[HN Gopher] 20 Years of Blogging on my own website
___________________________________________________________________
20 Years of Blogging on my own website
Author : jeena
Score : 145 points
Date : 2024-05-28 12:03 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (jeena.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (jeena.net)
| jseliger wrote:
| I've been blogging on wordpress.com since 2006 and think writing
| for the Internet still underrated (a point Patrick Collison and
| many others have also made). At some point I got a custom domain,
| which I then thought I'd renewed but hadn't (ambiguous emails
| from Wordpress) and switched to a different custom domain.
|
| I see a lot of complaints, often justified, about the dominance
| of the big social media companies, but not nearly as many people
| deciding to go their own, off those sites.
| acedTrex wrote:
| The internet is still plenty open, people just prefer the path
| of least resistance
| raytopia wrote:
| I think the biggest issue today is it's hard to find blogs
| and other tiny websites via search engine. You almost have to
| be on social media for people to find your website.
| z0r wrote:
| Hacker news is how I find things worth reading these days.
| If this place didn't exist my internet consumption would be
| cut in half (at least).
| ryandrake wrote:
| I have to admit, I have never really understood this need
| to be found and this focus on discoverability. Unless you
| are monetizing your audience, why does it matter whether
| 10, 1000 or 100,000 people read your blog? If I write
| something on the Internet, or release some open source
| program, or post a video, I'm not making any money off of
| views: I'm doing it for myself. So I don't really
| ultimately care how many people read it or view it.
|
| I firmly believe the best content on the Internet is not
| necessarily the stuff optimized for search engines and
| audience-building. We shouldn't really care about that.
| bombcar wrote:
| When people were blogging because it was fun for them,
| the world was full of various content. Once a few got
| rich (or at least well-to-do and famous) from it, it all
| went to hell.
|
| If you're blogging and worrying about "how will readers
| find me" you're doing it wrong, and are basically doomed
| to fail.
|
| You blog because you like to write, and readers will
| slowly accumulate over time. Comments and/or a small
| forum can work wonders, too, as long as you're protected
| from spam.
| deivid wrote:
| You could try Marginalia's small web / blogosphere modes at
| https://search.marginalia.nu/
| rectang wrote:
| It was hard to get your blog discovered 15 years ago, too.
| Recall "blogrolls", where blogs would link to other blogs
| -- networking to securing such links would be the analogue
| to making yourself visible on social media today.
|
| I wonder -- in absolute terms, is the number of people you
| can reach smaller today? It's surely proportionally smaller
| because the internet is much bigger.
| input_sh wrote:
| Even if you do your own thing and make something super cool,
| nobody's gonna stumble upon it randomly. You either have to
| spam it on social media or aim for high ranking in search
| results (while that's still somewhat of a possibility). So,
| even with your own little website, you're still completely at
| the mercy of big tech.
|
| I still highly recommend it though. Your social media account
| comes and goes, but your own little website will be there
| however long you want it to be, display whatever info about you
| you want it to display, and it can look however you want it to
| look.
| jmbwell wrote:
| > Even if you do your own thing and make something super
| cool, nobody's gonna stumble upon it randomly. You either
| have to spam it on social media or aim for high ranking in
| search results (while that's still somewhat of a
| possibility).
|
| Seems like this might depend on the objective. Spamming
| social media and aiming for search rank might be necessary
| for ad revenue, self-promotion, or other conversions,
| whatever those might be. But it is not strictly necessary.
| Doing your own thing and making something cool can be 100%
| the end in itself.
|
| The issue _I_ have leans the other way. I 'm hesitant to
| self-publish anymore primarily because I _don 't_ want my
| work to get sucked up into the commercial machinery of the
| Big Tech Web. I have no interest and gain no benefit from
| feeding AI, scrapers, aggregators, or other "creators" who do
| surf around for other people's work they can mill into their
| own hash for their own purposes.
|
| I'd love it if I could somehow publish only for other end-
| user humans, but I don't see how I can do that without
| paradoxically engaging with some aspect of the commercial
| apparatus. It's like a Foucaultian nightmare. There's no way
| not to be part of the system. Rejecting it requires first
| embracing it.
|
| To wit: here I am on HN complaining about giving away my work
| for free
| syoung666 wrote:
| Charge something like $.05 to get access. Will get rid of
| worries around feeding the AI, scrappers, and aggregators.
| Not sure how to limit the (human) plagiarism angle.
| boromisp wrote:
| "AI" had no issue pirating books (books3 and all that).
|
| If your blog is readable by and interesting to humans, it
| will be exploitable by leeches.
| input_sh wrote:
| I get it, a decade or so ago I happily blogged around on my
| own and plenty of other websites, my posts were released
| under CC BY-SA whenever I could get away with it. I was
| quite happy to do that! It brought me all-expenses-paid
| conferences, TV interviews, you name it! (Not a lot of tech
| bloggers at the time in this part of the world, I got cool
| opportunities simply for existing.)
|
| I was "famous" enough that ChatGPT now definitely knows
| about me. If you ask it very nicely it'll without a doubt
| refer to me in particular, by my full name, but _every
| single detail_ it 'll tell you about me is wrong. Where I'm
| from, what do I do, everything. And it's all just slightly,
| but demonstrably incorrect. No, I'm not from Serbia, I'm
| from Bosnia, and no, I'm not an infosec guy, but a devops
| guy, those kinds of errors. And of course, there's
| absolutely nothing I can do about it. I already get to live
| that shitty future you fear, my work has been used already,
| but in the worst way imaginable.
|
| Needless to say, I haven't actually posted anything in
| quite a while (excluding HN and Mastodon), and if I ever do
| so again, I'll do my best to block every single AI user
| agent I find. I'll also switch to CC BY-NC (only non-
| commercial purposes) and pretend like that actually means
| anything.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| Definitely for the first paragraph. I've got a little blog
| and to be honest, I could careless if anyone ever reads it.
| I do it because I want to. If someone stumbles upon it and
| finds something useful, great! Otherwise its mostly for me.
| The only somewhat 'promotion' I do is, if I get a lot of
| the same technical questions over and over, I'll write a
| blog post. So next time someone asks, I just give them the
| link to the blog post. Im still active in my University's
| discord. Lots of people every semester get confused by
| pointers in C on their first encounter. So when those
| questions get asked, I paste the link in there and that
| clears up all the confusion. I can help others, but I don't
| need to constantly have the same conversation every 6
| months.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I don't know why posting it on social media is considered
| "spamming". Putting an article on forums or a subreddit where
| people might find it interesting seems reasonable, likely
| will garner _some_ views, and possibly some interesting
| conversation.
|
| It also doesn't have to be self serving. I've thought of
| writing articles because I see a lot of misconceptions on
| various topics I've seen on certain language subreddits. But
| the roadblock is in the effort to make my "research" (toy
| projects) into these things suitable for public consumption,
| not any particular fear that it won't do something for me. If
| it helps even one person, awesome.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I agree with you, at least in principle. I've shared things
| I've written to various sites, including this one. My
| guidelines:
|
| - I never write with the goal of gaining traffic.
|
| - I only share things organically when it makes sense.
|
| If I were on Reddit and someone was talking about Foo, and
| I'd written something relevant about Foo, I'll send them
| the link. I've I write something and then realize people
| here might think it's interesting, I'll submit it. In
| short, I want to participate in the conversation, not make
| the conversation all about me.
| jessekv wrote:
| I've got a blog on my own domain, and I'd love to be able to
| write as well as you one day. So far I've mostly stuck to
| photos ([?]_[?];).
| atsaloli wrote:
| Ooh! I want to start publishing photos online. What do you
| use? I looked at your website but it doesn't seem familiar.
| dv35z wrote:
| If you ever come across it - I'd love to find the "MkDocs-
| Material of Photo Gallery". Structured folders of photos -
| run one command - a slick, static-HTML site is built. A
| feature where you could put full-size photos in there, and
| the tool would automatically generate web-friendly sizes...
| Keep an eye out (or share here if you know a good one!)
| jessekv wrote:
| That is sort of what I have now, a script using pillow
| and osxphotos to export my albums.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm very old school. I still have a Flickr Pro
| subscription.
| jessekv wrote:
| It's just hugo with a custom theme. I run my script to
| export photo albums from iPhoto, then I add some discussion
| in markdown.
| jseliger wrote:
| You can do it! https://writeofpassage.com/
|
| In books about writing, I like:
|
| _How Fiction Works_
|
| _Reading Like a Writer_
|
| _Writing With Style_
|
| There are many others of course. Perhaps the most important
| part is finding an editor. (I wound up marrying one, which is
| not uncommon.) I've seen recs for Sasha Chapin:
| https://www.sashachapin.com/
| raytopia wrote:
| A couple random thoughts.
|
| 20 years is a long time makes me wonder what the next 20 years of
| blogging/websites will look like.
|
| As beginner in web development I'm jealous of the simplicity of
| web development described at the beginning of the post.
|
| Finally I've held off on putting comments/a guestbook on my
| website for the same reasons. I don't think I have even close to
| enough traffic for it to be a issue but if it ends up being one I
| don't want to deal with it.
| breck wrote:
| > As beginner in web development I'm jealous of the simplicity
| of web development described at the beginning of the post.
|
| I've been blogging for 17 years, and gone through a number of
| iterations (started with Wordpress, then my own PHP blog, then
| Posterous, then Jekyll, and now Scroll). The language I use
| now, Scroll (https://scroll.pub/), is very simple, you might
| want to check it out. You can start small with something like
| this: header.scroll # My Blog
| firstPost.scroll import header.scroll Hello
| *world* <b>Its fine to use html too</b>
| index.scroll import header.scroll snippets
| raytopia wrote:
| That looks very interesting. Thanks for the link! I'll check
| it out.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I've been back and forth with comments over the years,
| including a couple posts that went viral enough to get a large
| volume of comments in a short time window. At the moment I've
| got some of those eras archived in a ZIP file but not currently
| visible. Moderation is definitely a responsibility. Spam
| Moderation is definitely a chore. Data ownership is definitely
| a trade-off: some of the comment hosting platforms that are
| better at spam auto-moderation want to own more things about
| your data or show more ads or trackers to your readers.
|
| It can be a lot to deal with. I added a comment widget again
| just recently because I missed some of the feelings of
| conversation, but I probably picked one that won't likely get
| as much conversation as some of my past tools did because
| higher barrier to entry on first comment (but that also makes
| the spam floor higher and gives me a trade-off in data
| ownership versus tracking JS). We'll see how long I leave it in
| place this time.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> I 'm jealous of the simplicity of web development described
| at the beginning of the post._
|
| All the simple old stuff still works. I recently set up a blog
| [1] that is just:
|
| * Each post is a plain HTML file, served as-is.
|
| * I make new posts by copying a template HTML file which has a
| small amount of basic structure and includes an external CSS
| file.
|
| * When I write a new post, I run a script that scans the HTML
| files and makes an index.
|
| If at some point I want something fancier I can extend it,
| which I've done over the years for my main blog, but for now it
| does what I need it to do.
|
| [1] https://data.securebio.org/jefftk-notebook/
| fjfaase wrote:
| Always nice to hear of people who have been blogging for a long
| time. I myself have been blogging (not always very seriously) for
| more than 29 years. First from a '~/home' directory of the
| University I was working at, later I moved to my own domain [1].
| The first entry is from February 1995, but it also has contents
| from before that date.
|
| I am still writing HTML (with some JavaScript) using a modified
| version of Crystal Edit, which has the ability open local files
| by following HTML links [2]. (So, it act like a kind of HTML
| source browser.) I am using a C program to check HTML and links
| [3], which also places all updated files in an upload directory.
|
| [1] https://www.iwriteiam.nl/
|
| [2] https://www.iwriteiam.nl/MySample.html
|
| [3] https://www.iwriteiam.nl/chkhtml_c.txt
| tracker1 wrote:
| Is that a fork of Crimson/Emerald Editor?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Yeah, long time blogging is always impressive. I've got archive
| remnants going back to 1999-ish [1] and I know I had websites
| prior to that, too. My start was in the personal web space of
| AOL back when a MB seemed like a lot. My personal domain itself
| goes back to 2002. For worse and sometimes for far better, I've
| got a bunch of archive holes from lost backups in the middle,
| too. It's still wild how much continuity I have managed to
| maintain across the decades, though, even with those bumps.
|
| (Over the years for blogging, I've bounced from handwritten
| HTML to custom PHP to Drupal to custom Python/Django to
| Jekyll.)
|
| [1] https://worldmaker.net/wmo99/ among other bits
| jmclnx wrote:
| Very nice article and happy belated anniversary.
|
| I have my own personal WEB Site, but I have been moving it to
| Gemini since I find maintenance of it is far easier with Gemini
| that html.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
|
| And good luck with the next 20 :)
| saltysalt wrote:
| I'm at 23 years blogging now (I feel it).
| jpe90 wrote:
| I started blogging about stuff I've learned about that I am
| likely to forget down the road. It feels so good when you throw
| up a post, never share it, and still manage to get a thank you
| email for writing it years later. If you have a folder full of
| notes, I would recommend turning them into a blog on a rainy day.
| susam wrote:
| My own blog/website is now 22 years old! It began in my
| university dorm room, though back then, it wasn't really a blog.
| Instead, it was just a loose collection of pages. I added a blog
| to it much later when blogging became fashionable. I still update
| my website occasionally [1].
|
| Back in 2001, a chance encounter with Microsoft Personal Web
| Server (PWS) on a Windows 98 system introduced me to the client-
| server concepts essential for creating and hosting a website. I
| used PWS to serve my website for the first couple of years and
| then moved on to IIS. At first the web pages were just individual
| HTML pages loaded within an HTML frameset. The frameset presented
| common headers and sidebars for the website. Later I learnt to
| use ASP (the classic ASP) and add dynamic content such as quiz,
| guestbook, etc.
|
| By the final year of my university days, I had gained sufficient
| Unix/Linux knowledge to confidently replace Windows with Linux,
| IIS with Apache, and ASP with PHP.
|
| These days, I am serving my website using Nginx from a Linode VM
| running Debian stable. The website itself is generated statically
| using my own little Common Lisp program [2]. All of the content
| and layout is simple handwritten HTML. The Common Lisp program
| combines the content HTML with the layout HTML and writes the
| final HTML pages that are then served via Nginx.
|
| [1] https://susam.net/
|
| [2] https://github.com/susam/susam.net
| raesene9 wrote:
| I'm at 20 years blogging as well. I've managed to keep my archive
| of posts with the blog as it moved technologies (with an
| unfortunately ever growing number of dead links as external sites
| die off).
|
| These days Github pages, Jekyll, and writing in Markdown have
| proven a good way to get things done. Means I don't have to worry
| about server hosting and all the content is accessible if I ever
| want to move it.
|
| My blog's been very useful to me as a reference for things I've
| looked at in the past and has hopefully helped out some other
| people as well. These days I generally blog when it's taken me a
| little while and some digging to figure something out, hopefully
| saves other people a bit of time.
| nimajneb wrote:
| Thanks for posting. It's fascinating you've kept up with it so
| long. Same with a couple other commenters in this post. I've had
| a website is some form for the same amount of time, but while I
| tinkered with blogs a few times it never made to my main site.
| Here's mine with it's unchanged design from like ~2005 (I'm not
| sure when) with just some simple additions of content over time.
| http://www.benjaminosborne.com
| davely wrote:
| 21 years, here! This made me go back to find my first post[1]
| from August 2003. Oof.
|
| It's interesting how things have evolved over time. Started it
| in college, and it was random posts about activities, feelings,
| etc. A lot of more personal stuff.
|
| Growing up, changing careers (and changing again and again),
| having kids... I find that my blog has gotten less personal and
| more just general knowledge sharing of things I find
| interesting.
|
| [1] https://daveschumaker.net/should-i-join-the-masses-of-
| blogge...
| davepeck wrote:
| 25 years last month.
|
| Hand-spun HTML on day one; cobbled-together scripts for the next
| many years; Jekyll once it hit 1.0; today, Astro.
|
| It feels like a real "moment" where people are reconsidering
| blogging and personal domain names; I'm excited to see what comes
| of it.
| ulrischa wrote:
| Would like to hear about your experience with astro since I
| consider switching to it
| davepeck wrote:
| I think Astro is great for building small mostly (or
| entirely) static sites. It doesn't assume that you're
| building a blog, but it's plenty flexible enough to support
| it.
|
| This said, blogs feel like a nice sweet spot for Astro. The
| current version of my blog came together without much fuss.
| (I've studiously avoided using Astro DB, or using Astro to
| build an API backend, etc. and so can't comment on them.)
|
| Overall I've found Astro to be highly reliable. I identified
| one unexpected behavior (I think a bug, related to when CSS
| is rendered) while building my blog and was able to work
| around it but, other than that, Astro behaved exactly as
| documented.
|
| There were days I wished that astro components didn't exist
| and, instead, I could just use the client:* attributes in
| (say) my Preact components. That said, astro components are
| well thought out and the tooling in vscode is solid.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| 27 years for me. Started with FrontPage 1997, with extensions for
| Apache on Linux! Then I wrote a PHP site with Smarty. Then I
| wrote a Rails app. Then I moved to Wordpress. Given that I've
| done another 15 years writing Rails apps, I should rewrite it in
| the new Rails 7/8.
|
| Because I use a ton of 3rd-party JS libraries which don't work
| well with Turbo, I'm kind of stuck with Rails 6 with turbolinks
| disabled on my main project. I've been looking for some reason to
| get to grips with the new additions, and I think I just talked
| myself into it.
| dyates wrote:
| Congratulations on the achievement. I recently hit my 10 year
| blogging milestone.[1]
|
| I've also written about some similar thoughts to those in your
| linked "Content is King" post.[2] Long may the individualist
| personal website live.
|
| [1]: https://davidyat.es/2024/04/07/ten-years/
|
| [2]: https://davidyat.es/2020/03/14/reader-modes/
| loumf wrote:
| I passed 20 years in December and wrote this about it:
| https://loufranco.com/blog/it-was-20-years-ago-today
|
| I don't have a lot of readers, but the blog opened some doors for
| me (and continues to).
| vaylian wrote:
| > but the blog opened some doors for me (and continues to).
|
| Is there any advice you have in that regard? How do most people
| contact you?
| k__ wrote:
| _" Because I couldn't find any other blog software, I decided to
| write my own."_
|
| Famous last words of a blogger.
|
| I didn't want to fall into that trap and started with a blogging
| service right away.
|
| 3 years after I started blogging as a new years resolution, it
| became my main source of income.
|
| Wouldn't have thought that I, the dude who almost dropped out of
| HS because of his bad English, would work as a writer one day.
| medo-bear wrote:
| > Wouldn't have thought that I, the dude who almost dropped out
| of HS because of his bad English, would work as a writer one
| day.
|
| Well done mate! Love hearing underdog success stories. What was
| your secret to success in effective communication?
| k__ wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| I don't really have secret.
|
| But you should write for someone that really exists, or at
| least existed in the past. Like yourself (from a a few weeks
| ago).
| medo-bear wrote:
| > or at least existed in the past. Like yourself (from a a
| few weeks ago).
|
| That's actually a pretty interesting approach.
| resource_waste wrote:
| >, it became my main source of income.
|
| >Wouldn't have thought that I, the dude who almost dropped out
| of HS because of his bad English
|
| Doesnt this just mean your income before was low?
|
| I have a website/blog that gets 1-2 million people per year, if
| I monetized I could get 5-20k/yr... But I make 150k+/yr at my
| day job.
|
| Really makes it hard to become a full time writer of technical
| stuff.
| whatamidoingyo wrote:
| > I have a website/blog that gets 1-2 million people per
| year, if I monetized I could get 5-20k/yr
|
| This depends on so many things. For one, there are various
| ways to monetize. Sure, if you just slapped Adsense on the
| sight, that may be your earnings. However, if you add in some
| of your own products, as well as direct affiliations, you
| could earn $10k+/month. I've heard of people making triple
| that in a single month.
| tarkin2 wrote:
| I've found writing my own software a wonderful experience over
| a number of years; seeing how my skills have improved, seeing
| the evolution of the site, seeing what fads came and went.
| Obviously if you're focused primarily on the message rather
| than the medium then using pre existing software--providing its
| not a trick to wall garden your now tracking-laden content--is
| a good idea.
| olooney wrote:
| I'm at 16 years. It's been through multiple iterations - a Django
| site, hosted on GitHub Pages, etc. Today it's a simple static
| site generated by blogdown/Hugo. MathJax is a godsend - I use a
| _lot_ of LaTeX formatted equations. Biggest pain was search. I
| tried Algolia, but am currently doing a very simple client-side
| search.
|
| I'd be very interested in people's blog stacks or if they have
| recommendations similar to the above.
| dep_b wrote:
| Blogging since last year on my own site. Didn't want any
| obstructions and something that loaded really fast, just hacked
| something together with PHP and static files.
|
| PHP is a great template language.
|
| So far I think it already led to some interesting opportunities
| and good discussions. All of my articles got picked up by well-
| know newsletters so at least it's good enough for other people.
|
| You only get a discussion if you claim something outrageous,
| you're completely wrong or you share something that can be read
| in less than a minute.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Tried to blog before, but never got into it until last year.
|
| https://blog.sapico.me/
|
| Ofc I blogged about the setup ;)
| https://blog.sapico.me/posts/setting-up-a-blog-on-cloudflare...
|
| It's Hugo on Cloudflare pages fyi. Auto deployed after
| committing.
| tomerbd wrote:
| I stopped blogging on my own website and completely moved to
| medium, result? comments + reactions > 0
| spc476 wrote:
| 23 years so far, using my own blogging engine [1]. It's nice to
| see others have been doing this for over 20 years.
|
| [1] https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog
| kamaraju wrote:
| I suggest to use a wiki instead of a blog. The idea here is that
| a blog might contain articles that are more "polished" and those
| that you want to share with others while a wiki is a place to
| store personal knowledge which is a constant work in progress.
| This way a 'blog' is simply a subset of wiki wherein you have a
| page called 'blog' that just links to various articles in the
| wiki.
|
| For example: https://kamaraju.xyz/dk/ is my wiki,
| https://www.kamaraju.xyz/dk/blog is my blog.
| abalcells wrote:
| Ha, very nice. My blog is 19 years old, although the website
| itself I started 25 years ago! It has been hard to keep up and
| keep posting in the most recent years. With kids life got real
| busy! You have inspired me to go back and keep posting as well.
|
| https://www.balcells.com/
| kstrauser wrote:
| 26 in a month. Like everyone else here, I went through handcoded
| HTML (hosted on my Amiga!) to a self-written Perl CMS-like-thing
| to some PHP ball of mud, and then across a variety of wikis and
| blog engines and static sites and back to blog setups and back to
| static sites.
|
| Last month I migrated my Hugo setup to a hosted micro.blog
| account. It adds the missing bits I was too lazy or time-crunched
| to configure myself, like crossposting to other services,
| webmentions, and all the other indieweb goodness.
|
| A big shout out to Matomo analytics that lets me look at
| anonymized visitor records on my self-hosted server. It lacks the
| detail of Google Analytics (although you can pay Matomo for
| plugins that bring it close) but my visitors' information never
| leaves my possession. I don't care about what _a_ visitor does on
| my site, but I enjoy seeing the aggregate patterns, how people
| came to find me, and things like that.
| tarkin2 wrote:
| The bit about PHP made me yearn for those simple days. Now
| creating a website with all the trendy technologies creates such
| a barrier to creation and creativity. It seems large scale system
| good practice has trodden the small, quick and creative.
| squidbeak wrote:
| Why not create one without those trendy technologies?
| Publishing to the web still only needs html, css and a simple
| server.
| tarkin2 wrote:
| I mean it's no longer commonplace, and rarely advice, and
| rarely taught, not that it's impossible.
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