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A friend of mine who's a data analyst looks for a platform/site to create his blog there. Options he expects to be available are posting text (+formatting, including for cyrillic), pics, maybe animated graphs, code boxes, formulas (in laTex or like), commenting or answering. Something approaching, maybe partly, the options of our site - only as personal journal, in this instance. Free, if possible.

Can you advise some? What are features there? If you have a blog, what are your pros and cons for it (mean, the platform features)?

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    $\begingroup$ My suggestion, especially if writing Python/Julia/Octave/R/Haskell or anything with a Jupyter kernel: write Jupyter Notebooks and publish those. Github will render them for you, as can nbviewer.jupyter.org. Supports all the usual formatting features above, with the added advantage that a reader can open the published Notebook and start experimenting with it immediately. Even if the language lacks a Jupyter kernel (say, C), I can script the process of building & running the code in the Notebook. $\endgroup$
    – Ahmed Fasih
    Commented Apr 10, 2017 at 1:34
  • $\begingroup$ You may view my profile, or see my answer for this Math.Meta.SE question for a quick start guide to set up a free personal math blog. $\endgroup$
    – GNUSupporter 8964民主女神 地下教會
    Commented Dec 5, 2018 at 5:07

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The original Stats blog was built on wordpress. I also have a personal free wordpress blog that fits all your needs (and I am happy with).

  • pictures (both svg and raster) can be embedded
  • you can write formulas in Latex and have code blocks, very similar to this site (via a similar type of markdown or edit the html directly). Personally I write posts in markdown, then use Pandoc to covert to html, then just upload the html to the online site.
  • animated graphs are more tricky - GIFs can be embedded same as images. You can also embed stuff via iframes (self promotion examples, CartoDB animated map, Han's Rosling moving bubble type graph).
  • comments, with pretty good spam filtering in my experience

I've described mine as a personal nerd journal as well. If I end up doing something a few times I will write a blog post (and it helps me find code/examples faster than searching through old files).

The only thing I did not cover was cyrillic. I'm personally ignorant of this aspect, as well as more general UTF support. It is likely some other platforms meet these same needs. I'm happy with my free wordpress site, it is low maintenance and has the functionality I want. I can't say much about other competitors.

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  • $\begingroup$ Andy, thanks a lot for the reply. I've already directed the person to your blog, to appreciate its look and facilities, and he liked it. I hope maybe other people answer too, about other platforms. $\endgroup$
    – ttnphns
    Commented Apr 9, 2017 at 14:07
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I'm looking for the same thing and have been considering Github pages/Jekyll. Here is a guide to how to do it. Drawback: it does look like harder work than Wordpress, Blogger etc. to set up.

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    $\begingroup$ you learn a lot by doing 'hard' things :) $\endgroup$
    – David
    Commented Apr 17, 2017 at 12:33

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