Ask HN: What's your blogging platform?
There are so many new blogging platforms. What's the platform you're using? Do you still use blogger? Or use a newer platform?
Is it self hosted or hosted by the blogging service?
Is it self hosted or hosted by the blogging service?
( I wrote about this in some depth a while ago: http://www.mmomeltingpot.com/2012/03/wpengine-review-after-1... )
Why Wordpress? Mostly for the It Just Works factor. I've done my time in the CMS trenches - I've written my own several times back before there were any decent hosted solutions. Nowadays, if it's reasonably easy to use and not too slow I'm good with it.
Plus, Wordpress has the advantage of an absolutely massive ecosystem around it, meaning that any features I want to add rarely require custom code, and usually just require a Google search. :)
It is free, super fast, works great for Markdown/plain-text editor. I never have to dick around with anything (security, caching plugins, spam, etc) - I can just write. And sometimes nice people send me pull requests to fix typos :)
I use it over managed solutions because I've set it up to easily integrate into any site, it loads insanely fast and has a lot of modern features you would expect (split pane live preview with markdown, auto saving without creating a million drafts, user login to handle authors, etc.).
Most managed solutions lack 1 or 2 important features in some way or another and that ruins the experience.
Using Markdown means no constraint on what software you use to edit your posts, which is really nice.
Another advantage to using a static site generator is your blog will be (generally) fast to load, secure, and it will be really easy to find somewhere to host it for a low cost (or even for free).
[1] http://nanoc.ws/
Definitely want to play with Ghost soon though.