Hi guys, I have been wanting to start a programming blog similar to Casey's, but I don't do a lot of web development, so I'm not sure what tech stack/hosting to use.

I have considered GitHub Pages, WordPress and friends, Host Gator + templates, Mongoose, and a few other things, but I'm not sold.

I just want a simple, handmade workflow where I can just write my blog entries in some sort of markup with good support for code snippets and basic highlighting. Comments would be great, but aren't required. A static blog like Casey's would be fine.

Any recommendations?

Hello Blake,

For my own website, I've had a good experience with Hugo: it's a static site generator, lots of of themes are available, including ones that have code highlighting, and of course you can create your own. When you want to create a new blog post, all you have to do is basically create a new text file, write your new post in it and re-generate the whole website.

Actually, I think it's too big and has too much features for a simple blog site, which you can create all by hand without a lot of extra work (especially if you're fluent with web design), but it can get you started quickly.

Hugo is only a static website generator, it doesn't take care of hosting, but since it generates only a bunch of html files, you don't need a fancy server to host it. Some themes include Disqus to support comments.

If you want extremely simple, handmade, and easily hackable, you could try bashblog. I used it for a bit and like it.

This is a little... too barebones, lol. I'm checking out Hugo + GitHub Pages as we speak.