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]](https://i.imgur.com/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.
![[Image: JQvMLdi.gif]](https://i.imgur.com/JQvMLdi.gif)
