I’m giving
Svbtle a try having used
Posthaven
for a few months. This is a quick comparison of how I find the two and a
little commentary on some of the alternatives I’ve considered but
haven’t yet tried. See this post
on Svbtle.
Background
I’m fairly new to blogging, I’d been meaning to set up a blog for
some time either off based on an existing open source blog/cms or
creating my own basic one in Rails or Django but I hadn’t got round to
it. I liked the attitude of Posthaven when it appeared, we will charge
you money but you get to keep your name for life and I think it came out
of the experience of one of the founders losing control of Posterious
and it’s shutdown.
Posthaven Summary
- Costs $5/month for upto 10 blogs
- GUI post editor (a little clunky but it works)
-
Commitment to long term platform
- Comments supported
Advantages
- Permanence/business model
- Manage multiple blogs including anonymous and/or private blogs and posts.
Disadvantages
- Some of the Posthaven features require Facebook, Twitter, Scribd,
Google Analytics scripts in the page and these are loaded (with
associated privacy issues) on all your pages.
- Not yet any way to theme/customise design which I don’t need for my general blogs but may want for special ones.
# Svtle Summary
- No cost (or business model)
- Clean (bare) design
Svtle Summary
Advantages
- Clean UI very clean (bare but I like it) page design.
Disadvantages
- Lack of business model, no confidence in it staying ad-free and free in even the short/medium term.
- No hit count - only Kudos.
- Seems to add editorial subheadlines for you “Read this first”, “More by Joseph”
# Alternatives
- Wordpress is obviously the monster but feels over complicated and
reportedly nasty to write plugins for so I personally wouldn’t want to
get too deep into it. You can get it hosted or run local.
-
Medium which might be worth a look
but requires a Twitter login so I haven’t tried. I also got put off by
many of the articles on HackerNews that were linked to there being poor.
Self hosting
I hadn’t got round to getting set up myself so this would sort of
defeat the purpose but there are a few options that I would consider.
- Ghost seems like quite an interesting option that I should look at
although it is Node so I might need to learn some Javascript if I was
going to modify it at all. Hosted cost $5/month even for a single blog.
Officially it only supports SQLite and MySQL - Postgres works but isn’t
high enough priority to delay releases.
- Octopress / Jekyll is probably
where I should be going in the short term. I could self host or push to
Github pages for this sort of thing and it supports Markdown which I am
increasingly comfortable with.
- Something hacked together with Rails or Django. No time to get it set up or support it in future.
Conclusion
I’m not quite happy with either for different reasons, will probably self host in the future.
The scripts from Google and Facebook will probably cause me to move
away from Posthaven fairly soon. I use Noscript to avoid them when I am
browsing and I would prefer not to impose them on readers as that would
be hypocritical (although it does work fine without them if they are
Noscript users).
As for Svbtle while I quite like the design and using Markdown but
the lack of current business model bothers me and I’d rather migrate at
my time of choosing than when they announce some new policy.
