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Hosted blogging platform

13 pointsnick_swan11 comments

I'm wanting to start a personal blog to write about startup things and am considering a hosted solution for once. What are people using/recommending?

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I use Posterous.

I love it - it gives you enough features but also automates some of the mundane things. It allows custom templates, uploads, and just about anything you'd want for free.

For me, a blog is about the content more than anything. Different platforms don't matter to me as a reader or a person who tries to write stuff. That being said, Posterous is the easiest to work with at the moment. All I have to do is write - there is very little effort I need to put into managing it.

Some issues: If you don't like emailing posts, the WYSIWYG interface they provide isn't amazing (I like it, but it can feel slightly clunky at times). If you need widgets or a drag & drop interface for adding external content, you won't feel at home. These don't really affect me, but everyone's different.

I like the fact that in drafting a post you simply save it to the drafts folder in your email client. Since my workflow rotates around the Inbox it comes nicely into it.

Tumblr, Posterous, Wordpress.com (probably in that order)

Check whether it lets you export. That could be a massive pain further down the line.

Tumblr is awesome, and in my opinion the easiest hosted blog platform to use. WordPress.com, though, is the most powerful, and you can actually use a couple of the themes basically as a free hosted CMS for a small website with static pages. Another advantage of WordPress.com is that it works almost the same as full WordPress.org, so anything you learn on it would be knowledge you can use with any WordPress-powered site. At the end of the day, it really depends on what you need:

- Tumblr is by far the easiest, and has the most features (domain mapping, CSS/HTML editing) for free

- WordPress.com is the most powerful, and has more advanced features (full site with just pages, shortcodes) than most other free hosted platforms.

I am using Posterous and can recommend it.

Whatever you choose, make sure to use your own custom domain. Doing so, you can later change your blogging platform wherever you want.

If you're a developer and want a free solution and don't mind hacking up your own blog, I totally recommend http://pages.github.com/ it's powered by jekyll (http://jekyllrb.com/). I used to use tumblr because it's easy and highly customizable, haven't used posterous but the fact that you can post via mail with very granular control and integration with other sites looks awesome. Yet, if you feel like hacking a little, github pages is a rad choice -you can write in the markup language you like better and the text editor you love; and can even do it offline, you just have to git push when you want to update stuff. Also, it allows custom domains.

I would've recommended Posterous a few months ago when they were in their earlier stages, but their "switch to Posterous" campaign has left a bad taste in my mouth, and the web interface has actually gotten incredibly confusing. Nowadays I would use Tumblr.

tumblr seems to promote itself as 'microblogging done right' but I guess it's fine for a normal content type blog as well?

Yes. You can post just text if you want to, but if there's a link, video, quote, or picture that you want to post, it's obviously going to be pretty easy to do that as well because of the nature of Tumblr.

I love using posterous, though I mainly use it for pictures.

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