If you currently write a blog, what platform/technologies do you use and why?
If you started writing a blog today, what platform/technologies would you use and why?
If neither of the above applies to you, then consider this: what platform/technology have you found the best reading experience for you as a consumer of (online) content?
When I launched a new project in 2012, I created a home-grown minimal blog for the project, never again. Main issue being with time requirements grow, you rather focus on developing main components of your project instead of developing features for ancillary blog, maintaining interaction with readers was more important for project than managing spam comments and links.
If I were to create a new blog I most probably will go with self-hosted WordPress. It scales as your requirements grow, lot of support, tools, and plugins. Readers are familiar with, writers are familiar with it, you can also outsource administration cheaply.
In your case, your core focus should be on learning and writing about things you are interested in and not developing and maintaining the infrastructure, software, etc. Consider starting with hosted version Wordpress.com and when your requirements grow out, migrate to self hosted version.
The reading experience is obviously important if you're blogging for your content to get shared or at least be accessible to people. Personally, I prefer any platform that outputs static HTML because it's fast and highly customizable. Jekyll, Gatsby, Hugo, and other static site generators are good for this.
On the writing side, you want to remove friction. The more mental effort required to get started writing, the less likely you'll stick with it. So, CMSes are nice for this. I have used Netlify CMS, Strapi, and plain markdown files in git for this in the past. If the blog doesn't have guest writers, I prefer the simplest path (writing markdown in git), but if you're opening up to guest posts in the future, you might want to give people a user friendly CMS.
If you'd like an easy to use system, with a decent ecosystem I'd take a look at Ghost.
If you are looking to take things seriously, writing often, thinking about extended features and want to be up and running quickly Wordpress still reigns here. So long as you keep it lean it's the most batteries included system out there and you can run it on your own machines.
highly accessible and compatible with ANY browser and configuration for the client,
portable and stable on the server side,
and convenient for me to use from a multitude of devices.
Starting a blog today, I would use this same platform, because I haven't seen anything better come about since I started writing it.
It’s let’s you write auto-converting markdown, outputs slim static html and lets you customize with basic HTML/CSS in the browser. It’s mostly meant for brochure sites but works great for small blogs too.