a simple Jekyll+Mithril blog platform that sounds closer to what you're looking for: ( https://github.com/eiriksm/kyll-thrill ). It's pretty lean, you can write posts in markdown, create a HTML template, and use Disqus for comments (it does RSS too). I'm planning on trying it out myself.
Re: portability, I think having the articles in markdown files is the way to go if you want to be able to move the content to other micro-blogging tools.
As far as domains go, I use my personal blog for writing about more random (but still programming-related) things, e.g. Angular or Velocity.js or whatever, and I keep application-development-focused content on the Mithril blog. You can always do a mysite.com/blog that is primarily focused on Angular, but occasionally talk about other things. As a reader, this type of blog feels more human, and I personally like the occasional insights that come out of deviations from the core topic.
On my Mithril blog ( http://lhorie.github.io/mithril-blog ), I'm using a custom build script based on grunt+marked and Disqus (you can check the github project page if it interests you). Some of the publishing steps are still a little manual though, so it's probably not what you're looking for, but I've stuff like syntax highlighting setup there if you want to steal the code for a starting boilerplate.
Recently someone from the Mithril community showed me a simple Jekyll+Mithril blog platform that sounds closer to what you're looking for: ( https://github.com/eiriksm/kyll-thrill ). It's pretty lean, you can write posts in markdown, create a HTML template, and use Disqus for comments (it does RSS too). I'm planning on trying it out myself.
Re: portability, I think having the articles in markdown files is the way to go if you want to be able to move the content to other micro-blogging tools.
As far as domains go, I use my personal blog for writing about more random (but still programming-related) things, e.g. Angular or Velocity.js or whatever, and I keep application-development-focused content on the Mithril blog. You can always do a mysite.com/blog that is primarily focused on Angular, but occasionally talk about other things. As a reader, this type of blog feels more human, and I personally like the occasional insights that come out of deviations from the core topic.