What is a publishing service for both blog and book?

Question

I am planning to start writing material online. I need a single platform to host the following

1. A regular running blog
   1. It should be easy to write and publish. Would prefer a simple near-vanilla layout and formatting.
   2. As I will be writing technical material, I would like to be able to put in code snippets
   3. Tagging and being able to search using tags is a must
2. I intend to author a couple of books. I would like to be able to use the same platform to organize the content in a book like layout
3. I am contemplating a separate tips section. Each of the tips will be a short read. This section can be considered a special case of blogs, with some additional features which makes it more appealing (I am figuring this part out and would welcome any advice on how to make this section appealing.)
4. Small section dedicated to provide information such as "about me" (what people commonly refer to as pages or static pages.)

Is there a single platform that can help me organize this?

Currently, I don't have budget for anything fancy. I am looking for something cheap. If the concept takes off, I will work something out to move to paid services (if it offers advantages.)

Answer 1

Aside from number 2, which I don't know any platform that does that, it sounds like all of your needs could be met by opening a Publication on Medium.

you could do the following with a publication:
1. create a homepage.
2. Medium's editor is at your disposal to write and publish (and supports code snippets).
3. Medium is free to use.
4. A publication can include different tabs and you can choose the layout of each tab.

And aside from those points, Medium may help you find your audience. A publication allows you to send "letters" to your publication followers which is something you may want to consider doing regularly when you have enough followers and you need their attention.

Answer 2

Since you are writing technical material (including code), you may have some experience with programming and related technologies. If so, I recommend Github pages.

Benefits:

• It's free.
• There are several clean templates available.
• You have basic markdown (as used here on SE) for the simple styling and HTML for anything more fancy.
• It's incredibly flexible because of its simplicity. Anything you can do with HTML and javascript, you can achieve in pages. It should be simple enough to organize a book with an HTML page per chapter.
• Code snippets with syntax highlighting are supported by default.
• All material is stored in a version control system by default, so you can always go back to earlier versions, or even make a branch if you want to try something that may not pay off. Contrast this with solutions like Wordpress where your content is stored in a database in a difficult to read format, or Medium, where it isn't stored in anything you have access to.
• For more complicated things (tagging posts, blog posts sorted by date, etc) there are several Jekyll plugins. You can generate the site offline, and upload the generated site to pages.

The drawback is that you need to be comfortable using git, writing in markdown and using Ruby software.