I want to start a programming blog, what should I use?

Question

Required features:

• Source code syntax highlighting
• I can write post using Markdown
• Open Source
• Installable on my server
• Written in Ruby or Python or JavaScript on server-side (plus JavaScript on client-side)

Nice to have (not very important to me at the moment):

• plugins

Answer 1

I see more programmers using Jekyll for their blogs lately. In ways, it covers the basics.

• [x] Source code syntax highlighting (You may want to check this method)
• [x] Markdown
• [x] Free (it's closedly tied to free hosting in Github, via Github Pages)
• [x] Hackable
• [x] Plugins

I haven't done enough research on other platforms, but I am sure you can find others easily.

Answer 2

I would recommend Nikola - it is free, written in python and specifically offers:

• Blogs, with tags, feeds, archives, comments, etc.
• Themable
• Fast builds, thanks to doit
• Flexible, extensible via plugins
• Small codebase (programmers can understand all of Nikola core in a day)
• reStructuredText [Cheatsheet] or Markdown as input language (also Wiki, BBCode, Textile, AsciiDoc, Python Notebooks, Misaka, Pandoc, txt2tags, orgmode, and HTML)
• Easy image galleries (just drop files in a folder!)
• Syntax highlighting for almost any programming language or markup
• Multilingual sites, translated to 18 languages.

So hits all your question points.

Answer 3

Drupal can definitely do this if you use a couple extensions. Drupal (and generally speaking it's extensions) are in PHP/HTML/JavaScript. You'd want the Markdown Filter and the Markdown Editor for BUEditor.

Drupal has more plugins than anyone could possibly use!

Answer 4

You can try radiantCms.

Although it's not a pure blogging platform, it definitely supports this functionality as shown in the Wikipedia article.

It offers Markdown during writing and like most CMSs and the ability to mess around the code.

Finally it has a large collection of extensions where you can find something like this for code highlighting and it's written in ruby ;).

Answer 5

Ghost blogging platform is very good. Apart from being open source and using markdown, it is lightweight with a beautiful minimalist them. it uses Nodejs for its back-end. It also support extensions. It is still being developed.