What is the best platform for starting a blog?

Hey guys and gals, I’m looking to start a blog. The blog will primarily serve as my platform / online journal where I will review educational resources such as books, online courses, tutorials, etc. that I’ve learned and benefitted from. In addition, it will be a place where I’ll talk about my projects from time to time.

In that regard, what blogging platform do you recommend – Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, etc?

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Medium is the suggested platform here. You can get published in the FreeCodeCamp publication, and you’ll generally be more visible as the tech community is highly active on the site.

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Hi! I’m a really big fan of WordPress. I have not used Tumblr. I used Blogger for a little bit but it didn’t offer me what I needed.

You can sign up for a free WordPress account on https://wordpress.com/ The free page does have limitations in terms of customizing the page and it does have ads on it.

I ultimately ended up moving over with WordPress.org to my own domain and hosting. WordPress has let me practiced my HTML, CSS and PHP skills. WordPress is used by many large companies. Check out their showcase page - https://wordpress.org/showcase/

I hope that helps!

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There’s a couple of free ones when hosted on Heroku. I can help you set it up if you’re interested.

I recommend using either Ghost or Jekyll.

Ghost is my favorite, it was created with bloggers in mind. It also comes with an Admin UI built in. It resemble the medium interface and is the easiest to use of the two.

Jekyll is a static page generator that doesn’t come with a admin UI. You basically have to run a little bit of code each time you create a new entry.

Check them both out.
They both give you the ability to customize your blog using themes.

Let me know if you have any questions.

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I second the Wordpress platform running on your own domain name and site. You can customize it and monetize it if you want. You’re building your own brand rather than a third party site.

To funnel traffic to it, post on medium.com with a link back to your own site.

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Wordpress can be bulky at times and if all you want to do is blog then You should really consider Ghost.
The reason I like Ghost so much is because it is simple enough for anyone to make changes to the front end, there’s no distractions when creating a new blog post, and its open source with the biggest blogger following.

You can use Markdown in the editor and the UI is extremely minimalistic.
Here’s what the Ghost editor looks like.

Along the rest of the contribute input, I personally use Wordpress. I knew Medium was an outlet too, but didn’t know too in-depth about it until I started learning here. I might switch over to Medium after I pick up some more lesson. I created CodingAfter30.com to document my learn to code journey as well as offer any resources (in time) and other stories like me. Being able to learn after 30 years old from scratch, not a lot of encouragement articles out there – hoping to shed some light to others.

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Good looking blog. I’ll try to revisit this.

I’ve had a journey blog when I was learning PHP & mySQL, from the point of view of a Classic ASP/MSSQL programmer. I can tell you it’s a lot of hard work, and sometimes you don’t know if you’re just talking to yourself. So pace yourself :slight_smile:

Ghost use Node.js and can give you actual JS hacking skills. Markdown by default is also huge positive. You can also use Ghost on Github Pages.

Wordpress, PHP & MySQL IMHO no such profitable. Of course you can make money with them, but much less and not comparable with Node and Rails.

Medium is the easiest to just get going with, but I personally strongly prefer any of the many fine static site generators, published to githhub pages.

With Medium you do not control nothing. You can be banned, lost your data etc and nobody cares.

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WordPress - hands down. It is superficially easy to learn to use, but you soon find that going beyond the basics can be technically challenging. But for a person interested in web development, it is well worth your time to learn. Market share is large, and there are tons of clients looking for developers versed in WordPress.

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Medium owns your audience. Wordpress is kinda slow and overloaded for simple blog but it has a lot of plugins both free and paid which can enchance your blog. Ghost seems to be good choice but I haven’t tried it yet.

Question to Ghost users:
Ghost runs on Node.js so I need hosting which supports Node.js right? Most of hosting providers in my country offers only servers with PHP.

Shared hosting isn’t necessary, hosting in your geographic location too.

Could you expand your answer because I am confused now.

Keywords: VPS, PaaS, dedicated server, CDN, static websites.

Thank you all for your suggestions. It seems that I’ll have to make a choice between WordPress and Ghost. Quick question: Is it possible to migrate a Ghost blog to WordPress later? (Sorry, I’m naive about blogging stuff.)

(Sorry, I’m naive about blogging stuff.)

You should try to use all listed software above. It’s like a buying new car without test drive.

Is it possible to migrate a Ghost blog to WordPress

You can migrate anywhere if still own your content.

I suggest Medium too. It has a big and active community, you don’t have to setup anything (jut create a free account) and it is full of readers that actually want to read contents (people can also find your posts easy).

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Let me just add that it’s easy to get caught up in the technical details and endlessly fiddle… we are programmers after all!

More important than finding the perfect platform is just starting to write. Once you have established a habit of writing about your code/work/learning, it’s relatively easy to move the content somewhere else.

So the best platform for starting a blog is the one that gets you writing a post asap.

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