[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What's the best platform for technical writi...
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Ask HN: What's the best platform for technical writing in 2022?
Over the years I've been writing notes, documents, articles mainly
for myself. But as I get older and further in my career I'm
realizing there's probably value in sharing these with other
folks...but I don't know the best avenue for doing this anymore.
And selfishly wouldn't mind building up a bit of an audience for
myself in the process. Are personal blogs dead? Medium? Substack?
Something else entirely?
Author : rco8786
Score : 39 points
Date : 2022-04-03 11:55 UTC (11 hours ago)
| ausbah wrote:
| I use a minimalistic Jekyll build hosted on Github pages.
| definitely not self hosted, but takes maybe an hour to setup with
| a custom domain
| billconan wrote:
| https://dev.to/
|
| https://observablehq.com/
| egberts1 wrote:
| Still waiting for the last magical but portable CI/CO conversion
| step of dropping in a Markdown and getting the SSG website.
|
| GitHub has one CI but is only output is to GitHub Pages
| (username.GitHub.io) and only with Pelican SSG.
| slavapestov wrote:
| TeX
| mamcx wrote:
| I use https://obsidian.md now and is nicer than expected. I
| publish with https://www.getzola.org/ for online stuff.
| adulakis wrote:
| I am developing https://giteditor.app as I felt that hosting the
| content on git and publishing with JAMStack is an ideal
| combination. What I always felt was missing though, was an easy
| and quick way to create a note without all the git steps.
| byteski wrote:
| the best platform is your own (website) platform
| nvarsj wrote:
| Sign up to wordpress.com, find a decent looking theme, done.
| pmlnr wrote:
| HTML files.
| FelipeRM wrote:
| It depends.
|
| Self-publishing is not always the best option. Maybe you can
| start writing for a well established magazine/blog. This may help
| you to build your 'audience'.
|
| If you want to go on your own, I think the best is first to
| define what are your goals, from that you can choose if your best
| option is a blog, a newsletter or a book.
|
| Every platform has its advantages and big disadvantages but
| choosing one is a matter of your audience's preferred channel to
| stay in contact with your work.
| GeneWilburn wrote:
| If you're doing technical writing for clients, they'll frequently
| want your submission in Word format.
|
| For blog writing Medium is decent. Wordpress isn't bad either.
| vinner_roy wrote:
| I'm building pagespace.app to address this need for myself as I
| was also looking for a place to share knowledge that spans
| multiple pages (with the option of selling via subscriptions or
| one-off purchases). Would love to hear what I can do to make the
| platform attractive for this use-case!
| mooreds wrote:
| If you just want to write, I'd go with wordpress and then
| syndicate to medium. I don't know if you can syndicate to
| substack.
|
| Set up a mailchimp mailing list account and have the RSS feed
| publish a newsletter.
|
| You didn't mention wanting to monetize your content, but if you
| do, then that's when I'd look at substack. In my experience, it's
| far easier to monetize your content by showing proof of authority
| for a better job or consulting than by selling access to
| knowledge. But your niche may be more monetizable than my
| experience.
| dp-hackernews wrote:
| https://www.scribus.net/category/about/
| garyfirestorm wrote:
| I don't write but i have always been intrigued about a pipeline
| for efficiently writing and publishing. I came across
| https://hemingwayapp.com/ - you can buy the desktop version and
| it allows you to directly publish to Wordpress or other places. I
| have never tried it, but it's supposed to be a minimalist editor.
| Give it a shot.
|
| Edit - I did buy the app, I have not tried publishing thru it.
| suyash wrote:
| Your own site
| dpwiese wrote:
| I had a nice experience using Hugo for https://danielwiese.com
| and deployed with Github pages - I was really happy with the easy
| setup and writing process. The other alternative I considered
| Jekyll.
| firstSpeaker wrote:
| Which Hugo theme are you using?
| dpwiese wrote:
| hermit: https://github.com/Track3/hermit/
| firstSpeaker wrote:
| Also note that https://store.humon.io/ just redirect to
| https://humon.io/ and there is no way to shop the gear (that is
| if it is out)
| sirodoht wrote:
| * I make https://mataroa.blog/ It's a simple blogging engine with
| an import functionality. One idea would be to just import
| everything there (assuming they are just text files). Eventually
| automate this process to keep everything up-to-date.
|
| * Similar problem statement by Stavros in this website:
| https://notes.stavros.io/ He's using Joplin [1] to write and then
| exports everything in an mdbook [2].
|
| [1]: https://joplinapp.org/
|
| [2]: https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook
| wtmt wrote:
| I'm probably not the target user for your platform, but it does
| look interesting.
|
| Do you plan to offer other domain names? Mataroa may or may not
| be easy to communicate orally, depending on the user's
| location.
|
| Do you have any plans for multiple users (authors) on a single
| blog? I realize this may go against simplicity, but there is a
| segment for such blogs where posts are authored by different
| people.
| sirodoht wrote:
| I could host a second instance somewhere. Or maybe even other
| people could! That would also be good in terms of
| decentralisation as well. I need to find a cool domain name
| though that people like because mataroa wasn't so much a
| success given yours and many other people's feedback :D
|
| Multiple authors might be too much for mataroa. But it could
| be inspiration for another project. Like a mataroa-style
| Notion alternative.
| simne wrote:
| I think, now are strange times, looks like for really wide
| distribution, need to switch to video (podcast) format - youtube,
| tiktok, share podcasts through app stores (Apple/Google/Sony).
|
| So, writing will become screenwriting, or make presentations.
|
| Podcasts, are for people, who listen them while commute, or while
| waiting in queue, or while do gym exercises, or something like
| these.
|
| For just text format, I think, just upload to github is good
| enough for many cases.
|
| But if you want to see real value of your texts, mind about make
| small books for read on Amazon Kindle, or other reading platform
| (now Apple have such service, and Google, and many smaller
| companies). May be good fit Patreon. Mean, if people pay for your
| work, they really value your work.
| k__ wrote:
| The most crucial part is a setup that lowers the barrier to
| publish.
|
| Something that you like to use regularly.
| kqr wrote:
| I used to publish a personal blog solely in Emacs. Then I
| upgraded my Emacs version and some quirks I relied on got fixed,
| so I can't publish anymore. I also got children to take care of,
| so I can't spend much time taking care of a somewhat brittle
| configuration.
|
| I'm thinking about either
|
| - containerising an older Emacs version configured just for this,
|
| - hosting something like WordPress on my own, or
|
| - looking for a hosted alternative.
|
| I heard Drutopia was run as a co-operative which seems like a
| great idea for a writing platform. However, it doesn't seem that
| way from their website.
|
| If you know of a co-op in this space, let me know!
| kreetx wrote:
| pandoc can convert org-mode to html - perhaps that and github
| with netlify integration would be easiest (or just github
| pages)? If you only have static content then wordpress would be
| overkill.
| efitz wrote:
| Did I miss the EMACS post? Cause you know it's coming.
| 35mm wrote:
| Self hosted Wordpress on a cloud VPS for around $5 / mo.
|
| Build an email newsletter.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| Doom Emacs + org-mode. Export as HTML upload to webpage, lasts
| forever, doesn't require a bunch of upkeep, and don't get
| distracted by all the other things.
| leephillips wrote:
| This is what I was going to suggest, except Vim. Use your
| favorite editor, learn basic HTML and CSS, get a domain, rent a
| VPS, set up Apache, rsync your HTML files to your server. You
| might already know how to do some or all of this, and none of
| it is difficult.
|
| Personal "blogs" can never be "dead" unless the internet stops
| working.
|
| Every canned solution, such as Medium, is inferior to this
| setup in some way: less control and a far worse experience for
| your readers, at least. And the suggestions here to use GitHub
| as a platform for publishing your articles? Good lord.
| postpawl wrote:
| This seems more difficult than pushing the static files to
| netlify via GitHub.
| leephillips wrote:
| I know that it seems so. When I started doing this I think
| the dominant browser was called "Mosaic". In the
| intervening couple of decades I've seen many people, who
| relied on "simpler" solutions, suffer data loss, exploits,
| sites disappearing when some company disappeared, sites
| being disappeared because a company decided they violated a
| TOS or just didn't like their content, discovering that
| their articles were being used to track and advertise to
| their readers, and so on.
| postpawl wrote:
| Most of what you said also applies to VPS providers.
|
| There are more scalable ways to host static files without
| needing to maintain a VPS. You could also move to S3 +
| cloudfront if you had issues with netlify. I've had 0
| issues with netlify for years though.
| leephillips wrote:
| I realize that, and there may be no rational reason for
| you to switch to a setup like mine. But, aside from
| avoiding such things as Wordpress exploits, my approach
| turned out to have other advantages. Over the years I
| added to my knowledge and taught myself how to provide
| things other than static files. Today my readers can use
| gnuplot in a Jupyter notebook, and interactive Pluto1
| notebooks backed by Julia running on a VPS. No canned
| solution exists for this, and in fact I had to work with
| the Pluto developers to iron out some kinks. This is only
| possible because I have total control over the servers.
| If you know will only ever want to serve static files,
| there are simpler options (with potential pitfalls). But
| those options are also limiting, in case one day you want
| to do something unusual.
|
| [1] https://github.com/JuliaPluto/PlutoUI.jl
| atmosx wrote:
| How is that easier than writing markdown or any other
| language and export to static html using a generator?
| leephillips wrote:
| In fact that's what I do, using a generator that I wrote
| that relies on Pandoc. But you still need to understand
| basic HTML and CSS.
| shishy wrote:
| This is maybe what you're looking for --
| https://neuron.zettel.page/
| glacials wrote:
| After a long journey jumping around I've recently started writing
| plain HTML files in GitHub Pages with a custom domain and I have
| been loving it.
|
| I've been on WordPress, Blogger, Medium, a custom Vue site, a
| custom Go server, a Raspberry Pi, the works. Each was either a
| platform that could rot, or a hobby that could distract me from
| writing. Raw HTML on GitHub Pages has solved both these problems
| for me.
| softwarebeware wrote:
| I feel you should instead look for paying jobs contributing to
| existing blogs that have high readership. Baeldung.com for one
| example.
| taubek wrote:
| I've switched recently from WordPress to Jekyll on GitHub.
| HNHatesUsers wrote:
| slowboat wrote:
| I use iA Writer, it uses markdown. It's quite a minimalist
| experience, export to html and pdf is available.
| taubek wrote:
| Be sure to take a look at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30714647
| juancn wrote:
| It depends. For some things, when it gets really technical, I use
| LaTeX, and I use TeXShop as an editor. It has a nice side-by-side
| view of the source code and the generated PDF.
|
| For an intranet, something like Atlassian Confluence does the
| trick (with LucidCharts for complex graphics).
|
| Public web-based consumption, a markdown doc on github usually
| does the trick, unless you need something fancy, in that case,
| you kind of need to fall back to HTML.
|
| I've played a bit with Jupyter notebooks, but I haven't done
| anything serious with it. I need to look at
| https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite for complex
| embeddings.
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(page generated 2022-04-03 23:02 UTC)