Ask HN: Best, free (or cheap) blog service for coders?

1 point·ljw1001··4 comments

My needs: Easy-to-use, nice-looking, formats code well. Free is best, but cheap is good, too. Syntax highlighting would be a real plus.

Tried: Wordpress, Weebly, Slvrback, Wix, Squarespace (too expensive).

Looked briefly at blogger, but defaults were so ugly it scared me away.

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I've been using Jekyll with GitHub Pages. I'm not a Web developer so it took me a while to customize a template to my needs. Pros of using Jekyll is 1. You get complete control over your blog 2. You blog like you are coding 3. Tons of free templates to choose from 4. Free hosting with the ability to use your own custom domain

Thanks. I may end up doing that, but I code for work and I code for fun and I blog about coding so I would really like to have something that 'just works'.

I should probably just upgrade to the pro version of Wordpress. It's just that $100/year seems like a lot for a blog nobody reads ;)

I also use Jekyll/GH-pages, and it really 'just works'. Usually the only thing I spent time on was cosmetics, but even out of the box it doesn't look bad, plus there are (as mentioned before) lots of free templates.

I know a lot of people use Medium as well, but I'm not sure how it handles syntax highlighting.

For the record, i was pretty happy with Wordpress, but needed the ability to make the font for code smaller, and that requires a paid account.

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