During the initial phase of the bootstrapping of Cloudburo.com I was also evaluating various blogging- and content management solutions and currently are using the following ones:
Dev.Cloudburo.net will be the master blogging and documentation system for any tech related content of the platform (well this reading is hosted there). I was looking for a long time for blogging system aiming a techie work, which allows to efficiently document design and development work (in a notebook style).
I found an absolute awesome and ideal solution for that it’s Octopress. Octopress is a framework designed by Brandon Mathis for Jekyll, the blog aware static site generator powering Github Pages. It comes with brilliant plugins, as for example code syntax highlighting. Moreover content can be written in markdown a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers, initially developed by John Gruber (founder of The Daring Fireball Company).
Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML) and it’s ideal for my work.
On top of that you can add full GIT version control for your content (yes your pages are hosted on Github) and by the way the hosting is free (in case you use public repositories only).
So what do you want more for bootstrapping cost efficiently a micro business?
Cloudburo.com which is currently the master site for static content of Cloudburo is based on ExpressionEngine which is running under the hood CodeIgniter an Open Source Web Application Framework for PHP programs.
I used the CMS system to bootstrap the Web presence of my wife Educane.ch and leveraged this knowledge for an the initial Web presence of Cloudburo. To be honest I’m not too excited about this PHP driven CMS system.
My experience is that such Content Management System are getting quite quickly clumsy and hard to maintain especially if complexity of the web site increases. In a long term I will consider to migrate this pages to Octopress as well.