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Comment by Yhippa | Hacker News Reader

This is perfect timing for me. I'm interested in getting serious about starting a technical blog. I've been deciding between Ghost and WordPress. Does anyone have thoughts on that comparison?

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I know this isn't one of those two options, but I'd recommend a static site generator (e.g., Lektor, Hugo, Nikola, Pelican, Octopress). I find myself wasting less time twiddling and configuring them and instead focusing on writing content (in Markdown or ReStructured Text, no less).

Additionally, I can then throw the content up on GitHub pages or AWS S3 and cut down on hosting costs.

I switched to Ghost because I found I spent a lot of time twiddling with my static site generator. My Jekyll setup had a habit of breaking every few months.

Interesting to switch away from a static generator due to reliability. We used Tumblr for our first start up since many non-technical folks were writing content (It was a consumer app). We had a bad experience with it being slow loading for users while being very constrained regarding the theming and clunky editor.

Our current startup is much more dev focused (API analytics) so we went with Jekyll and absolutely love it. Just code in Markdown and your favorite editor and host on GH pages. It's free and super fast. No need to worry about theme settings everything is version controlled. These days, even if you need dynamic content like search, you can use Algolia or Lunr if the index is small.

I guess once you hit a point where you have a large team writing and scheduling content to be posted, static generators may not scale well accordingly (and Ghost will prob be one of my first picks), but we love it for smallish dev focused teams.

I loved Octopress and wanted to use that. It seems like development stopped around 2016. Do know if someone forked it and there's a more updated version out there?

It definitely looks like Octopress development has tapered off. As you can tell, I haven't had to do this research for a while :-)

It looks like a lot of Octopress users have migrated to vanilla Jekyll for their needs.

Yeah. From what I remember, Octopress was designed to take Jekyll from static site generator to Blog engine (i.e. automate the manual stuff to set up a blog). Jekyll has since cribbed significantly from Octopress to make it much easier to approach for that use case.

Depends on your skills and preferences. I would choose Ghost since I am a JavaScript developer and would be more comfortable with a node.js solution. I'm actually so happy I was reminded about Ghost by this post, I might try to set it up myself tonight.

Lacking PHP experience, I've never felt that comfortable in WordPress, but I can't deny that It Just Works. Easy to install and there are millions of users for easy troubleshooting.

That's basically what I'm thinking. Ghost is more inline with some skills I'd like to round out but it's undeniable that WordPress is the standard and there are so many plugins and extensions for it.

Wordpress has so many plugins and extensions because people use it as a site builder for anything and everything. Want a shop? A contact form? A newsletter? Restaurant bookings? Hotel reservations? Whatever, do it in wordpress.

If you want a technical blog, Ghost also "just works" and is far, far better, cleaner, more beautiful out of the box imo. I use their Pro version for our company's blog (https://articles.hsreplay.net/) and it's just unbelievably good. I'm so glad to have found it and I'm a huge, huge fan of not just their product but also how they run their organization.

If you want to build it out into a business, WP might be better because of all the addons for small businesses. It's basically a small business framework.

Ghost is fantastic if you just need some simple features and a good Markdown editor.

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