Blogging Platforms

Popular platforms for (science) blogs include:

• Wordpress (opens in a new tab)
• Ghost (opens in a new tab)
• Hugo (opens in a new tab)
• Jekyll (opens in a new tab)

The software is available as open source software that you can either be install yourself, or pay for the convenience of a hosted version.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

Wordpress and Ghost are Content Management Systems that are specialized for generating blogs. Wordpress in particular can also be used for other use cases and powers more than 40% of all websites (opens in a new tab). Traditional Content Management Systems (such as Wordpress and Ghost) use a database backend. More generic Content Management Systems such as Drupal or Joomla are sometimes also used for blogs, in particular if the site also generates our types of content.

Static Site Generators

Hugo and Jekyll are examples of static site generators that turn your blog posts (or any other content) written in Markdown format into an HTML website that can be hosted easily. GitHub Pages (opens in a new tab) is one popular option that uses Jekyll and let's GitHub host your blog. Other popular options to host blogs generated by static site generators include Vercel (opens in a new tab) and Netlify (opens in a new tab).

Static site generators can also use a Headless Content Management System, which use a database, backend API, and admin user interface, but leave the user-facing frontend for the static site generator. Dynamic content such as search or comments can be generated with Javascript, and the term JAMStack (opens in a new tab) (Javascript, API and Markup) has been coined in 2015 to describe this architecture.