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[Blog] Questions about starting a blog - Aura - Dec 20, 2014

Hey guys, Aura here 🙂

So I'm thinking about starting a blog, where I would post my tutorials, security news, articles, videos (from Youtube), etc. and it looks like I have the choice between three popular CMS : WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Therefore, I have a few questions to ask you concerning these.
  • Is it only WordPress that allows you to create your own blog, free of charge using their .wordpress.com extension?

  • Which one of these CMS would be the best fit for what I want to do on my blog, which would like like a general computing blog, with videos, articles with pictures, comments, etc.

  • If I ever decide to create my own website, is there any way with these three CMS to take my current website I have with them, and transfer them to my own with my address, etc. without any problem?


That's all I can think of as of right now, but if I have more questions, I'll let you know.

Thank you 🙂

Update:

Thinking about it, for the kind of blog I want, would you recommend me another solutions or not? The best one so far from my own researches seems to be WordPress since it offers you a free website affiliated to them.

* - Vitamin Energy - Dec 20, 2014

I am not sure about the transferring, but i would use WordPress for your blog.
And i would just buy domain and hosting right away.

If you don't feel like paying a lot you can get a hosting for a year from NameCheap.com and it costs 8€.

If you have more questions please hit me a pm 🤝

* - Dem0 - Dec 21, 2014

You need to realize the difference between CMS and blogging platform.
Wordpress.com is a blogging platform that allows you very little customization and the domain will be yourblog.wordpress.com
Wordpress.org CMS allows you to have a fully editable website/blog that you host on your own server with any domain you want.

If you just want a simple blog with basic functionality and no cost, than go with Wordpress.com, and someone correct me if I'm wrong but Drupal and joomla only serve as CMS and not as blogging platform.

* - Vitamin Energy - Dec 21, 2014

(Dec 21, 2014 05:45 AM)Dem0 Wrote:  You need to realize the difference between CMS and blogging platform.
Wordpress.com is a blogging platform that allows you very little customization and the domain will be yourblog.wordpress.com
Wordpress.org CMS allows you to have a fully editable website/blog that you host on your own server with any domain you want.

If you just want a simple blog with basic functionality and no cost, than go with Wordpress.com, and someone correct me if I'm wrong but Drupal and joomla only serve as CMS and not as blogging platform.

Actually they do allow you to register a domain you can use :)

* - The RooT - Dec 21, 2014

You can get a free ".wordpress.com" Sub-Domain or you can buy a Domain & download the wordpress software and set it up on your on Domain.

I personally prefer WordPress for Blogging Software.

Off Topic: If you do make a blog, please PM me the link or post it under Website Showcases because i would really love to visit your blog!

* - Vitamin Energy - Dec 23, 2014

You should read this post before choosing between wordpress.org and Wordpress.com 🤝

http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/self-hosted-wordpress-org-vs-free-wordpress-com-infograph/

* - NoScript - Dec 29, 2014

Is it only WordPress that allows you to create your own blog, free of charge using their .wordpress.com extension?
You can also download the software and host it on your own domain.

The other two questions I can't answer because WordPress is the only blogging software I have messed with.

* - Control Alt Elite - Jan 3, 2015

Shoot me a PM. I'd host your WordPress site for free.

Only thing you'd need is a Domain Name.

* - Gox. - Jan 3, 2015

There's a load of other alternatives. My favourite blogging platform is Ghost.org, as it supports Markdown, and I find it faster to blog than using BBCode or WYSIWYG editor.

You could also use Googles' Blogger platform which is very nice and elegant as it involves Google Analytics - something Ghost.org doesn't by default.

IIRC, both of my suggested platforms host your content, and you can just use domain-forwarding so you don't need to host it yourself.

Blogger
  • Easy to use

  • Google Analytics

  • Widgets

  • Free hosting

  • Ability to use own domain (or domain.blogger.com)



Ghost
  • Easy to use

  • Great UI

  • Ability to host yourself (need to support node.js)

  • Ghost.org will host for you (pricing starts from $0 - $250pcm)

  • Theme changer

  • Markdown

  • Ability to use own domain (or domain.ghost.io)



If you decide to go with Ghost and wish to host yourself Digital Ocean have a one-click set-up on a VPS (pricing starts from $5 - $640 pcm depending on spec)

* - Yell - Jan 4, 2015

For a blog as you described, I would go with wordpress.

* - Crypto™ - Jan 5, 2015

Jumping in here a bit late, but let me bitch a bit about Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal, and then I'll spout out some alternatives. Now don't get me wrong, Wordpress is a pretty fan-fucking-tastic platform, with a thriving ecosystem and plenty of customizability, and options to play around with. (I typically throw Jetpack [Utility Plugin from Automattic {Wordpress Parent Company}], Wordfence, and a few other plugins for taste) However, even though Wordpress has gone more towards writing and blogging, it's still hard as hell for me to focus and write/put together articles in there, since I typically do link-heavy articles, and every link is an interruption, since I actually have to either switch to text mode (non-WYSIWYG) or click on a WYSIWYG button, which is annoying to me. Their new distraction-free interface is better, but I still have some other qualms.

1) I'm not a huge fan of PHP (anymore). It's comparatively slow, hard to scale, and good managed hosting is hard to find/not that reasonable.
2) Everything is abstracted. While this might be a plus for some people, I have no interest in learning all the abstractions necessary to develop my own plugins to make my blog work how it should. Also, I like getting into the nitty-gritty of things, and Wordpress has grown so much, it's hard for me to really get into it and actually tweak it to my liking, but this is just me.
3) Managed Wordpress hosting (Wordpress.com) is expensive as hell, and comparatively restricted. It reminds me of Tumblr in terms of use (Tumblr has proven to be a surprisingly good blogging-platform for all manners of people. Some of my favorite tech/security bloggers are on there, and even Lifehacker moved there when Hurricane Sandy took down their datacenters.

As for Joomla and Drupal, they're great CMSes, don't get me wrong, but they are not conducive to writing/blogging at all. I find them much better for managing websites where the content doesn't change much. They're generally pretty clunky to work with.

One of the newcomers in the scene is Anchor, which is probably my fa vourite PHP-based blogging platform. It's significantly smaller than Wordpress (~150KBs vs Wordpress' 5.9MB gzipped tarball, or 6.4MB plain ol' .zip, and 18.3MB by Archive Manager's count when expanded.)

[Image: Q2ibt2x.png]

Also, it's easily extensible, supports Markdown out of the box, theming is super simple, and the backend is supremely clean. (One of my favorite platforms of all time, and it's PHP to boot)

Personally, I ended up running Ghost, after I ran a Wordpress blog for a few months, followed by some blogging platform I found on my travels, but have since abandoned and forgotten the name of. It costs me $5 a month, since I'm hosting it on Digital Ocean's teeny tiniest droplet, and I got a bunch of credit on there thanks to Github's student bundle. Node.js is my main language, and super simple to work with in my experience. Also, the backend is amazingly writer-friendly. Markdown support, live preview, very minimal.

Finally, my personal new jam, which I will probably be transferring to eventually, are static site generators. You write your posts offline, save it with a little bit of metadata, and then regenerate your blog and push it to the server. (This is sexy as fuck with a git-based workflow, since it can be boiled down to a single, simple, reusable script.) I've played around with Jekyll/Octopress, but since I'm a Node.js guy, I moved over to playing around with Hexo, which is super cool as well. If you are interested in going this route, Staticgen has a massive listing of frameworks for doing this. It's also nice, since it's pure HTML/CSS/JS, so there's no backend processing, so it's as fast as the server hosting it. Of course, there are some tradeoffs in terms of what can be done, such as the lack of ability to use backend-code on these sites without using a routing server to process it, though you really don't need it, since search can be handled by Google's site: operator, or even DuckDuckGo as well. If you want to truly focus on blogging, I can't recommend a generator like this enough.

Also, for hosting, if you're a cheapskate like me, and don't want to pay a dime, the "development" plans on some PaaS sites are amazing to at least get you up and running with zero overhead. I ran my blog on Heroku's free plan for a year, give or take. There are some limitations, like Heroku's free instances spin down after a certain period of time, resulting in a few seconds of latency when someone loads up your blog once it's spun down. Openshift is probably the best one out there in terms of features for free plans. It's easy to build a quick stack with these PaaS platforms as well, so I cannot recommend them highly enough.