Hi all,
blogger.com and wordpress are
well known platforms for people to create
free blogs. Github pages have also become popular with
developers recently.
What are the recommended alternatives for people who want to
adhere to a
more free / libre approach?
In particular, I'm looking for solutions I can recommend to
students
getting into Outreachy and GSoC. They often have a lot of
things to
think about during their application and at the start of their
project
and need to start blogging quite quickly.
For now, I'm tempted to recommend github pages with Jekyll
static
content generation because at least the git repository (and
full
history) behind these sites can be easily migrated to any
other hosting
platform. Are there other alternatives people recommend?
Alternatives: Medium, Ghost, Tumblr
I would recommend for an approach of narrowing down choices.
Do you want a static blog or a dynamic blog?
Static blog:
The dynamic component of a static blog would come from client
side _javascript_. For extra features/plugins, you'd need to
depend on third party services like Comments (Disqus), Likes
(Facebook), Analytics(Google) which one can easily integrate
with static blogs.
However the underlying concept of generating static html from
configuration and templates
Dynamic blog: (something you'd perhaps not require)
This is required when you want one or more of the following
features:
* Complete control over everything.
* Don't like generating HTML all the time (however Jekyll
does that for you)
* Don't want to depend on external services like Disqus,
Facebook, Google Analytics.
* Want to use/write custom plugins which are available for
Wordpress.
For most use cases of personal and technical blogs Medium and
Github pages are most suitable. Comparing these two, Github is
more compliant to libre/free ideology.