What do people view as good blogging platforms for this stuff these days? Jekyll on Github? Something else? I'd like to get going fast focusing on content, but of course want good syntax highlighting, comments, and such features.
Jekyll is pretty great (just chuck a disqus block in your footer), there's a real risk of getting bogged down in setting up the 'perfect' system with it and never getting round to publishing anything.
I think Wordpress still has one of the most outstanding install experiences, but keeping it up to date is a pain.
Indeed, I think I've spent more time tweaking my jekyll based site than actually blogging. It was a lot simpler when I just had some html pages I edited in Emacs :).
Cool, I may give Jekyll another shot(had a false start couple years ago).
I have tons of experience doing hardened WP installs(and compromise root cause) but almost no experience USING it haha. I'd prefer not to go down that rabbit hole if something like Jekyll is sufficient.
If you only publish an blogpost once in a while, you wouldn't even need Jekyll. Figure out your template, and save your post in an .html file, add a link to the index.html and upload both to /var/www/ on your own cheap Linux cloud webspace. Markdown is nice, but if you don't need much you can sprinkle some <h..> and <b> tags on your post and you're done. There are browser based syntax highlighting tools where you can paste in your code from your IDE and get it back nicely formatted with the appropriate CSS.
Might not be right for you, but I had to bring up the easiest, the truly minimalist, hey, the original way to it.
There is a bit of a learning curve, but actually using it is great. All your content is versioned, there are always backups, performance is most excellent, and security is a complete non-issue since there is no server-sided logic involved.
I also like writing articles in Markdown. It's a good fit.
The git/md combo also allows you to write anywhere without requiring an internet connection. I do write quite a lot during my train commutes, for example.
I've seen some people start with just a github repo full of markdown files, and issues for comment threads. Can work for programming blogs, and you can easily turn the markdown files into blogposts in another system later.
(downside is that you can't as easily tie it to a personal domain name)
Been using hugo the last few months, and absolutely loving it. Easy to get going, great in-built functionality, cross platform executable and super super fast.
