Ask HN: Best place for programmers to blog about code?

3 points by jcuga 10 years ago | 6 comments

I have benefited greatly from all sorts of great programming material that other people have put on the web. Over the last few years I've accumulated quite a few nuggets of programming gold myself and I'd love to start sharing. What are some good blogging platforms for programming blogs?

Preferably these platforms would be:

- free

- minimal personal info with no facebook/twitter login required

- hosts images

- supports embedding code snippets in blog entries

From almost starting a blog recently, the best one I could find was Medium, but I'm curious as to what else might be out there. For those of you who are already writing these sort of blogs, what do you use?

dudul 10 years ago |

I would advocate Github Pages powered by Jekyll. You can use another static site generator, but Jekyll is directly supported by GH pages, so it makes it slightly easier to deploy.

I like not being dependent on a specific platform. If I decide that I don't like Github pages anymore I can just take my static content and push it somewhere else. Also, it makes it very easy to work on my posts offline.

Albright 10 years ago | |

If you're going to use Jekyll or some other self-hosted-ish service (as opposed to Medium or Tumblr or so on), why not just deploy to your own webspace rather than GitHub Pages?

dudul 10 years ago | | |

Because it's free and there is nothing to do. I just create a repo that is my blog, it kills 2 birds with one stone: I keep the content under source control and it is made available as a website.

If I had another webspace I would have to keep my git repo, and in addition I would have to push the generated content to my host. Effectively, when I commit to my repo it's doing the publish automatically.

jcuga 10 years ago | |

Thanks! I don't know how I missed this. Will definitely give it a try.

BorisMelnik 10 years ago |

x2 for Github pages, it really has almost everything you need or a quick workaround.

That said, I am a huge advocate for owning your own content. You never know you might be an awesome writer that will turn into a famous blog :)

bluejellybean 10 years ago |

Why not start your own website and post there?