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6

I am thinking of starting a programming blog to cover my progress and ideas in open source and employed projects. I am wondering if anyone has an opinion as to which of these sites/tools lend themselves to programming blogs:

  • Tumblr
  • Twitter
  • Wordpress
  • Posterous
  • Other?

Any advice would be highly appreciated.

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5  
Whenever I see Posterous written, I always read posthumous. – dan_waterworth Mar 5 '11 at 20:04
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Tumblr is a horrible idea for a technical blog, I have one and it's full of young teens who usually just reblog stupid posts. – Mahmoud Hossam Mar 5 '11 at 20:44
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@Phobia Yep. At least three of my friends do just that. I had one for about an hour before I realized I had nothing important to say and deleted it. – Maxpm Mar 7 '11 at 7:26
@mvid, how did your writing efforts go? – user1249 Mar 6 '12 at 15:17
If this is not a good question for any stack exchange site, then stack exchange is broken, period. – Bill K Dec 30 '12 at 18:52

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5 Answers

up vote 17 down vote accepted

The most important thing is not having technical details right, but doing the actual writing. That is where most programmers fail, and the reason why e.g. Joel Spolsky is so well known (he writes and do so pretty well instead of being very terse as programmers in general tend to do).

Why not just start at http://www.blogger.com/ and if you get going writing a lot of stuff of interest to others then consider moving it in a more public place.

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+1, this is definitely a situation where agonizing over tools is just going to give you an excuse not to get started. Pick any blogging site: Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, it really doesn't matter. There's no difference between them significant enough to make one the "wrong" choice. Just get writing. – Carson63000 Mar 5 '11 at 22:44
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I would also suggest getting your own domain name. If you move away from Blogger, any links you've built up over time can move with you. – jmort253 Mar 6 '11 at 7:54
One of my pet-peeves with blogger.com is that I have yet to find a blog that doesn't force me to "follow" it using Google (friend connect?) if I want to be notified of new posts. Apparently it isn't simple enough to publish an rss feed... – Marjan Venema Mar 6 '11 at 12:31
@Marjan, got a better solution? It is in my opinion still a matter of getting to write... – user1249 Mar 6 '11 at 12:45
@Thorbjorn: Any other site offering people their own blog really. Wordpress comes first to mind, but I suppose there are plenty of others. Btw, it is possible to publish an rss feed with blogger.com, it is just not setup by default and many people don't do it themselves, especially if they hardly have a clue what the use of an rss feed is... And yes, getting to write is the most important part, but getting found and offering several options to follow you a close second. – Marjan Venema Mar 6 '11 at 17:57
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up vote 14 down vote

I think WordPress is very good for technical blogs, start with a WP.com account, they support posting source code there, with formatting and syntax highlighting.

If it works out for you, host your own blog, you can import your wordpress blog to your own website where you can install third party plugins and themes.

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How do you post source code there? I ended up setting my code to "preformatted" but then you don't get syntax highlighting. I've heard of javascript snippets that pull in code but then it may not appear in RSS feeds, and it's not found by search engines. There is a WordPress plugin for this but I didn't think it was on wordpress.com. Apart from that I agree tho, wordpress.com is a pretty good choice. For me, I also appreciate that it's been around for years and seems pretty solid, both technically & as an established business. Also the fact you can export to your own self-hosted wp is great. – James Mar 5 '11 at 22:13
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@James Take a look here link this is powered by the third party plugin, it works like a charm, enjoy :) – Mahmoud Hossam Mar 5 '11 at 23:25
Very nice, thank you. – James Mar 6 '11 at 9:56
up vote 3 down vote

I've been working on doing the exact same thing for the past year or so. Why has it taken me so long?? Because I ended up bogging myself down with this very question and nothing got accomplished. (Also a fair amount of procrastination, and being scared of posting stuff.) Do yourself a favor take a look at a few of them and see if they meet your needs then just go with what works for you. Make a throw away account on some of those services and see if they work for what you want to do.

Your real focus needs to be on what your going to write on the blog, because that is what matters.

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up vote 2 down vote

I'm using wordpress to run my programming blog. I highly recommend it. There are awesome syntax highlighting functions, it's easy to manage, and looks the most professional.

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+1 for the most professional. – Mudassir Mar 7 '11 at 8:29
up vote 2 down vote

For developers, I find Jekyll to be very geeky.

Free hosting at GitHub (with Github Pages), your posts are managed with git and you can write them in markdown with the editor you prefer (like vim or emacs).

I especially find the "editor" part very important. Writing in a WYSIWYG editor online just feels wrong.

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