free blog hoster with markdown support?

Question

I lastly thought about starting a personal blog. Since I'm not really sure on how active I'll be, I don't want to invest too much time or money in starting this.

Thus, I would like to use some free blog hoster for the start, but allow later upgrading to an own domain, and maybe even host this on an own server.

Also, since in the last months I really got used to Stackoverflow's (or Stack Exchange's) markdown syntax, thus I would like to use this for writing my posts (and maybe for comments, too).

Is there some blog hoster which allows these?

1. having a non-cost blog
2. using markdown for posts (and comments)
3. redirecting all the URIs to corresponding URIs on another domain (not only to the main page), should I ever think about doing this myself
4. (optionally, may cost a bit) having an own domain for my blog
5. exporting all my blogged content easily

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I have looked at:

• Posterous: It seems to support 1., 2., 4., but I found no information about migrating away from it.

• WordPress: It supports 1, it has a page about exporting the content (5.). It seems not to support Markdown, and redirecting to a new page (3.) comes only as a paid upgrade.

• Github pages with Jekyll: This supports 1., 2., 4. (if I register my domain elsewhere), 5. I'm not sure about redirecting to another domain if I should feel about migrating away.

Answer 1

Tumblr is a free blogging service that supports almost all of the features you mention. (Screenshots below from my own tumblr login area; I use it for two of my blogs.)

To use Markdown

Go to Account > Preferences, and select the following:

To redirect pages

Click the 'Customize' link from your Dashboard, then the 'Pages' header, and the 'add page' link. Choose 'redirect' in the 'Page Type':

Redirecting lots of pages like this can be a pain if you're using a tumblr subdomain (the default), so it's best to register your own domain and use that with tumblr from the very beginning, as this will give you more options with page redirections later on.

To use a custom domain name

Register your domain with a registrar such as dynadot, then follow tumblr's domain setup instructions, then add your domain under Customize > Info:

Comments (without markdown)

Comments aren't enabled in tumblr by default, but you can use a third-party service such Disqus to add them. Note that Disqus doesn't currently use Markdown, although there's an active feature request for it.

Export content

With the web-based tumblr2wp tool or the tumblr backup app (Mac only).