Good solutions for blogging and creating programming tutorials?

[fuzzybabybunny]

I want to start a blog / website and make tutorials as I go along. Currently, I'm constantly pissed off by the lack of cohesive documentation, howtos, and tutorials on popular MeteorJS packages. As I figure them out on my own I want to create tutorials that show the end-to-end process so that others don't have to go through the same pain as I did.

I really like StackEdit because the UI is so nice. I get a real-time preview of my markdown formatting when editing in StackEdit. StackEdit can also publish directly to a lot of blogging platforms, but I don't know which one to choose.

I'm looking into GitHub Pages as a convenient and free way to host the blog / tutorials. I'm not sure how well it would play with StackEdit though and Pages doesn't use databases or a CMS system, instead using the Jekyll templating engine to make a quasi-cms.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Have you looked at free blog hosting at wordpress.com? If you spend (?$30-50) a year you can also do customization and can map a subdomain like tutorials.fuzzybabybunny.com to it.

We do that at work for a newsletter with articles and tutorials. It lets marketing create their own content without needing a web developer, and having Wordpress host it means we don't need to patch it daily with security updates.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Have you looked at free blog hosting at wordpress.com? If you spend (?$30-50) a year you can also do customization and can map a subdomain like tutorials.fuzzybabybunny.com to it.

We do that at work for a newsletter with articles and tutorials. It lets marketing create their own content without needing a web developer, and having Wordpress host it means we don't need to patch it daily with security updates.

I'm speaking entirely from a perspective of having no experience, but most of the programmers I know rail on Wordpress since it's in PHP and stuff. Again, I have zero experience, so are there some kind of pitfalls that I'm going to encounter?

 

[GregGreen]

I'm looking into GitHub Pages as a convenient and free way to host the blog / tutorials. I'm not sure how well it would play with StackEdit though and Pages doesn't use databases or a CMS system, instead using the Jekyll templating engine to make a quasi-cms.

I use GH Pages/Jekyll and it works pretty well. I'm not sure how it would behave with StackEdit though as I've never used it. GH Pages doesn't have to be just Jekyll btw -- it will automatically build your Jekyll site for you, but you can also publish just regular html files to a `gh-pages` branch, so you could use something like Assemble if you were more comfortable with that.

 

[DaveSimmons]

I'm speaking entirely from a perspective of having no experience, but most of the programmers I know rail on Wordpress since it's in PHP and stuff. Again, I have zero experience, so are there some kind of pitfalls that I'm going to encounter?

If you just want to have them host your content, it doesn't really matter how bad their CMS code is, you never deal with that. The customization you'd do is just style sheets and such for the look that you want.

You might want to create a free account there and play with it a little to see if it does what you need.

We chose not to install a CMS on our main company site because all CMS packages are priority targets for hacking, so they're a maintenance nightmare. If you have an existing server and look at the error logs you'll see attempts to fetch Wordpress and other CMS admin pages to use some exploit.

 

[Ken g6]

I don't see the problem with Wordpress either. You probably shouldn't have very complicated stuff hosted inside the blog. For complicated demos, I'd suggest embedding from an online script demo site like http://codepen.io

 

[TechBoyJK]

wordpress is pretty good imho. Very extensible with lots of support.

 

[Crusty]

Wordpress is fine for a blog site, it's all the other crap that people try and do with Wordpress that makes it so crappy.

 

[Eelectricity]

Depends on your skill level and how much time you want to spend setting things up.
wordpress would suffice and there are a lot of themes. I recall seeing one for doing tutorials. Even if I misremembered I'm pretty sure there's at least one targeted at posting tutorials.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Wordpress is fine for a blog site, it's all the other crap that people try and do with Wordpress that makes it so crappy.

Interesting. Like what other stuff?

 

[purbeast0]

Interesting. Like what other stuff?

like using it for anything other than a blog.