Ask HN: Blog Platform of Choice?

2 points

5 years ago

As an occasional writer, I am a big fan of Medium. I even pay them $5 each month, not because I make any money from the site or particularly like their content, but because their writing tools are really amazing - makes writing very enjoyable.

In addition, their SEO abilities are great, one of my articles on formatting Lisp code is now the highest ranked post on Google :)

(Link: https://link.medium.com/NbSWkq4hJcb )

However, Medium has some issues:

- No syntax highlighting on code (big issue for programming blogs) - No color options (would like an accent colour) - No Mathjax or Latex support (this is a bit too niche for most blogs)

Running my own website has a lot of pluses and I’m well versed in creating static websites for free (particularly like vanilla html / css / JavaScript on GitHub Pages), but I will never get the SEO rankings or audience that Medium can give me.

I honestly can’t find much alternatives. I basically want Medium with a syntax highlighter but I don’t see any blog platform that does this?

What do you guys recommend? Not just for my use case but in general for programming blogs.

Substack looks like an option, but it requires you to bring your own audience, which, if I had, I would just do it via my own website since I have the technical skills for it (but for other writers, substack can be great as it packages up a mailing list + hosting very well).

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