How everybody's blogging in 2017
Examples
- marco.org uses secondcrack, a basic static-file blog engine using Markdown-formatted text files as input
- danluu.com is a static Octopress site, hosted on GitHub Pages
- jamesfisher.com is a Jekyll blog
- acolyer.org looks wordpress-y, served by IIS and ASP.NET
- troyhunt.com is a Ghost blog, according to builtwith.com
- jeremykun.com is a Wordpress blog
- charity.wtf is also a Wordpress blog
- blog.jessfraz.com?
- blog.samaltman.com uses posthaven.com, sounds like a similar promise as svbtle.com
Solutions
- Wordpress
- stale, tons of unneeded features and stinky CMS
- Medium
- analytics?
- what’s the fuss about Medium “owning” your content?
- migration most likely going to be an issue
- maybe not so great for technical content, geared towards prose
- can embed gists though
- svbtle.com
- looks nice and minimalistic
- but also abandoned since 2014?
- standardnotes.org
- note-taking app, notes can be shared on the web (listed.standardnotes.org)
- what about customization, analytics, code highlighting?
- Ghost installation hosted on Digital Ocean or something like that
- do I feel like messing with a server on the weekends? probably not
- Github pages
- uses jekyll (turns markdown files into a static site with pages and posts), just push a _config.yml and markdown files to a github repo and the site is rebuilt automatically
- can preview locally with
gem install github-pagesandjekyll serve - can inject disqus for comments, google analytics
- out of the box themes are meh, but lots of great options at https://jekyllthemes.io/
Stuff I’m looking for
- no fuss setup
- clean look out of the box (on desktop and mobile)
- light customization options but nothing too crazy like multiple columns, sidebar, embedded Twitter feed and whatnot
- analytics and SEO options (for nice looking results in google search and sharing on social media)
- code highlighting
- support for markdown
- not necessary: comments, likes…
Written on November 25, 2017