Blog building strategy (1) : platform selection

Although I started to write technology blog in college, it was always a passion for three minutes, and I recorded some content on some big platforms intermittently, and finally it didn’t work out. It has been more than a year since I started to build my own blog (Didispace.com) and share technical content in January 2016. In the process of writing a blog, besides the harvest of the content itself, there are many other aspects of experience, and these experiences mainly come from some obsessive-compulsive blog content editing.

Next, I would like to share with you some of the tools I have used in the process of blogging, and also use this article to answer the questions I often ask on my blog, what is my blog built with, what is the architecture drawn with and so on! I hope the following content can help those who are interested in building a blog or are already writing their own blog.

The option of starting your own blog

Before writing blog content, we first need to choose a suitable blogging platform. If you just pay attention to the content, for site layout and other users without obsessive-compulsive disorder, you can directly choose Jianshu, Open Source China and other blogging services to write their own articles. For many programmers who like DIY, they may feel more comfortable using open source software to do some secondary development and build a blog that meets their own tastes. There are so many open source blogging programs out there that we can classify them into two categories: dynamic blogging and static blogging.

In general, dynamic blogs are more suitable for people who don’t want to spend too much time customizing, because they provide a powerful backend system, so they can easily manage their own content and front desk presentation. Here are a few blog systems I have used and the considerations I take into account each time I change them, according to the order in which I use them.

WordPress

Ghost

Then came Ghost, a more concise and pure blogging system. In a previous post, I also wrote about how to build a Ghost blog: A Tutorial for Node.js’s Open source blogging system Ghost. Overall, Ghost is very good, with MarkDown as the default editor and a very good writing experience. In addition, because its function is much simpler than WordPress, the speed of running is very good, but because Ghost uses Node.js implementation, so we can not use cheap virtual host in the deployment, but also have to use ECS similar to Ali Cloud to build the running environment, So it’s a little bit more expensive to deploy than WordPress.

So why didn’t I stick with Ghost in the end? There are two main reasons:

• High deployment cost: See the deployment section below for details.
• Classification function is not: Ghost has no classification function, only label function, so if you achieve some complex classification also have to modify the source code customization, so the use of cost is on the high side.

Here by the way, I share a theme of a Ghost I wrote before.

Hexo (Recommended)

Deployment of your own blog

With regard to blog deployment, there are several different solutions for the three different platforms mentioned above.

• WordPress: The virtual space provided by several public clouds is the most cost-effective option because it is implemented in PHP. Take Ali Cloud as an example, it has its own economical virtual space: 298/ year, which is enough for most blog users.
• Ghost: With node.js implementation, virtual space is hopeless. Only virtual host to build their own Node.js running environment to use, relatively high deployment cost. However, now the national cloud computing activities or more cost-effective choice, calculated down with the price of the virtual space, but the virtual host function is much stronger than the virtual space. If you aspire to be a good programmer, I think it’s necessary to have an ECS to play with.
• Hexo: Because it’s a static blog, there’s a lot of choice. In addition to virtual Spaces and virtual hosts, some code hosting platforms that provide static page services, such as Github and Gitee, can be used to host blogs. But personal recommendation or own a virtual space or virtual host to use will be more stable.

Summary: If you use WordPress or Hexo, there are two options: use virtual space for ease of mind. If you like DIY, you can use virtual host. Personally, I recommend using virtual host (ECS of Aliyun has more freedom, and you can decorate other things besides blog). If Ghost is used, it can only be a virtual host, no choice.

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Introduction to this series