[Sergio Tapia]

I have my own blog hosted by Wordpress, but I'm tired of it. It's too much hassle to include code in one of my posts and more often than not the code presentation is mangled.

What blog platform would you recommend for a code-related blog?

I've been somewhat using Coderwall, but haven't taken the full dive yet. It's getting there, but many features are missing such as analytics and whatnot. They recently implemented comments section for each "pro-tip" we share so that's something.

Things I'm looking for:

• Free
  
• Can allow easy code writing. Markdown or similar.
  
• Comments on each post.
  
• Analytics of how many views/shares a post has.

[CasiOo]

Use dream in code for your blogging

[xclite]

I'm a total command line junkie: I self-host and use Jekyll. Basically with Jekyll you write the post in markdown and run the jekyll gem, which does some conversion and creates static HTML. I don't do a lot of UI stuff, so static html is good enough for me.

An advantage of Jekyll is that you can host for free on Github with no extra work (or on Heroku with a little work).

[Skaggles]

I use Jekyll as well, but I prefer the Octopress framework for Jekyll. It may be static HMTL, but through services like Disqus, I was easily able to add in comments and have a fully functional blog that was free (hosted on Heroku with my custom domain), translated markdown into HTML (even added in the ability to translate footnotes), and allowed for comments through Disqus. Google Analytics was also easy to add by editing the templates. I'd definitely recommend check it out.

I got busy and let my domain expire, but you can still check out how it looks here: http://andreburdette-blog.heroku.com/

This post has been edited by Skaggles: 23 September 2012 - 04:47 PM

[Sergio Tapia]

Those sound great as self-hosted solutions.

I'd rather have it hosted and managed by someone else. The problem with something like Jekyll or Octopress is that I cannot create a new post from anywhere. I'd need to clone my "posts" repo and install Git, etc.

Do you guys know of any 3rd party hosted solutions.

[fromTheSprawl]

Does Heroku offer a free account? I would like to try out this Jekyll platform, and thanks OP for that CoderWall thing. I'll use it too.

And I plug my CoderWall here shamelessy: CoderWall

This post has been edited by fromTheSprawl: 23 September 2012 - 09:50 PM

[Skaggles]

fromTheSprawl, on 23 September 2012 - 08:13 PM, said:

Does Heroku offer a free account? I would like to try out this Jekyll platform, and thanks OP for that CoderWall thing. I'll use it too.

Yes. It's free to sign up and host a site with minimum resources. They give the option to scale up resources when needed, but they charge you for that time. So, as long as you keep those at the minimum, you shouldn't have to pay. You can toy with the pricing/resources here: http://www.heroku.com/pricing#0-0

[fromTheSprawl]

Yeah, I saw that too but I'm not really clear on the dyno's. I read that you could set Web Dyno to 1 and Worker Dyno to 0 but on the Monthly thing it says $36 even though the total says $0. I'll give it a try though, thanks.

[Skaggles]

fromTheSprawl, on 23 September 2012 - 09:53 PM, said:

Yeah, I saw that too but I'm not really clear on the dyno's. I read that you could set Web Dyno to 1 and Worker Dyno to 0 but on the Monthly thing it says $36 even though the total says $0. I'll give it a try though, thanks.

Yeah, they limit you to 720 Dyno hours. Anything over will be charged.

[fromTheSprawl]

And that concludes me trying out Heroku. Does that mean they need some payment information from the outset even if you're going for the free version? I should really get a debit card.

By the way, the CoderWall thing looks buggy. The code syntax highlighting does not exist, well it does but in only one color. Also, I had fun watching people viewing my "Hello World in Python".

[xclite]

I've never had to provide credit card info to Heroku - I'm not sure how many visits the cap is equal to (obviously depends on your content) and I'm not sure how they handle overages - aka do they cut you off and email you, do they autoscale you and send you a bill? Haven't bothered looking.

[DarenR]

who has time to blog? I mean isnt that what DIC is for?

[Nykc]

I just started re-building my blog - Despite my frustrations with Wordpress it is one of the most convenient and easiest platforms to work with.

[Sergio Tapia]

DarenR, on 24 September 2012 - 09:53 AM, said:

who has time to blog? I mean isnt that what DIC is for?

I can't count how many times I searched for my own blog posts to solve a problem I was having. It's better than documentation! As an added bonus you can weigh in your experience since the time of posting and see how much you've grown by the amounts of "what the fuck was I thinking?!" yells during reading.

[xclite]

That was actually my main motivation to record anything. "Oh, that's how I solved that exact error message 3 months ago..."