Saturday, December 19, 2015

The perfect blogging platform for developers - what is it?

I've been using many blogging platforms so far and each of them is dev-friendly at something while suck at something else. This post is here to help me visualise the perfect combination.

Before I go into features, I want a tool which is simple and without any pain, without anything to learn and remember. It must be optimized for the develoer workflow - creating new drafts should be easy, publishing should be easy. It should be code-oriented.

  • I want to be able to easily embed my just made screenshots (with shift-cmd-ctrl-4), as it's possible at Blogger, without any effort - just cmd-v to paste it (wysiwyg)
  • I like the simplicity of markdown and want to be able to use it sometimes, as in nanoc/GH pages
  • I want to have the post look pretty without any additional effort - medium has it OOTB, custom blogs have it after all the styles applied 
  • medium has a cool title inventor
  • I want to add fixes quickly and see them live immedietally (like in Blogger, unlike the statically generated blogs)
  • none of the platform satisfies me with the pre-blog phase - drafts, notes gathering etc
  • nanoc forces me to come up with some title and it generates the date
  • no special support for drafts in nanoc, but we can fake it
  • publish schedule is sometimes cool
  • Blogger has it OOTB
  • I love to use iaWriter-like tools, so desktop apps when work on longer posts
  • markdown makes it easy
  • Some kind of Slack integration would be cool (Slack driven posts)
  • team collaboration is important - allow others to fix typos, edit anything
  • IDE integration is crucial - I want to move some code snippets easily as new drafts/posts
  • embedding code should just work with syntax coloring
  • auto-promotion of blogposts would be cool, like with Medium - they distribute your posts magically bringing you some traffic


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Even though, there's no perfect blogging platform, yet - there are still techniques which can help you blog more in less time. 

During a limited time, you can buy my "Blogging for busy programmers" book with a 30% discount (coupon: HOLIDAYSALE2015 )

3 comments:

jim said...

have you tried: https://github.com/tejo/boxed ?

cu

Unknown said...

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Francis Kim said...

You should try Ghost.