I’m starting a new political blog and I was wondering how people felt about the various extant platforms out there? I already have a Blogger blog, and it’s… fine… I guess. I definitely want something that will allow me to buy the domain actionabespoliticalblog.com so I’m pretty sure tumblr is out, (it’s out anyway because people have preconceptions of a tumblr blogger that I would rather they not have.)
Beyond that, what’s out there? I’ve wrestled with Wordpress the way Jacob wrestled with God, but I’ll give it another shot if people tell me that the Automattic managed domain is decent.
I could handcraft something out of luxuriant HTML/PHP alphabet soup, but I’m rusty and just… don’t… wanna.
I think WordPress is still the best bet for a traditional blog with lots of styles & plugins readily available. I don’t know when you last tried it, but it’s quite different than it was, say, ten years ago.
There are also these days also a number of static blog generators where you essentially compile Markdown (similar to the BBS text format) into HTML files which you can sync on even the dumbest web server with FTP or whatever.
I’m thinking about something similar & will probably end up hand-rolling my own static site generator.
If you’re using your own server, Jekyll is quite good. It’s a ruby code that compiles markdown files into a static site, there are themes that you can include / change to provide styling, and you can incorporate Disquss to provide comments. http://jekyllrb.com
I’m a bit curious about the options myself. I’m anti-WordPress because the BBS folks who are experts say it’s difficult to maintain and has lots of security issues.
I’ve heard good things about Drupal (as a hosted solution … I set it up by hand myself once and I doubt I’ll do it again … nightmare).
I’m gravitating to Wordpress as a package solution. I’ve worked with it as a CMS, and it is indeed a bit of a nightmare. But the platform-locked service managed by Automattic doesn’t require me to muck about with its innards and maintain them. I have a domain name and blog name picked out and I’m pretty much ready to go at this point.
Ghost.io and Jekyll that @anon68287401 mentioned both sound like they might be worth moving to in the future, but for now I’m not looking to spend a great deal of time coding. Again, I’m rusty and I just don’t have the time. I’d rather spend that time on content creation.
I’ve used Blogger in the past, but I’ve just not been enthusiastic about it.
My solution there was to just use a given, free WP theme and make slight tweaks. I wasn’t about to go deep into the code, though I’ve designed a WP theme before.
For a first post, a longread isn’t a problem. My main concern is proliferating TL;DR posts. But if my Googlings are correct 2500 words is starting to become ideal post length.
I’m going to quote my spouse, who builds and maintains websites, including a very large one (1200+ pages, constant activity).
“The first question to ask yourself when designing any website is ‘can it be done with Wordpress?’. If the answer is yes, you should not bother asking further questions.”
