[HN Gopher] Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
___________________________________________________________________
Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
Author : jger15
Score : 299 points
Date : 2025-01-29 22:45 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.henrikkarlsson.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.henrikkarlsson.xyz)
| Animats wrote:
| Do they have something to say, or is this like "I want to be in a
| band" of a previous generation?
| drewcoo wrote:
| > is this like "I want to be in a band" of a previous
| generation?
|
| People started blogs for that? I thought that was more the
| realm of supermarket bulletin boards next to the firewood
| flyer.
|
| Maybe I'm just from a previous previous generation.
|
| How can "a friend" post something on a supermarket bulletin
| board now that they don't seem to exist?
| zem wrote:
| what the gp is getting at is that back in the day there were
| people who wanted to be in a band not out of any particular
| musical talent or even inclination but because a lot of their
| friends were doing it and it looked like a cool thing to do.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Ronnie Coleman put it succinctly:
|
| "Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to
| lift no heavy-ass weights."
| LtWorf wrote:
| I don't want to be out of breath after 3 seconds of
| running. No thanks.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Me neither and yet I've been doing it for 45 years.
| LtWorf wrote:
| I see people got triggered by the obvious general lack of
| fitness in body builders. They are not more healthy than
| starving female models.
| billdueber wrote:
| "Do you want to be a Writer, or do you want to _write_?" I
| think that almost any question of the form "Do you want to be
| an _X_ er, or do you want to _X_ " is useful these days.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| 100%. As a kid growing up near a golf course I knew lots of
| kids who wanted to be a pro golfer (me too). Did they want
| to spend 10 hrs a day at the range hitting ball after ball?
| Not so much. Lots of people want to be Warren Buffett - do
| they want to read 10-ks for 10 hrs a day? Not so much.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Your question got me thinking about supermarket bulletin
| boards. I recall them from way back as busy places with lots
| of notes attached, but last year or thereabouts I remember
| seeing a small bulletin board with one note attached and
| thinking how unusual it was.
| LtWorf wrote:
| I mostly write for future me.
| al_borland wrote:
| This is a question more people need to ask. Be it a blog,
| YouTube channel, podcast, or whatever else, they all need to be
| rooted in having something worth to sharing to some small piece
| of the world.
|
| Many people get caught up in thinking the blog, YouTube, or
| podcast is the thing, when it's just the thing that lets you
| share the real thing. It took me longer than I'd like to admit
| to really integrate this lesson.
| 1dom wrote:
| That sounds like a chicken/egg scenario: how are you supposed
| to know if you have something worth sharing without producing
| that something first to make that assessment?
|
| I think putting more questions and uncertainty in the way of
| actually just writing/podcasting/youtubing is what stops a
| lot of people really building the habit in the first place.
| al_borland wrote:
| That's just it, a lot of people want to write, podcast, or
| be a YouTuber, but they struggle with ideas. They want to
| use the medium, but they don't have content ideas. The
| "real thing" I was talking about is the overarching theme
| or topic. What are you into, what are you going to write,
| podcast, or make videos about?
|
| I think understanding what you want to share helps solve
| the major stumbling block that leads to thousands of blogs
| with one entry that is effectively hello-world. If told to
| draw anything, most people will sit with a blank page.
| However, if they are told to draw a castle, those bounds
| give them the freedom to start and create, and it can
| evolve from there.
|
| What are you into to? What hobbies do you have? What do you
| know, or have opinions about, that others might be
| interested in? This is your theme, the "real thing".
| Writing, podcasting, or video production, without this
| usually falls flat after 1 or 2 attempts, and it makes it
| impossible for a habit to form.
|
| If you're already into something and doing it on a regular
| basis, then you're just writing about, talking about it, or
| recording what you're already doing or thinking about all
| the time anyway. The content and ideas can flow more
| easily, especially at the beginning. Not to mention, being
| more motivated to make the content, since it's already a
| passion.
|
| So many people are trying to make content about nothing,
| because they aren't really doing anything else... and this
| is where friction is born. Do something you find
| interesting, then share that thing and your perspective on
| it. Start with the doing, not the sharing (writing,
| podcasting, and YouTubing is the sharing).
|
| Hopefully this clarifies what I was getting at and resolves
| the chicken/egg thoughts.
| a-french-anon wrote:
| You're supposed to be capable of introspection and ask
| yourself "would I truly be interested in what I want to
| write? Do I even have an idea of what I want to write?"
| before writing anything...
| watwut wrote:
| No, that would be a youtube channel.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Or being a "streamer".
| Turboblack wrote:
| there are two types of blogs - sincere ones, where the author
| pours out his soul and talks about what he can't keep to
| himself, possibly raising some important issues, trying to
| convey them to the masses, and SEO blogs - where there are
| excrements of hashtags, advertising slogans, constant
| repetitions, and requests to throw a bone (support the project,
| you haven't supported the project yet? you can do it here,
| well, or here! did I forget to tell you that you can support
| the project? by the way, one more thing - support the
| project!). Such ones are immediately banned. I am also very
| annoyed by those who are already looking for a place for a
| banner from the first minutes of the site's existence. you will
| not survive in this world without this cent? 10 bucks a month -
| payment for personal shame?
|
| all this conversion and optimization of texts for search
| engines turns bloggers into robots, and it is simply impossible
| to read the texts, they are not human, they are as if created
| by neural networks. who needs this hypocrisy?
| tkjef wrote:
| i think you're exactly right. but to blog with zero SEO in
| mind sounds foolish as well.
|
| you should blog, and by a blog definition that is going on
| the internet. to get more people to read it (often the goal)
| the easiest thing to do is utilize the tool people use to
| find things on the internet (search engines).
|
| if there are issues with spam, keyword stuffing, forever run-
| on paragraphs of nothingness, well that is the search engine
| algorithm's job to fix. And they have a lot of money to fix
| it.
|
| and if they don't fix it we should use a new search engine.
| it'll take time. but those seem like the dynamics at play in
| this scenario.
| bhasi wrote:
| Great advice!
| ghaff wrote:
| I pretty much agree with all that. I'd add, is this something you
| want to do or are you looking to make money? If the latter, don't
| bother. You MAY want to separate a business blog and personal
| stuff but I'm not yet sold on that being a good idea unless
| you're really serious about a separate business identity. (Still
| muddling that one. I may re-merge.)
| codpiece wrote:
| I am getting started writing a blog, and this article is some of
| the most helpful I've read.
|
| Makes me feel OK to be quirky and unpolished when the rest of the
| world is making reaction faces and pointing at text to feed an
| algo.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Thank you for not doing that.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Be OK if 95-99% of your content gets zero engagement. That's
| fine, if you're writing for yourself first and foremost.
|
| Accept that you will work on a cool personal project for a long
| time (months, at least), and will then write a blog post
| showcasing that work - and no one will care. Over. And. Over.
| Again. Very humbling, but a good exercise in evaluating your
| original motive to work on the project.
| lapcat wrote:
| > I should add, for context, that my friend and I are talking
| about writing beautiful essays here. If you want to write the
| most precise thing possible, you need to edit mercilessly and
| accept that the writing ends up flat and disjointed.
|
| I don't think that merciless editing and beauty are opposed. The
| author perhaps underestimates the extent to which artists
| mercilessly edit their own work. The author employs the metaphor
| of musical improvisation, but the best musical pieces are usually
| composed, not improvised. I like jazz, but... not for the
| songwriting. For stream of consciousness writing, you'd almost be
| better off posting on social media.
|
| I've been blogging for over 15 years, and my advice, admittedly
| ironic, is to not take advice from anyone. Actually, that's my
| advice on many subjects. Everyone wants to impose their own
| little idiosyncrasies on you, but what works for them won't
| necessarily work for you. One's idiosyncrasies are not universal
| truths.
| naveen_k wrote:
| I've been putting off starting a blog to document my side
| projects for a long time. Finally having it up feels great - it
| motivated me to organize my thoughts and publish rather than
| letting them sit as unstructured notes.
| idlewords wrote:
| The best writing advice I ever got was from a college
| professor--"everybody's got 100 bad essays in them. You just have
| to get them out."
|
| I feel like this is what blogging is especially good for. You can
| clear out the awful stuff and then try to incrementally improve.
|
| I would diametrically disagree with point #7--if you want to
| write well, you need to revise the hell out of it. I guess pick
| whose writing you like better, between me and the author, and
| take the corresponding advice.
| deadbabe wrote:
| It's better to get those bad essays out in the form of
| comments, you get instant feedback and you'll know what works
| and what doesn't work when you go to write a real blog.
| 7thpower wrote:
| Sadly, that hasn't helped me.
| lazyant wrote:
| yes; quantity leads to quality
| alxexperience wrote:
| While I agree, I know it can be hard to start writing as well,
| because you are so worried about the quality. One of my
| professors from college brought up a great point that "No one
| will read your shitty first draft except you."
|
| I find that phrase very helpful, because usually when I write,
| the first draft is always a giant mess. But you're able to
| craft it and edit it the best way that you can. So you can push
| out what you think is good work, and continue to improve as you
| write more.
| idlewords wrote:
| It is very scary. Oddly that makes blogs kind of a good place
| to start, since almost no one will find them or read them.
| It's public writing, but a lot less nerve-wracking than
| putting yourself out there in other formats (like forum
| posts).
| 1dom wrote:
| I don't consider myself a writer, but it sounds like you
| do.
|
| I find forum posts far, far less nerve-wracking than a blog
| post. For me, a forum post is almost like how the original
| article describes a chat: it feels closer to realtime, and
| feels easier, because it's just like playing a normal role
| in a conversation. It's normally a response to something,
| expecting a response.
|
| A blog post feels closer to a formal publication, and I
| feel like they're more expected to stand on their own,
| without the justification and context helpfully provided by
| others' posts.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| > then try to incrementally improve
|
| My technique is Da Vinci method just collect / discover lot of
| shiny pieces. Then stitch them together later. Develop these
| pieces separately like colored glass pieces in a mosaic, sort
| of inversion of divide and conquer, collect and assemble.
| _glass wrote:
| I was doing this, and then it is confusing for people to
| follow. Nowadays I do this, too. But when I am ready, I write
| up everything once, then add in the details.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Yeah, I've been collecting many bits on my obsidian notes
| but I'm still in the stage of mostly dreaming of putting
| them together. But it is very interesting to see what
| thoughts i deem worthy of recording and which i don't. It's
| helped me significantly to form a coherent understanding of
| the world and politics, and i suspect one day it'll help me
| with finding novel research for my PhD
| greenie_beans wrote:
| there's a lot of good writing advice out there, but some of the
| best i got was from a college professor, too. i will botch it:
|
| each sentence should make sense based on every prior sentence.
| each sentence should be able to stand alone on its own sheet of
| paper.
| langsoul-com wrote:
| Advice to use substack, medium and a few others similar.
|
| No point hosting a blog or anything of the sort, unnecessary
| effort in the beginning when you don't know if you'll continue.
| aradox66 wrote:
| OTOH setting up a static blog site is a great way to
| procrastinate on actually writing blog posts
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| Hey, no need to call me out specifically like that.
| heelix wrote:
| Ouch... that actually hits a bit close to home. After having
| a couple of blogging homes fold out from under me, I've
| kicked around the idea of coding up my own blog - which
| usually was in whatever framework/language I was getting
| ramped up in. I realize I've probably ported/built something
| a half a dozen times in the last decade, and never bothered
| to take the final step to deploy it before starting the next
| rewrite.
| duggan wrote:
| Take the last step! Just try not to account for it as the
| culmination of a decade's work in your head.
|
| I recently rebuilt my own blog over the course of a month
| or so after a decade hiatus (and wrote about it, of
| course[1]).
|
| I enjoyed the process of working through all my little
| ideas and deploying it -- and continuing to tinker on it.
|
| 1: https://duggan.ie/posts/ignoring-good-advice-and-
| building-my...
| spc476 wrote:
| I started writing my blogging engine [1] in late 1999, and
| spent almost the next two years trying to get it perfect,
| while at the same time using it for blogging (locally at
| first). I finally got fed up with trying to perfect the
| software and just went public with it. I still use it after
| 25 years. Granted, there hasn't been a line of code that
| hasn't changed in that time, but it still feels the same to
| me, as it still works the same from a user perspective
| (entries can be added via a web interface, email, file
| (that was true even 25 years ago) and the PUT method (added
| last year); the storage system hasn't changed either and is
| backward compatible such that the code in 2001 (when I
| first went public) could still work on the data today). And
| yes, it is _still_ a CGI script. I saw no need to change
| that over the years.
|
| [1] https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog
| wonger_ wrote:
| Manuel maintains a list of (low-fuss) blogging platforms:
| https://manuelmoreale.com/blog-platforms
| codr7 wrote:
| Why?
|
| Many people don't like using the platforms.
|
| They're obviously parasites.
|
| It's not very complicated to do yourself.
| alp1n3_eth wrote:
| Obligatory "Substack has a Nazi Problem" article:
| https://archive.is/uyugO
|
| Obsidian Publish, Micro.Blog, Ghost, BearBlog, HackMD, etc. are
| all great places to start, with less "baggage" associated with
| them. I know a lot of people write on Medium as well, but the
| account requirements that pop-up randomly are super annoying.
| RajT88 wrote:
| This is good advice! I had a personal blog for a while which
| nobody read, but lately my Medium articles have gathered hundred
| of reads (writing down stuff I figured out in side projects
| nobody else bothered to write down).
| semking wrote:
| Serious question, as someone who recently started writing:
|
| * How do you guys feel about your thoughts, ideas and creativity
| being scraped and secretly added to the training corpus of AI
| models?
| a-priori wrote:
| You can't worry about it. It's the world we live in now. The
| alternative is to not write anything of significance on the
| internet, which would be of no benefit to anyone.
| nemomarx wrote:
| I wonder if any noticeable group of people are retreating to
| paper journals or letter circles again. Probably not, but you
| never know.
| semking wrote:
| To books, yes! 100%!
| semking wrote:
| That's precisely my problem: the only alternative is worse
| because no one would benefit.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| You can't really blame the blogger for that though.
|
| Letting a AI learn from your content devalues it as they
| can regurgitate it for a few dollars a month.
| fritzo wrote:
| Pleased. One of my main motivations in writing open source
| software is to create training data for future sentient things.
| I felt that way decades before LLMs. I am as proud to know my
| code ended up in training datasets as I am to know that my
| human students took a little away from the classes I've taught.
| semking wrote:
| I did not expect this type of positive feedback... thank you.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Don't care, although in the old days I declared a CC BY
| (attribution) license[1] on my blog. The fact many of these
| models cannot do basic attribution-- this is a very serious
| shortcoming, that potentially may affect the availability of
| fair use.
|
| [1] https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/
| semking wrote:
| Thanks for your feedback.
|
| Serious shortcoming indeed.
|
| I know it is stupid but I care.
| yen223 wrote:
| I take perverse pleasure in knowing that some future AI will be
| convinced that chicken is the best ice-cream flavour because
| some rando (me) posted it
| semking wrote:
| So... AI feeding on itself? :D
| tkjef wrote:
| this would have to be a largely targeted endeavor to offset
| such a fact. probably not worth the trouble. but interesting
| to think about.
| Y_Y wrote:
| It should be enough to look at the earnings reports of Kreamy
| Frozen Chicken to know that chicken is the most delicious ice
| cream flavor.
| colonial wrote:
| Pissed. Almost everything I publish online is licensed, usually
| in a copy-left manner.
|
| These companies are violating that agreement for their own
| gain, and respond to any pushback by invoking bogus legal
| arguments and ridiculous machine anthropomorphism. Brute force
| statistical analysis is not "learning."
| nthingtohide wrote:
| People donate their bodies for science after death. I am ready
| to donate my thoughts. My thoughts are just clever
| rearrangement of already existing ideas, just like my body is
| of atoms.
| watwut wrote:
| I kinda lost motivation to write tutorials and such. It is
| going to be an input for AI, so why bother.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It's already a real problem that the organic blogosphere was
| destroyed by "blogspam" and overt plagiarism of entire blogs
| into content farms that existed purely to push SEO, including
| SEO over the original blog. AI just makes this worse.
|
| I'm also worried that if I wanted to find an audience the
| audience would first have to navigate the AI search hall of
| mirrors.
| tkjef wrote:
| it does make it worse. but it will get better IMO. any
| blogspam house is not going to last the next 5-10 years IMO.
|
| as soon as i do something slightly spammy or excessive SEO-
| wise i get dinged for it. within 1-2 days. then i re-evalute
| what i did and revert it or change the strategy slightly.
|
| those blogspam houses are just doing a few things right that
| are clearly being given too much weight.
|
| and finding an audience was never easy. but social,
| newsletter, building free tools that link to your blog are
| some ways to do different than just SEO.
| mediumsmart wrote:
| not thinking about that - anything I do is _cc zero_
| righthand wrote:
| All of these replies say don't worry about it and just blog but
| I say detect the IPs and user agents and return a scrambled
| post. If you're small enough they probably won't care to go the
| extra effort to scrape you.
| EFreethought wrote:
| Is there a way to do that in WordPress on a shared host?
| righthand wrote:
| Sure you can hook into Wordpress' hooks with either:
|
| - `add_action('template_redirect', 'my_scramble_func')`
|
| - or `add_filter('the_content', 'my_scramble_func')`
|
| Wordpress is PHP so you get the power of doing whatever as
| the request loads.
|
| `Template_redirect` would allow you to redirect to a
| specific template/page.
|
| `the_content` would allow you to return different content
| for that path.
|
| Then you just need to check the user-agent/IP. I'm sure
| there's a PHP library you could install with composer to do
| this.
|
| What would be fun in my opinion is leaving the metadata the
| same but replacing only the meat. For example article
| titled "How to Update Your Blog" would still have the title
| and headings, but then return "<h2>Step one: open your blog
| editor</h2><p>hajfineidif hahahe lorem ipsum...</p>" for
| the paragraphs.
| EFreethought wrote:
| I do not like it either.
|
| I have a blog that admittedly does not get much traffic, and I
| have started to add random words after each paragraph. The
| background is white, and these words are white, so they are
| invisible to most people. Maybe it is not that effective, but
| it makes me feel better.
| sixdimensional wrote:
| I don't like the idea of intellectual theft without
| attribution/citation. If it is shared publicly/into the public
| domain, I believe the least that should happen is
| attribution/citation where possible - especially if a for-
| profit entity is using the content.
|
| On the other side, for many of my thoughts/ideas/creativity, I
| find it is often a question of, do I die alone with it in my
| head or put it out there, maybe for someone to find, use or be
| inspired by? If it's a question of one or the other, I think
| perhaps I'd rather let it go free so the value isn't lost
| (assuming, that what I have to write/say/share is of some
| value).
|
| I have seen that mechanism be exploited.. sometimes you put
| something out there, someone uses it, and there is zero
| attribution/citation. For myself, I prefer to try (most of the
| time) to treat non-fictional writing in the traditional sense
| of an academic paper and include citations whenever they are
| useful and I can - even for non-academic purposes - for the
| purposes of giving credit to others. It's nice to share credit
| and show how things connect, IMHO.
|
| FWIW, I like some of the inspiration behind Creative Commons,
| but even old school citations (MLA/ALA or heck, even just this
| kind of inline citation style [1] that is common on HN and
| other sites is better than zero).
|
| There are citation generators online also [2] - for formal
| purposes/writing/papers you must get these formats right, but
| for informal/casual use, I think simple citation is better than
| no citation.
|
| [1] simple citation style, or even just paste the URL - at
| least you're giving credit.
|
| [2] example, https://zbib.org/
| tkjef wrote:
| like there's nothing i can do about it so i should embrace it,
| learn from it and integrate it.
| narag wrote:
| A colleague gave me the best advice when I was teaching
| programming courses: you haven't learned from books but from
| professional experience (actually both, but anyway) just tell
| them what worked and what didn't. And why.
|
| I applied the same method when writting my long defunct blog.
| Nobody was really interested in my opinions, but my experience
| both positive and negative was somehow valuable.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Why do you insist on only using the middle third of my screen to
| display content?
|
| I'm over 50 and my eyes are not quite what they used to be. Your
| 12pt (ish) text is largely legible to me but why do you insist on
| your idea of presentation, rather than mine?
|
| The whole point of the www as far as I recall is that you send a
| message and I receive it. How it is formatted should largely be a
| matter for the recipient, with some hints from the sender.
| jraph wrote:
| Content width is an odd thing to complain about:
|
| - everybody limits it. This is because no matter the size of
| your screen, the human eyes are somewhat limited to lines of
| 70-130 characters. Higher than that, and your eyes have hard
| time finding the next line at the end of the previous one
| because the travel is too high. As a web page writer, you need
| to take care of that, because the default presentation will be
| bad for everyone if you don't.
|
| - as it happens, the author uses Subtrack so they might not
| even have picked that size consciously.
|
| - reader mode works on this page, so you can use this to read
| the post the way you want, and if you like the content and
| would like to read it regularly, there is an RSS feed that you
| can use with a client that displays posts the way you want.
|
| The last point is why separate style sheets and correctly
| structured content are so nice: if you have such a strong
| opinion, you can tweak stuff or even ignore the style sheet and
| use yours. And reader mode actually makes that practical for
| most blog posts / articles.
|
| (that said, I agree that the width seems particularly small, I
| replaced it with 80ex just to try and it looked better to me -
| but I just set up a new WordPress website and the default 2025
| theme has the same ~730px width for the content, I don't know
| what's with this default size)
| echoangle wrote:
| Limiting width is what you should do, if the lines are too long
| you will struggle to find the next line when skipping back.
| rchaud wrote:
| > Why do you insist on only using the middle third of my screen
| to display content?
|
| You can always read these posts in Reader Mode on your browser
| and adjust the text size, paragraph width etc. Even on this
| site, I have to magnify the display to 130% to view comfortably
| on a hiDPI screen.
|
| The reason why most blogs are narrow is because blog templates
| are still from the 2000s in terms of how they show content on
| desktop . Traditionally the right hand third of the screen
| would display ads or a blog roll, while the left hand third
| would show the site's navigation .
|
| Over time this changed, but what stayed the same was showing
| body text in the central third columns.
| madhadron wrote:
| > (I should add, for context, that my friend and I are talking
| about writing beautiful essays here. If you want to write the
| most precise thing possible, you need to edit mercilessly and
| accept that the writing ends up flat and disjointed.)
|
| There speaks someone who has never spent time writing poetry, and
| probably isn't very good at editing.
| msephton wrote:
| My advice is do it for yourself, any engagement is a bonus, and
| don't lock it behind a wall like Substack etc.
| rednafi wrote:
| I have been maintaining a semi-successful blog [1] for the last
| five years and have learned a few things along the way:
|
| - Own your content: Medium, Substack, Hashnode, Dev.to--all of
| them suck. Your readers deserve better. Don't waste their time.
|
| - No one cares about the technology behind your site unless it's
| huge. So it should be the least of your concerns. Don't be that
| JS guy who rewrites their entire site every week in a different
| stack and writes a blog post about it.
|
| - Consistently writing is a lot of work, and there's no way
| around it.
|
| - Picking a niche and writing about it yields better results than
| trying to write about anything and everything.
|
| - No one will probably read it for a long time, and that's okay.
| You should write only for yourself in the beginning.
|
| - POSSE is the way to go. If you don't promote your work, no one
| else will.
|
| - That said, if it took less time to write than it would take
| someone to read, it's probably not worth writing.
|
| [1]: https://rednafi.com
| revicon wrote:
| POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
|
| I didn't know what this acronym meant. Hopefully I saved
| someone a Google search.
|
| https://indieweb.org/POSSE
| narmontas wrote:
| I searched for this and then came back, only to find the
| answer below!
| bookofjoe wrote:
| I asked Perplexity what this acronym stands for and this is
| its reply:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/oWfIjkZ
| apercu wrote:
| The interwebs is such hot garbage that we now need to use
| ChatGPT to search.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| Thanks! You saved me from exactly that.
| lippihom wrote:
| Nice - thanks.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| >POSSE
|
| What does this mean? (Googling wasn't helpful.)
| rednafi wrote:
| POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
| mvkel wrote:
| I'd argue that you could write only for yourself for your
| entire life and still have a successful blog.
| rednafi wrote:
| Yep. The success metric isn't unidimensional here. Having
| external readers is just a cherry on top. I didn't even think
| anyone else would find my writings interesting, let alone
| useful.
| cryptopian wrote:
| Often, the only reason I write is to have a method of
| sorting out the soup of thoughts in my head into a
| recognisable shape, with the accountability that being
| public brings to it (no, you can't have the link to my
| site!).
| oe wrote:
| Well said. Sometimes I notice that I'm thinking about a
| thing for days or weeks and the only way to make it stop
| is to write a post about it.
| walthamstow wrote:
| People focus a lot on the 'web', and not enough on the 'log'
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Problem in a nutshell, excellent.
| masutaka wrote:
| The term POSSE is new to me. It is a great learning experience.
| snackbroken wrote:
| > If you don't promote your work, no one else will.
|
| This has not been my experience. If you do interesting things
| then there are plenty of people who are willing to bring
| attention to it. I've been cold-emailed by journalists wanting
| to interview me without ever doing anything other than a) make
| my work publicly accessible and b) collaborate with like-minded
| people.
|
| Perhaps I'm lucky (probably). Perhaps my work would've gotten
| more attention if I spent more effort promoting it (probably).
| The things I do because I find them interesting are not things
| I feel the need to promote, because I'm not doing them for
| attention.
|
| If your goal is to grab a lot of attention, you will inexorably
| have to do things that are not interesting because the only way
| to achieve broad appeal is to not offend anyone's tastes and
| the only way to do that is to be bland.
| gffrd wrote:
| > the only way to achieve broad appeal is to not offend
| anyone's tastes and the only way to do that is to be bland
|
| Careful. While I agree with the premise, you make it sound
| binary. You can have broad-er appeal while still being
| individual.
| meiraleal wrote:
| One can have even broader appeal by offending everyone
| gffrd wrote:
| True!
|
| On that ...
|
| - It's generally easier for people to know what they
| _don't_ like than what they _do_. Preferences are defined
| by process of elimination.
|
| - The commonality is: get lots of people on the same page
| about you, and you've got a big audience / broad appeal.
| But the most engaged audience is the one who has strong
| emotions attached, so being an offender guarantees a
| ravenous audience ... and is generally easier.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| > Careful.
|
| I witnessed a memorable moment at work when an engineer
| responded to a VP and started by saying "careful." Had it
| been another engineer, it would have been ignored as
| authoritative-sounding filler. But the VP did not take it
| well.
| gffrd wrote:
| I would have loved to seen their expression ...
|
| That's like an actor breaking character during a play and
| it pops the bubble of reality the audience has been
| living in.
| 0xEF wrote:
| When people give advice to content creators in the form of
| "when you do interesting things" my brain immediately jumps
| to one question; how do you know what other people consider
| interesting?
|
| Honest question, because I am just starting out, myself. I
| have a small blog where I share my opinions and projects
| related to technology I enjoy. However, if I were to do a
| thought experiment and assume my audience is HN readers, I'd
| hesitate to say anyone here would find my posts very
| interesting. I like them, but I am not sure who else would.
|
| I genuinely do not understand how to evaluate an audience, so
| I just write what I like to write and hope for the best.
| moehm wrote:
| I know people here don't like site analytics, but for this
| one it's pretty good.
|
| Setup Matomo or similar analytics software, write about a
| bunch of topics and review after a year which topics your
| readers are most interested in, for which they search on
| your site etc.
| rednafi wrote:
| Don't evaluate your audience; it's a losing game. Write
| things so you can find them later, and leave the rest to
| chance. Worked quite well for me.
| econ wrote:
| It primarily refers to what you consider interesting.
|
| When you have a decent number of posts and some visitors
| you can see which sub set they find the most interesting.
|
| You can also make a blog about things that don't interest
| you at all. This is the shortest route to success and you
| will hate your new job :)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > That said, if it took less time to write than it would take
| someone to read, it's probably not worth writing.
|
| Is that actually a possibility? I can't type faster than I can
| read.
| kqr wrote:
| You can if yountype complicated tjings and include typos that
| make it hard to decode anything much less a run on sentence
| like this that includes redundancies and extra meaningless
| words saying the same thing which is easy to type but takes
| ages to read.
| moehm wrote:
| Well done.
| rednafi wrote:
| LLMs
| econ wrote:
| You don't have to type. I wrote some things with hundreds of
| links then assumed the reader was at least somewhat familiar
| with the set of links above each paragraph. I may even try
| keep opinions out of it (less effort) and simply paint a
| context with references for the reader to do their own
| thinking.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Don't be that JS guy who rewrites their entire site every
| week in a different stack and writes a blog post about it._
|
| seems like a perfectly reasonable idea for a blog about
| different stacks. I'm not advocating it, but there's nothing
| wrong with it if that's what interests you.
| eclipsed0x01 wrote:
| That close minded opinion you quoted left a bad taste in my
| mouth and makes me not want to check the OP's blog out.
|
| Almost every opinion people have has been covered by someone
| else in some way unless you are working at the forefront of
| something, so it usually depends on how you value-add to
| existing things with your own experience.
|
| It's also that sort of I-know-what's-better attitude that
| turns a personal thing into a competitive thing.
|
| What is semi-successful anyway...
| gffrd wrote:
| You're missing the point.
|
| OP is saying don't be the person who says they want to write
| about Frogs, but who then spends an immense amount of effort
| not writing about Frogs, and writing about procrastination
| instead.
| egeozcan wrote:
| If it had been phrased like yours, I'd completely agree. I
| reread that part from the OP, but the point really doesn't
| come across.
| watwut wrote:
| Nothing wrong with that either. It is an unpaid hobby.
| Doing what you feel like doing is perfectly fine.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| What tech do you recommend for own site? Wordpress?
| crackalamoo wrote:
| It probably doesn't matter much either way, but I use vanilla
| HTML/JS
| inetknght wrote:
| You don't need some fancy tech. Blogs have been around for
| 30+ years and function just fine on such old tech. The only
| new tech you should use is certbot and own your own domain.
|
| Write in markdown and serve directly, or export to HTML. Or
| write in LibreOffice Writer and export to HTML.
|
| Upload HTML to a basic webserver. You don't need a fancy load
| balancer or denial-of-human-system or anything.
| ineptech wrote:
| You make this sound trivial, but I did this (not with a
| blog per se, but with a silly one-shot parody website I
| made for fun) and the first time it got posted on HN it
| exceeded my hosts bandwidth limits in the first hour
| despite only having a handful of images. Unless you never
| write anything popular, you at least need a static host
| like github pages or a cdn or something behind it.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Unless you never write anything popular, you at least
| need a static host like github pages or a cdn or
| something behind it._
|
| No, you just need a host that doesn't have ridiculously
| small limits. You can easily find find hosts with limits
| in hundreds of GB, or TB, or even unmetered. You can find
| them for free, and you can find them for quite cheap
| compared to most technologists' incomes.
| skydhash wrote:
| Were each image 1 MB? My rule of thumb is to have smaller
| pictures in the page and to link to their full size if
| needs be. If your webpage exceed a ebook in size while
| not having more features, there's a wrong decision made
| somewhere.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| I'd not use Wordpress personally. Luckily for you, there are
| plenty of options: https://manuelmoreale.com/blog-platforms
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| SGML.
|
| Just joking. Sort of. There's apparently a modern tool you
| can use to transpile SGML to HTML[0], and I'm itching to try
| it out.
|
| --
|
| [0] - https://sgmljs.net/docs/producing-html-
| tutorial/producing-ht... - yes, it's an NPM package, and yes,
| you can run it in the browser, but you can also use it on a
| server, or as a static site generator.
| pithanyChan wrote:
| > if it took less time to write than it would take someone to
| read, it's probably not worth writing.
|
| Disagree. If it took less thinking than it will take reading,
| then yes, probably not worth it. But if you can trim your
| writing to the pith in every paragraph or even line, people
| will love you.
|
| Too many people babble to keep the underlying lies and fraud
| and their complicity burried in narratives.
| eagleislandsong wrote:
| > trim your writing to the pith in every paragraph or even
| line
|
| This takes _a lot_ of time. Writing concisely is much more
| challenging and time-consuming than writing verbosely.
| Writing unnecessarily long essays means that your readers end
| up spending more time reading them than you did writing them.
|
| As Blaise Pascal wrote: "I only made this letter longer
| because I had not the leisure to make it shorter."
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > all of them suck.
|
| > POSSE is the way to go
|
| Can you host your own blog, but replicate (in part) in dev.to?
|
| Is it against their TOS to have a link to an original, or even
| only include teasers advertising the 'real' blog post?
|
| It's kind of like having you main git repo somewhere, but
| cloning to GitHub for the community.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| > No one cares about the technology behind your site
|
| You know a blog is going to be good when it's using the default
| wordpress theme from 10 years ago.
| sidpatil wrote:
| https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/
| RobotToaster wrote:
| I was hoping someone would post that (^_^)
| rednafi wrote:
| Exactly. Or a pure HTML and CSS site, like Daan Luu's or Russ
| Cox's blog.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| what are some good self-hosted blog alternatives? something
| with features similar to ghost/substack
| ramses0 wrote:
| This is a long-shot, but take a look here:
| https://github.com/simonw/datasette.io
|
| I've been blogging for decade(s) with:
| http://blosxom.com/documentation/users/blog.html http
| ://blosxom.com/documentation/users/install/dynamic/isp.html
|
| ...it's basically a janky (possibly insecure?) perl-cgi-
| script which converts a directory of markdown files into a
| blog.
|
| I love the idea of it in that it's just markdown files! `vim
| ~/blog/entries/some-random-thought.txt` end ups with $AUTHOR
| of `chown`, $DATE of the file modification time, tree of
| `mkdir -p ~/blog/entries/some/category` ... it's just trivial
| to backup, restore, and work with. You can even (probably)
| hook it up to a static regen which is probably safer:
| http://blosxom.com/documentation/users/install/static/
|
| The link to datasette is if you're wanting to nerd around a
| bit more, as it's kindof a combo of sqlite and a web server
| for rendering data from within it. The linked github repo is
| how their main site is built/rendered and it definitely has
| aspects of "blogginess", and you can kindof see how it's
| done. The neat thing of `let tags = "SELECT DISTINCT tags
| FROM posts"` or transforming blogging into effectively
| updating/adding records in a database is an extension of the
| blosxom zen of "it's just files [records], yo! go forth and
| edit them..."
| stevenicr wrote:
| wordpress.org is the defacto standard right?
|
| set plugins and themes to auto-update, add wordfence and
| change default settings.
|
| use updraft or similar to pull full backups on a schedule.
| gtirloni wrote:
| > POSSE is the way to go. If you don't promote your work, no
| one else will.
|
| I agree but when I tried this a few weeks ago, it looked like a
| lot of work to publish on my own blog and then replicate
| everywhere else. I didn't find a good tool and got lost trying
| out fediverse stuff.
| gamedever wrote:
| Strong disagree on Medium, Substack, etc. There are very famous
| and popular blogs on both with tons of followers. My sister
| asked for a blog, I steered her to substack. Zero effort, just
| works.
|
| > Your readers deserve better. Don't waste their time.
|
| Nothing about substack wastes readers time.
|
| Conversely, what wastes their time is your site being down or
| hacked and what wastes your time is maintaining your blog's
| infra, updating because vulnerabilities, and/or using bad UIs
| like blogging from github (maybe passable for nerds, not for
| non-nerds)
|
| A blog isn't about the tech you use. It's about the writing.
| Worrying about tech is not going to add a single reader to your
| blog.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| Substack is trash. VC-backed, full of tracking pixels and
| privacy-invading anti-features, constant push to monetize,
| cross-promote and increase engagement... Every blogger who
| has moved there has gotten less interesting than they were
| when they were independent. It's everything that is wrong
| about social media cynically branded as some kind of
| alternative media outlet.
|
| Of course there is plenty of money to be made as a social
| media influencer who specializes in long form content, and if
| that's the career a person is interested in building then
| sure - Substack, Medium, whatever - great choice. But for
| people who are interested in blogging as it used to be,
| independent writers who want to write without the pressure of
| editors, without paywalls, without popups, without forcing
| their readers into signup funnels... It might be a bit more
| work to set up, but tools like WordPress, Ghost etc are
| better suited.
| hackitup7 wrote:
| I've had the exact same experience. I'd add that Substack will
| give you some mildly helpful distribution at times as well.
| SteveVeilStream wrote:
| My favorite two reasons for blogging:
|
| 1) Because sometimes you are right about something and it's nice
| to show that you were thinking about it ahead of time. An example
| would be my prediction in 2023 (which is fairly late in all
| fairness,) that one of the most important improvements in AI in
| the near future would be the ability to interact with any GUI as
| if it was an API.
|
| 2) Because often you are wrong about something and having it
| written down and in public will keep you honest about hindsight
| bias. An example would be predictions I made about lasting
| impacts of the pandemic on how we approach healthcare and
| minimizing respiratory infections in general.
| jopsen wrote:
| Also nice that people you interact with online or old friends
| who look you up, can see some of the stuff you do. Without
| having to resort to Facebook.
|
| Whether that's hobbies, a home renovation project, a public
| presentation you did at work, a life event (wedding, kids,
| etc).
| jopsen wrote:
| Unless you aim for your blog grow a following. You really don't
| need to overthink anything!
|
| A picture and 3 sentences can be a blog post.
|
| You can talk about a hobby, a trip, a vacation or random
| thoughts.
|
| Sometimes people will find a how-to blog post through Google.
| Sometimes an old friend or former teacher will look you up.
|
| In reality, you'll probably be happier if your blog never grows a
| steady following :)
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Daring Fireball by John Gruber (used to) frequently post just
| links to a post/article with a short excerpt.
|
| No need to write a full-on 10k+ word novella on everything.
| roydivision wrote:
| A slight tangent - does anyone have advice on anonymous blogs? I
| would accept an email address as being the sole contact, but
| nothing else.
| yapyap wrote:
| bearblog.dev?
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Haven't tried this myself yet, but came across this while
| sorting my Obsidian inbox: https://pico.sh/pgs
|
| Basically you can ssh/scp/rsync static pages there.
|
| The only personal thing you provide is an SSH public key pair.
| alp1n3_eth wrote:
| With Paragraph.xyz I'm pretty sure you can sign-up with just a
| crypto wallet.
| mangeshm wrote:
| Hey, you are a great inspiraiton and I really like to read your
| blogs. I have been maintaining a broken blog since I was 16
| (currently 19) and last year I started writing actively about
| everything I do.
|
| I started reading more and more books and have seen a lot of
| improvements in writing. I am not inspired by anyone's writing
| style but yes I am writing for the sake of my own curiosity and
| fun. I did follow some of your ideas on how you write though xD
|
| my blog: https://mangeshm.xyz/ some recent articles about my
| thinking and some stories I've written.
| raesene9 wrote:
| I've been blogging for just over 20 years at this point, my main
| takeaways
|
| 1) Blog for yourself and no-one else. Write things up because you
| find them interesting or you learned something. Trying to second-
| guess things like what will be popular or get engagement is not a
| fun time for what is likely to be a hobby.
|
| 2) Keep it low maintenance and simple publishing process. I use
| Github pages and Jekyll, but other similar options are available.
|
| 3) If you're doing technical content, try to have practical
| examples. I've had multiple times where I _thought_ I knew how
| something worked and, in the process of writing a blog with
| practical examples, found out I was wrong about how it worked!
| MisterTea wrote:
| Point 3 is very important and something that needs to be done
| more often. I would also say have someone who works in the
| domain you're writing about read it and give feedback.
| zerr wrote:
| Why publish at all? Why not just write privately?
| jononor wrote:
| Sometimes you talk to someone (possibly online, usually about
| a shared interest), and they ask you what your thoughts are
| on X. Then you can just link them, if you have written on X
| (or related).
|
| Sometimes others want to express a (non trivial) idea to
| someone else, and your writing may be the best thing they
| know that gets the message across. Then they can send it.
|
| Sometimes (or rather, always) your idea and writing is not
| the best or final thought you have on the subject. But it is
| not until someone has read and commented/replied
| (thoughtfully) that you understand what the next refinement
| is.
|
| And then there is serendipity, just putting it out there to
| see what might (or might not) come of it.
|
| Plus maybe one finds it motivating to have it actually
| accessible for others. As a clear goal and a standard to hold
| each piece to.
| raesene9 wrote:
| A couple of reasons (for me anyway)
|
| 1) Main reason is that if I've spent time working something
| out, I can save other people the time doing that, by writing
| down the details in a searchable place.
|
| 2) If I want to explain something to someone, it's easy if I
| can just point them to a blog I've already written
|
| 3) (bit of an unintended consequence) It helped get me my
| last two jobs :D Being able to point to a long history of
| technical blog posting was relevant when I got a job in
| advocacy as that's one of the necessary skills.
| christophilus wrote:
| Speaking from experience, start by building some tools to make
| blog publishing more pleasant-- build a markdown processor in
| your favorite language, then write your own syntax highlighting
| and html parser / transformer, then benchmark and optimize the
| heck out of it, then decide blogging isn't all that interesting,
| and write some games instead.
| rchaud wrote:
| Every post about blogging that reaches the top of HN turns into
| a discussion about static site generators, without fail.
| fallinditch wrote:
| Bear Blog looks like a good option for a new (minimalist) blog.
| Can anyone recommend it? https://bearblog.dev/
| denvaar wrote:
| One thing that helps me write is to picture someone I know who
| I'm talking to. This helps me to include the appropriate level of
| context, and it also impacts the "voice" I will use. I think the
| author basically mentions this as one of the their list items.
| csswizardry wrote:
| Point 13, ironically, reminds me of one of the best bits of
| writing[1] I ever did. I somehow lost an entire near-complete
| draft[2] of an article, so I had to write it again from scratch.
| It came out much, much better than the original.
|
| 1. https://csswizardry.com/archive/
|
| 2. A fact I am embarrassed to admit in present company. I still
| can't remember how it happened.
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| Host your own. Keep it simple.
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