The quest for a blog engine
I’ve been trying to become an avid blogger for a while, but none of the available options for blog engines seem to fit my needs:
- Easy workflow for posting entries
- Code blocks and highlight
- Simple & minimalist UI/UX
- Markdown based
This feature set would allow me to write posts in any Markdown editor, without requiring to be logged into a blog engine, and just write the damn post. My needs are simple, nothing fancy; I just want what a casual blogger would need. I tried different blog engines, none of which made me feel comfortable fulfilling my requirements.
For months I tried Google’s Blogger, Wordpress and Tumblr, I felt most of them to be practically the same, a system with so many settings and dashboards to manage that even writing a post seems to be a cumbersome task full of steps and settings, giving me no flexibility. I know, you could say that you can write your post in some editor - Google Drive, Word, plain text, etc - but that means that later on you have to copy the content and make sure the formatting is correct, making the process of posting something into my blog unnecessary complex.
I ended up with a github/jekyll based static site as my blog engine. The workflow is basically the same as what I do everyday at writing code, working with git and a text editor. It gives me plenty of flexibility on the site design and I can use my own domain name easily.