I use Discourse a lot, across my small number of health-related fora and of course via my work with thepavilion.io with @angus @merefield @fzngagan @Ellibereth and I find the more I can use Discourse, the more I can familiarise myself with all the features, plugins, theme-components, and ecosystem.
For nearly 10 years I’ve had a GitHub Pages static jekyll site as my personal/work blog, and I decided to revamp this, and thought I’d try setting myself up with a Discourse instance as a blog. Today was an ideal day to do it because I’m supposed to be doing something else (rewriting my CV/resumé for a job application) so obviously what I needed was a nice pro-crastino-ject like this, transferring content from the static site to the blog etc…
It’s worked fairly well, and with the addition of Topic List Previews showing excerpts of the blog posts, I’m pleased with the result. It could do with some more visual tweaking, but as a starter it’s fine.
Blogs are mentioned in a few other Meta posts, but they are mainly about using Discourse as a backend for a static site, or as a commenting engine for a WordPress blog, not as a blogging engine in its own right, so I thought it’d be worth writing up this native blogging usage.
I also have some private categories in that same blog, where I put notebook notes, reference material, and other stuff I’d possibly put in a GH Gist otherwise (but here without the dreadful Gist UI and laggy interface!)
If anyone has any helpful suggestions for either improving that blog, or plugins/theme components for using Discourse as a blogging engine, then please do comment.