[HN Gopher] Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
___________________________________________________________________
Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
Author : gnabgib
Score : 576 points
Date : 2025-11-21 22:40 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (disassociated.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (disassociated.com)
| ricardobeat wrote:
| > But with the revival of personal blogs well underway
|
| Is it? I haven't seen anyone in my circle return to blogging, nor
| kids of this generation.
|
| Discoverability is going to be a massive problem, since search
| engines are dead. Maybe word-of-mouth through social media is
| enough?
| minimaxir wrote:
| Social media referral traffic is also dead, mostly due to
| algorithms that really don't want users to click out of their
| websites.
|
| The only exception is Bluesky because it does not have
| algorithmic feeds, but technical content does not do well as
| most technical people did not migrate.
| gerdesj wrote:
| We could always resurrect WAIS and Gopher.
|
| I sometimes compare Mediawiki vs SharePoint to Web x.0 vs WAIS
| n Gopher.
|
| One is light on resources, storing just the information with
| some formatting hints, leaving presentation to standards and
| the other is SharePoint. The comparison is really about bloat,
| not functionality, but the two are intertwined.
| throwaway5465 wrote:
| SharePoint was, as I remember it, one big unnormalised table.
| Everything else was views on that.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| The content will be discovered just fine. It'll get embedded in
| the LLMs on the next round of training. Won't be attributed to
| your blog of course, but an approximation to the information
| will still get out there.
| bji9jhff wrote:
| Knowing mega corps will suck my blood thanklessly is of no
| solace.
| baconbrand wrote:
| The way things are going, I'm not sure if the mega corps
| will ever truly turn a profit off the blood sucking. Maybe
| suck some USA tax money for a bailout...
|
| In the meantime, there are lots of actual humans trying to
| do things who will benefit from your knowledge being
| repackaged and delivered by the blood suckers.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| I honestly can't wrap my head around people getting excited
| about companies ingesting their work to munge up and sell
| without compensation or any attribution. I'm sure the
| feeling is mutual, but I really don't get it.
| wiether wrote:
| You can also see it that way: big corps are funding the
| computing cost to ingest and propagate your ideas to
| millions of people, for free to you.
|
| The alternative would be to setup yourself a system that
| could serve those people.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > an approximation to the information
|
| Playing telephone has now been automated ...
| Larrikin wrote:
| Will an LLM purposefully change facts to incorrect
| information without fighting you the entire way? Seems like a
| blog platform could offer a feature where every posts has 3
| or 4 factually wrong posts that would only be found by
| scrapers.
| AstroBen wrote:
| I had Gemini copy a bunch of text from a personal blog
| yesterday to answer a query so the content will definitely get
| read
| VP2262 wrote:
| Here's a starting point https://peopleandblogs.com/
| flpm wrote:
| This looks very interesting, thanks for sharing
| dogline wrote:
| We'll have to get the old
| (webrings)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring] back in
| fashion.
| VP2262 wrote:
| There's some here https://indieweb.org/webring
| smetj wrote:
| Exactly! Linkportals and webrings ...
| FrasiertheLion wrote:
| I would argue personal blogs are back and Substack is the
| medium of choice this time around
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Substack to me seems to be 40% self-promotion or advertising
| a service, 40% long-form LinkedIn posts / AI slop, and the
| remaining 20% is behind a subscription with eventual
| freebies. Mostly professional writing. It's far from being a
| new blogspot.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| I agree. Substack feels more like Op Ed writers realised
| they could make more money by self publishing than by
| staying at a dying media company with multiple levels of
| editorial oversight.
|
| To do well on Substack you need to publish pretty
| regularly, several times a week to keep and build an
| audience, and the only thing anyone can generate that fast
| are opinions. So Substack has really just become a
| decentralised Op Ed page.
| baconbrand wrote:
| Decentralized and expensive. Maybe I'm looking at the
| wrong blogs but my impression so far is that a lot of
| subscriptions are around 5-10$ monthly for a single
| creator. I can get a ton of newspapers (ok not papers,
| websites) magazines etc for that price or better, and
| those have way more than one contributor. The video
| platform Nebula for example has 175 creators for
| 6$/month.
|
| It does seem to work for a lot of people, though. Good
| for them.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| The minimum price is enforced by Substack, unfortunately.
| You can make everything free but you can't charge, say,
| $1/month. It definitely pushes the platform toward
| writers who think "I want to make this my full-time job &
| income". It also definitely suffers from, to a lesser
| extent, the Medium problem of way too many people
| thinking it is some kind of get-rich-quick thing. Somehow
| the Reddit algorithm started showing me the substack
| reddit, which seemed to mostly be pretty new authors
| complaining that they aren't making much money from
| Substack.
| baconbrand wrote:
| That explains a lot. Thank you! What a weird business
| decision on their part. I would guess the minimum has
| something to with payment processing overhead, but
| Patreon handles 1-2$ monthly payments no problem and
| always has. Strange.
| raudette wrote:
| Maybe a centralized Op Ed page?
| epiccoleman wrote:
| There was a brief moment where it felt like a really fresh
| take on blogging, but the number of big names that have
| come in make it feel a lot less "wild west, anyone could go
| big on this platform". The addition of Substack Notes
| (essentially, X / Twitter built in to Substack) also sort
| of brings it down to earth. It's hard to pretend your
| "longform reading" is more sophisticated than the low-
| attention-span Tiktok masses when you've got Twitter baked
| in.
|
| I still like Substack overall, there is a vibe over there
| that I certainly like more than Twitter or Instagram. But
| it also has that air of snooty elitist nerdism that
| characterized the middle days of Twitter - and it seems
| like the level of get rich quick self promotion is at least
| in line with the rest of the net.
| chickensong wrote:
| Those aren't the same. Substack has distinct smell.
| jclarkcom wrote:
| I restarted my blog after a 20 year break
| (https://jonathanclark.com) thanks to AI making taking out the
| drudgery.
| stanmancan wrote:
| You use AI to write your blog?
| jclarkcom wrote:
| yes, for example this article including charts and
| summaries were generated by AI.
| https://jonathanclark.com/posts/ai-coding-million-
| lines-2025... Typically I act as an editor rather than a
| direct writer with cursor now replacing word
| soiltype wrote:
| I'm sorry to be harsh, but honest question - What's the
| purpose of using AI to create toy software that already
| exists (eg. YouTube downloader)? Normally the purpose
| would be to learn how to create that type of software,
| but that's presumably being skipped.
|
| Similarly... what's the point of blogging if you're not
| writing it yourself? This post is very long, but seems to
| basically just be riffing on the title over and over, at
| least by the 3rd graph. If you're not explaining anything
| and readers aren't receiving anything - what's it for?
|
| I really am asking with curiosity even though it's
| probably clear I have an opinion on this endeavor. There
| must be a reason you've paid money to do all this!
| wiether wrote:
| See Simon's comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46011877
| jclarkcom wrote:
| For me, it is about learning about what AI can and can't
| do, how to progressively prompt, how to avoid problem,
| etc. once you understand that you can build more things
| quickly. I gained a pretty good understanding of what it
| can/cant do, how many prompt it will take to get there,
| and which model(s) are capable.
| raffael_de wrote:
| > nor kids of this generation.
|
| (I fear) the blog of this generation's kids is called TikTok or
| whatever and the form is video instead of text.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| TikTok is the exact opposite of blogging.
|
| It was about sharing bits of your daily life and personal
| thoughts and feelings, while building a small community.
| Having more than 50-100 readers was a major event (and not a
| thing people aimed for).
| raffael_de wrote:
| That's exactly what TikTok is for ... to the T.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Almost right. The blog of this generation is called YouTube,
| and there's millions of such videos, with the author mostly
| talking.
|
| Why? YouTube pays creators, blogs don't.
| foodriver wrote:
| OT: "
|
| My hunger-self does feel so memories are as lucid made with
| others in hope
|
| "
|
| ...say, "People making a name of 'themselfes' for profit
| (boinboing IIRC), cos it has to be a (1994) profit ?
|
| And to say something, that: it is only "the complexity of big-
| tech-companys", in terms of content" ?
|
| Asking, cos i tryed...
|
| I do it for _um_... "politikum" (if that is the correct term)
| maybe while keeping to give someone an excuse to laugh about...
|
| ...try, but remember mostly after a day or two, maybe one
| week... often before i lost a (often needed) password or email-
| adress, i delete it.
|
| Did it for fun, get lost...than => doing something other...
|
| > //deviantart.com/journalseducatethink/gallery
|
| regards, ...
|
| PS: rewritten while listening to: > //youtu.be/dzw7u9KOOBM?t=66
| ilamont wrote:
| I have been blogging for decades, personal and work. I look at
| traffic patterns and see all the comments coming through.
|
| I don't think personal blogs are back.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| I've been indexing blogs and while I can't definitively say
| they _are back_ , there are a lot of active bloggers. More than
| that, there are a lot of people wanting to have blogs to read
| since everything else has gone to shit.
| julianlam wrote:
| Niche forums. Federated.
| Pacers31Colts18 wrote:
| Does that actually exist? I know there are reddit type clones,
| but I'm yet to see anything that allows me to setup a niche
| server and only that.
| interroboink wrote:
| Yeah, there quite a few. Like old-school phpBB is still
| around[1]. Or, take a look at the list on Wikipedia[2].
|
| Not sure if you're looking for a hosted solution, though. A
| lot of those would involve you running your own server.
|
| [1] https://www.phpbb.com/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_foru
| m_s...
| doublerabbit wrote:
| How I miss my script kiddie days of being 15, downloading
| "nulled" versions of vBulletin off of Limewire and throwing
| them up on pocket money paid cPanel web hosting account
| waiting for it to upload on my parents 56K.
|
| Exploit ridden PHPNuke & e107 CMS too.
| speff wrote:
| We had similar childhoods - though I did phpBB. Never had
| an audience for the forum, but it was cool just having
| and styling it. Good times.
| input_sh wrote:
| Discourse also has a (first-party) ActivityPub plugin now!
| monksy wrote:
| I can't wait till theres a good reddit federated clone.
| Zak wrote:
| Lemmy and Piefed are federated Reddit clones. I'm assuming
| you think they're not good.
|
| What should they improve?
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| I would love something that is close to phpBB but _slightly_
| more modern. Like, phpBB but with federation support and a
| clean API would be great. But most modern forum-like software
| is Reddit clones.
| cagrimmett wrote:
| Don't call it a comeback. We've been here for years.
| chickensong wrote:
| Ladies Love Cool Blogs
| Venn1 wrote:
| Two years ago I started a niche blog and tech site focused on
| hardware and software guides for Linux creatives. Even set up a
| forum because I was fed up with digging through scattered mailing
| lists and Discord servers for information. I like to think it has
| helped some people and it gives me a chance to practice writing
| human-readable documentation.
| ra wrote:
| how's it going?
| Venn1 wrote:
| Quite well, plenty of new skills to learn.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| link?
| Venn1 wrote:
| https://interfacinglinux.com/
| blakesterz wrote:
| I was wondering what the definition of "niche" was going to be:
| Kottke is one of the better known blogs that does not have a
| specific speciality.
|
| I think that's a good one to highlight as NOT niche, and niche is
| much more specific. Like I've had a librarian blog since 1999.
| Pretty much niche.
| rmoriz wrote:
| While there are ~ millions of blog engines out there, what is the
| current state of commenting and trackbacks?
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| Fragmented.
| Peacefulz wrote:
| I want to start one myself. More of a public journal, but all the
| same. I keep having fits and starts and things distract me from
| the habit. That, and I'm never satisfied with my implementation
| in the end and I always want to try new or different things.
| codazoda wrote:
| I standardized on pure HTML and CSS and wrote about why:
|
| https://joeldare.com/why-im-writing-pure-html-and-css-in-202...
| crackalamoo wrote:
| I also use pure HTML and CSS (and a touch of hand-written
| JavaScript)
| ctxc wrote:
| I wish your contact details were in your profile, because I'm
| the kinda guy who'd annoy you till you finally give up and
| publish the blog ;)
| nazargon wrote:
| I started mine a couple of weeks back and I was surprised how
| useful it was to write down your process, as each post gives
| you a clear goal and helps you consolidate whatever you are
| working on.
| codazoda wrote:
| If you want to setup a super minimal blog checkout Neat CSS.
|
| https://neat.joeldare.com
| awesome_dude wrote:
| Isn't there a cycle - blogs, aggregators, email lists, back to
| blogs...?
| tinkelenberg wrote:
| Every blog is a niche blog because blogging is a niche. It never
| was and never will be mainstream. Social media began as an
| attempt to make the spirit of blogging a low lift for the noobs.
|
| Today, you're talking to an audience that is online, willing to
| venture outside social media, and opting to actively read content
| rather than passively listen or watch. That's far from everyone
| and that's okay.
| viraptor wrote:
| > It never was and never will be mainstream.
|
| We had the time around when blogspot was a thing when everyone
| and their dog had a blog. It was mainstream enough for "Julie
| and Julia". It was a different time.
| tinkelenberg wrote:
| It was a great time. Social media's reached beyond that
| though. Grandma wasn't online back then.
| bji9jhff wrote:
| That grandma is dead. The online grandma is her daughter.
|
| *You changed your post and now mine doesn't make sense
| anymore. I forgive you but don't do it again.
| tinkelenberg wrote:
| Fixed it for you.
| bji9jhff wrote:
| Haha thanks ;)
| munificent wrote:
| It was good when we had social networking, and it got bad
| when that turned into social media.
|
| The point should be connecting people to _other people_ and
| their creativity, not just connecting people to _content_
| which may or may not be vomited out by generative AIs.
| viraptor wrote:
| > Everyone and their mother wasn't online back then.
|
| Yes, but - there were lots of people who got online in
| other to blog. Livejournal, blogspot and others were the
| reason some of their mothers did get online. It was that
| mainstream!
| simonw wrote:
| It's fun watching TV episodes from ~2005 to ~2015 and noting
| how common it was back then for a blog or blogger to be used
| as a plot point.
| elcapitan wrote:
| Probably because writers love writers being a plot point ;)
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| I would argue that most people who had a blog were 15-25 in
| that time. Yes it was very common in that demo, but outside
| of it, it was definitely not. I don't know if that classifies
| as "mainstream".
| HeinzStuckeIt wrote:
| The very active ecosystem of blogs I followed in the first
| decade of the new millennium, on arts themes (literature,
| cinema, non-popular music) and religious-denomination news,
| were mainly people above 30 blogging, sometimes much older.
| Wordpress had made it easy for any computer user, not just
| tech nerds, to set something up.
| viraptor wrote:
| That and both mum blogs and early food blogs were
| definitely driven by older people.
| jdub wrote:
| Ha, Julie and Julia is an excellent riposte.
|
| The previous poster might also consider all the high profile,
| independent, and influential publications across various
| subjects that grew out of blogging - e.g. HuffPo, Pitchfork,
| Jezebel, so many video gaming and entertainment sites... many
| of which were sadly bought up by rich idiots and/or existing
| media conglomerates.
| guestbest wrote:
| Heh, when you started talking about venturing outside I thought
| you were going to talk about in real life meat space.phones and
| tablets really freed us up but we still don't leave our house
| to go on the internet for discussions. Funny with all that
| freedom the untethered life gets us.
| HeinzStuckeIt wrote:
| > Every blog is a niche blog because blogging is a niche. It
| never was and never will be mainstream.
|
| Content creation is indeed something a minority of society
| practices, but that can still be mainstream. In the first
| decade of the new millennium, the Movable Type and Wordpress
| ecosystem was active enough among ordinary people, not just
| nerds, that it led to things like local politicians being
| ousted, religious denominations' leadership being shook up. All
| the drama now associated with Twitter/X happened on blogs
| before that.
|
| Watch the last episode of _The Onion_ 's series _Sex House_
| from 2012. A joke about everyone focusing on blogging is used
| multiple times. Even after the rise of Web 2.0 social media
| platforms, social media and blogs still coexisted for a time.
| It wasn't until just after this that Google began deranking
| niche sites, and social media platforms sought to keep people
| on their sites for maximum engagement.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I didn't know they ever went out
|
| I've maintained my own domain since 2010 and know plenty of
| others that still do as well
|
| My page is one of my favorite places on the internet cause it's
| in my opinion the original purpose of the internet which is to
| share your personal research and places to document and share
| personal ideas with infinite distribution.
| emschwartz wrote:
| If you're looking to put one up, try https://bearblog.dev (no
| connection, just appreciate Herman's work).
|
| It's got just the features you need, is built by a solo dev, and
| it's got a very fair split between free and paid features. I used
| it to put up my personal site and have been very happy with the
| experience.
| hackerbeat wrote:
| +1 Also, unlike search engines these days, it helps you get
| exposure.
| carabiner wrote:
| He needs to fix the "dd mm, yyyy" date format. It should be "dd
| mm yyyy" without a comma.
| loktarogar wrote:
| AI scrapes niche blogs, Google deranks or spam drowns them out.
| It's really not a good time to be starting niche blogs.
| simonw wrote:
| The most depressing thing about AI these days is seeing people
| cite it as a reason NOT to create useful content!
|
| Feels very nihilistic.
| loktarogar wrote:
| I agree!
|
| There's certainly a difference between making useful content
| for the love of it and making content because you think
| there's an opportunity to get something out of that (that
| could be money, but it could also just be appreciation or
| someone reading your work).
|
| It's demoralising to not get any views on your hard work, and
| in this economic environment it sometimes feels more worth
| your time to do any other activity.
|
| You may be the counter-proof to that and I enjoy your blog!
| But, also a lot of what makes your content useful is timing
| with depth and that's something that AI can't beat yet
| krater23 wrote:
| It's just, no one will read it, beside of some machines.
| Blogging was fun because you knows that someone is reading
| it. You had some comments under your articles. When this
| isn't there, you can just write your stuff in a paper book
| and put it in your drawer. And today, there is absolutely no
| one who will read it, or react to it. Only AI inhales the
| information and shows it without giving credit to people that
| never will hear about you. You just fill their database with
| useful data for free. Thats all.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Having everything you make stolen and fed into the AI machine
| absolutely is a good reason not to create anything useful. Or
| at least a good reason not to post it online
| baconbrand wrote:
| I don't think it's a good reason.
|
| I think it's a reason. It's certainly demoralizing.
| Plagiarism sucks and feels bad. If I were to google
| something and see the AI overview parroting my blog post,
| sort of almost kind of paraphrasing my words and shoving
| the link to my actual blog off the phone screen entirely, I
| think I would personally travel to google headquarters and
| start swinging a baseball bat.
|
| But... For starters, plagiarism has always been an issue.
| Even before the internet. Look at Tesla, or Rosalind
| Franklin. It was an issue on the internet before LLMs
| showed up. It's always been trivially easy to copy and
| paste digital information, and with a little bit of
| programming to do so at scale. Those weird SEO wordpress
| blogs with their aggregated/stolen content have been around
| forever. The web was choked full of plagiarized garbage
| years before chatgpt was an option or even an idea.
|
| Also consider that the AI machine takes a lot more than
| your stolen creative output to run. It needs tons of
| electricity poured into expensive equipment. It's not clear
| whether the "stolen data + expensive scientists + expensive
| graphics cards + metric shittons of electricity" side of
| the equation is ever going to equal "monthly rate people
| will pay for access to sort of ok almost sometimes accurate
| information (a service which has been on offer for free for
| roughly 2 years and is easy to find for free depending on
| the company/model/use case)" let alone be lower than it.
| The plagiarism is not profitable and hopefully
| unsustainable.
|
| And let's sit on "access to sort of ok almost accurate
| information" for a second here. Because I'm pretty sure
| people looking for this and people looking for a blog
| written by a real human person who they can build a
| (parasocial perhaps but still) relationship with and send
| emails to and follow for more related content are entirely
| separate demographics. Blog traffic has dropped off because
| Facebook, Instagram, etc. It was those massive sites, not
| LLMs, that gutted that part of the internet.
|
| Going back to sustainability, legal challenges to the
| plagiarism machines do still exist and have traction. The
| more creators, more bloggers and artists and programmers
| and more of anyone sharing their stuff online, the more
| people we have with a very vested stake in ending the
| plagiarism free for all.
|
| I say get in there, get creating, and get up to some
| lobbying on the side for good measure. Don't sit back and
| let a handful of spoiled nerds and obscenely wealthy old
| people ruin the joy of creating and sharing things. Maybe
| drop in more references to baseball bats to make your
| output less palatable to the monster. I don't know.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > If I were to google something and see the AI overview
| parroting my blog post, sort of almost kind of
| paraphrasing my words and shoving the link to my actual
| blog off the phone screen entirely, I think I would
| personally travel to google headquarters and start
| swinging a baseball bat.
|
| This is the only sensible reaction to the abuses that
| huge tech companies are dumping onto society.
|
| I do agree half heartedly with what you are saying.
| Making our own stuff and seeking out human-made stuff is
| more important than ever
|
| It's just demoralizing because it is now also more
| difficult than ever. It should be the norm, not the
| exception imo and to me the future looks bleak and
| soulless.
| braza wrote:
| Yes, it is. I've blogged since 2006, and after the content-
| oriented-to-SEO boom, I totally lost hope in writing online
| again. Part of me wants to write for the sake of sharing, but
| the other part thinks being a free content farm for AI is
| quite depressing.
|
| On top of that, discoverability is dead, SEO indexing for
| attribution of original works does not exist, the culture of
| rehashing content for walled gardens like LinkedIn and Medium
| is out of control, and the substackzation of writing does not
| make things optimistic.
| chemotaxis wrote:
| Bloggers write because in their value system, the result of
| this effort is a net positive. LLMs show up and, as far as
| some bloggers are concerned, turn that net positive into a
| negative. Bloggers stop blogging. That's rational behavior,
| not nihilism?
| bachmeier wrote:
| I'm not sure of your age, but I'm old enough to remember the
| days of copyright protection. The argument was that without
| copyright protection, there would be insufficient incentive
| to create content.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| No shade: you're very, very bullish on AI though, so
| naturally you wouldn't think AI should or could be a
| hinderence to well, anything? People creating content feeds
| the AI machine too, another reason to encourage blogging
| simonw wrote:
| I've written about ethical concerns with AI 232 times:
| https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-ethics/
| grayhatter wrote:
| The most depressing?
|
| More depressing than the realization how few people are able
| to evaluate the quality of something?
|
| More depressing than the number of people who proudly
| advocate for having pride in plagiarism?
|
| More depressing than the number of people who unwittingly use
| genai as an excuse to DoS sites, individuals, organic content
| ranking? (Each being their own completely diff method)
| anonnon wrote:
| > AI scrapes niche blogs
|
| And further, the LLMs will DDOS you in the process, completely
| disregarding robots.txt, so self-hosting is a pain-in-the-ass,
| forcing you to use (and trust) something like Cloudflare (or
| the Anubis, or Kiwiflare).
| tjpnz wrote:
| Is Kiwiflare available as a FOSS project?
| arjie wrote:
| Are personal blogs back? My personal blog ten years ago (even
| twenty years ago) received a lot of direct traffic on all sorts
| of things from the primary search engines and so on. Nowadays,
| the only search engine that delivers any traffic to my site is
| Kagi! Looking back, I haven't changed my style of writing very
| much, so I suspect the reality is that I've just fallen behind in
| a comparative sense. There are much better things nowadays to
| access.
|
| It's probably similar to the street-side musician. In old times,
| he may have been the only musician around you might hear.
| Nowadays, he's got to compete with a perfect recording of Hotel
| California by the Eagles.
| sowbug wrote:
| I assume that search engines these days don't care as much
| about showing results that won't make them money. Either you
| bought search ads, your site is showing ads from their network,
| or you're SOL.
| andai wrote:
| Hmm, that's pretty rough. It kind of sounds like a search
| engine should be considered public infrastructure.
|
| (Perhaps also the browser, email, etc? ;)
| krater23 wrote:
| You can install your own email server without much costs,
| so when everyone would do that we would have fewer
| problems.
| chemotaxis wrote:
| I think they do. The problem is different. It used to be that
| if you had a blog about something like guitar maintenance or
| linear algebra, that was enough to show up in the results,
| because no one else was directly competing with you.
|
| Over time, a lot of companies figured out that if they start
| posting content-farmed articles on notionally non-commercial
| topics, this drives people to their website, so you ended up
| with billions of pages like this: thecleaningauthority .
| com/blog/how-to-clean/the-ultimate-guide-to-cleaning-pillows-
| and-pillo/ (remove spaces if you really want to).
|
| And then LLMs brought down the marginal cost of cranking out
| content on any conceivable topic basically to zero, so you're
| all of sudden competing with 500 companies publishing spammy
| guitar maintenance advice. It's not that search engines
| _want_ to show that stuff, but it 's hard for them to tell.
| chairmansteve wrote:
| You may not reach the masses, but there will be an audience.
|
| I have an RSS feed of personal blogs which I really enjoy.
|
| I also refuse to go to LiveNation type concerts. I only go to
| local musicians charging $10 at the door.
|
| I don't even do it on principle. Corporate entertainment
| (including blogs) often feels formulaic to me. I find that
| Medium sucks the life out of good writers for some reason.
| ctxc wrote:
| Hi! I'd like some quick feedback - I just implemented RSS on
| my blog. ie the URL works.
|
| Am I supposed to advertise it with the icon explicitly or is
| it enough if the URL works? What do you generally look for?
| davidcollantes wrote:
| Your blog seems to be broken.
| arjie wrote:
| Huh, thank you for letting me know. What did you observe?
| It's running on a machine in my home office so it's entirely
| possible something happened for a short duration of time.
|
| I just checked in incognito on my cellular network and it
| seems to be working now. If you get the chance, I'd
| appreciate it if you'd let me know what went wrong when you
| visited it. Email in profile if you'd prefer that.
|
| Also, I was just reading _your_ blog and saw a reference to
| FutureMe.org. Man, that website really did survive. I
| searched my email for it and look at this!
|
| > _(The following is an e-mail from the past, composed on
| Wednesday, June 14, 2006, and sent via FutureMe.org)_
|
| And another where I say
|
| > _Hopefully, you have a child and everything is good and
| they are healthy. I wish you the best of luck, mate._
|
| It worked out. Thanks for the good luck, past me! :)
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| I haven't noticed a huge upswing in traffic on my personal blog
| but efforts like mastodon have led to some nice interactions. I
| think there is more sense of community and people realizing
| that blogs need to be encouraged than there was a few years
| ago. Whether this is sustainable remains to be seen.
|
| If you like this sort of thing, find a blog you like and
| contact the author to tell them you enjoy their work.
| kazinator wrote:
| Say, "personal" blogs being back wouldn't happen to have anything
| to do with being able to generate reams of text with little
| effort?
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| The Gemini protocol, which has been posted here recently, is
| pretty good for reading personal and niche blogs. Yes, yes, I
| know you don't _need_ Gemini for this, it is entirely possible
| from a technical perspective to host a minimalist personal blog
| over HTTP. But a great thing about Gemini is that there really
| isn 't that much _else_ on there, so the signal to noise ratio is
| higher. I check gemini: //warmedal.se/~antenna/ pretty regularly
| and find some interesting posts there.
| ghssds wrote:
| Lot of interresting blogs on gopher too.
| shevy-java wrote:
| We have medium.com too. I hate that.
|
| Blogging kind of was better in the past.
|
| I also remember geocities. It was kind of cool.
|
| Neocities unfortunately does not really capture that old spirit.
| It's just ... different.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| > Neocities unfortunately does not really capture that old
| spirit. It's just ... different.
|
| Geocities was used by slightly nerdy average joes while from a
| brief glance Neocities looks to be a place for Mastodon techies
| to roleplay an internet they never participated in.
| ctxc wrote:
| I do have a fairly new personal blog, but I'm not sure how
| discoverability works.
|
| It seems like you'd get traffic from search engines a few years
| back, but now the only traffic I've had is from a HN post.
|
| Everything points to optimizing for "AEO" for LLMs now
| crackalamoo wrote:
| I'm a little skeptical of AEO. What's the point if AI users
| just ask the LLM to retrieve the information and never visit
| your blog? I almost never click the links ChatGPT gives me
|
| Maybe it makes sense if you're selling a product or service,
| but I don't see the appeal of AEO as the new SEO. Maybe I'm
| missing something?
| foxfired wrote:
| I don't know about being back, but it certainly isn't dead. A few
| years back, I used to get at least 10k readers a day. That number
| went down to less than 100 a day at it's lowest, I was writing 10
| entries a year at most. Last year, I wrote just 4.
|
| One thing I failed to notice was that RSS was still active. So
| this year, I started consistently contributing, over 150 so far,
| and I see RSS picking up right where it left off [0]. A lot of my
| blog post suck, but I write them as an observation and my current
| understanding of a subject. Readers have agency to skip what they
| don't like and only read what they like.
|
| [0]: https://imgur.com/a/RSVtD1W
| ctxc wrote:
| Wow. A few questions: - I recently added RSS to my blog. The
| URL works but I don't advertise it with the icon. Should I? -
| What do you use to track traffic?
| foxfired wrote:
| I don't use the icon, but at the end of every article I have
| the "Follow me via RSS Feed" as a direct link to the RSS. As
| far as tracking the rss traffic, this graph is generated from
| my server logs. It is literally cat apache logs | grep my
| feed url | awk daily traffic | sort.
|
| Note this shows me how many RSS readers have accessed my RSS
| daily. I can't actually track each person, although I have a
| report I'm working on for the end of the year.
| simonw wrote:
| I hadn't looked at my feed subscriber stats in a while, turns
| out I had around 6,000 at the start of 2025 and I'm up to
| around 12,000 now - very healthy!
|
| I use my own server-side tracking to count them - I look out
| for the user-agent from feed software like Feedly and pull the
| number out of it: Feedly/1.0
| (+https://feedly.com/poller.html; 694 subscribers; )
|
| Here's my code for that:
| https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/blob/main/feedst...
| firefoxd wrote:
| Oof, mine says 68 for feedly. I got some catching up to do.
| I'll ask AI to draw a pelican reading RSS news.
| mythrwy wrote:
| But how will they know what they like if they haven't read it?
| Melatonic wrote:
| Kagi small web is great for discovering stuff like this. I also
| follow a few things on Substack but overall that site seems a bit
| all over the place
| mawise wrote:
| The article goes back and forth between bloggers who "are doing
| well" (ie: making money) and efforts that are non-commercial. It
| comes across as asking humanity to put more effort into writing
| and publishing in a non-profitable space while the blogging
| incentives are profit. I still think the unexplored space for
| blogging (and the LLM-proof space) is _private_ blogging--for
| friends and family. But maybe Facebook killed that space off, who
| knows.
| kevg123 wrote:
| A lot of the sites on neocities have blogs on them:
| https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=random&tag=
|
| nekoweb is another one:
| https://nekoweb.org/explore?page=1&sort=lastupd&by=tag&q=
| grahar64 wrote:
| My main advice for engineers is to write a blog. It isn't for
| anyone else it is to organize your thoughts. But should be
| presented in a way others can learn from. For a year I published
| every Tuesday morning, and that schedule made me learn so much so
| fast.
| benleejamin wrote:
| I maintain a list of interesting personal websites. There's some
| link rot, but a good number of young people maintain personal
| sites, and some of them have blogs! (college CS/design grads,
| mostly.)
|
| I don't think anyone's really optimizing for SEO. (it's not even
| really clear to me that that's very important any more.)
|
| Submissions welcome ofc :)
| https://arc.net/folder/4A220E67-674A-456D-AEDB-796B5BE82034
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| At that time, when Problogger started showing off the Google
| AdSense checks, many blogs also got "inspired," and AdSense
| became the default for blogs. I still remember getting my first
| check all the way from Mountain View, which takes about 30-40
| days to reach my home in India. I never encash that one, just
| like the few others that serve as nostalgia pieces for my Time
| Capsule: the first DCMA letter, the tiny dollar checks one gets
| from Apple settlement checks, etc. Of course, the check size grew
| pretty big, and with other ad revenue that my personal website
| brought in, it was enough for me to live a rather lavish life in
| Bombay (INDIA) in the mid-2000s.
|
| Just like Problogger, India has its own -- Digital Inspiration by
| Amit Agarwal at https://www.labnol.org
|
| In fact, a VC hinted to me that I should, or if I have the balls
| to convert my personal blog to the "Techcrunch of India" and
| become Michael Arrington. I wasn't made for that and never wanted
| to be a blogger. My blog should be a very personal space. Well,
| my personal blog became a cheesy mess of personal ramblings with
| no aim or ambition. :-)
|
| I think Kiruba Shankar attempted the closest to that one in India
| at https://www.kiruba.com and did succeed to a degree.
|
| Fortunately, my website still enjoys direct links from a few
| Patents in the USA that reference my articles as a source of
| truth, as well as a few links from Wikipedia, WordPress.org,
| Adobe, and a few other well-established websites here and there.
| Quite a few of the articles were translated into other languages,
| and I keep getting referenced. Google still sends me quite a
| handful of visits daily.
|
| I don't think niche blogs are coming back, because the moment a
| "niche blog" becomes sustainable and "profitable", it is no
| longer a niche blog. It becomes another commercial website or a
| publication.
| simonw wrote:
| Here are some reasons to start a personal blog:
|
| 1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else
| has always been the best learning tool, and writing about
| something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture
| some of that value.
|
| 2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two
| of the most important questions I have about a potential
| candidate are: Can they code? Can they communicate well? If a
| candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't
| been updated in five years that's _still_ a big boost over
| candidates with nothing like that at all. In a competitive market
| that could be the boost you need to make it from the resume
| review to the first round.
|
| 3. If you blog more frequently than that it can be a really
| valuable resource for your future self. I love being able to look
| back on what I was thinking and writing about ten years ago.
| Having a good tagging system helps with this too - I can review
| my tag of "scaling" or "postgresql" and see a timeline of how my
| understanding developed.
|
| 4. It's a great way to help establish credibility. If someone
| asks you about X and you have a blog entry about X from five
| years ago you can point them to that.
|
| 5. Building a blog is really fun! It used to be one of the
| classic starter projects for new web developers, I think that
| needs to come back. It's a fun project and one that's great to
| keep on hacking on long into the future.
|
| Notably none of the above reasons require your blog to attract
| readers! There's a ton of value to be had even if nobody actually
| reads the thing.
|
| As a general rule, assume nobody will read your blog unless you
| actively encourage them to. That's fine. What matters isn't the
| quantity of readers, it's their quality. I'd rather have a piece
| read by just a single person that leads to a new opportunity for
| me than 1,000 people who read it and never interact with me ever
| again.
|
| If you DO start to get readers things get even more valuable.
| I've been blogging since 2002 and most of the opportunities in my
| career came from people I met via blogging. Today I get invited
| to all sorts of interesting events because I have a prominent
| blog covering stuff relating to AI and LLMs.
|
| But I do honestly think that a blog is a powerful professional
| tool even if nobody else is reading it at all.
|
| If you want to give it a go I've written a few things that might
| be useful:
|
| - What to blog about: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-
| to-blog-about/ - Today I learned and write about your projects
|
| - My approach to running a link blog -
| https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/ - aka write
| about stuff you've found
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| I like Point No. 4. By now, I have enough articles to point to
| when people ask the same questions over and over. I have been
| asked, "Do you always have a blog post for these questions?"
|
| Another advice or a deduction that I learnt from reading
| biographies and many historical books is -- write as if you are
| writing for a stranger, even on your own personal
| blog/diaries/memoir -- when you get older, your younger self
| will become a stranger and you will have forgotten a lot of
| things in that life you lived.
| simonw wrote:
| I really like that. It's absolutely true, I constantly find
| older stuff on my blog that I had entirely forgotten about
| and it's always interesting to get back in touch with past-
| me.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Oh, absolutely true about finding stuff, and I go like,
| "Ah! I wrote about that." I got my search working
| (abandoned for a long time) and a list of all post archives
| just so I can find them easier.
|
| Btw, I have had a to-do item for quite a while to copy your
| blog's yearly archive link style in the footer. I haven't
| figured out a way to make it simpler and I don't have to
| deal with it for a long time. :-)
| hdjrudni wrote:
| Past-me was so dumb. Asked a lot of rookie questions. It's
| the one little piece of evidence that _maybe_ I have
| actually learned a little something in the past 10 years.
| spankibalt wrote:
| "[...] write as if you are writing for a stranger, even on
| your own personal blog/diaries/memoir -- when you get older,
| your younger self will become a stranger and you will have
| forgotten a lot of things in that life you lived."
|
| How bizarre. Well, memory spaces are just that, I suppose. I
| write diaries and letters since before I entered school and
| my younger self does feel anything but a stranger to me; many
| of my memories are as lucid to me as they were all those
| decades ago, both life-changing as well as trivial ones.
| setopt wrote:
| Depends on the person, I suppose? I have some strong
| memories from decades ago, but most of my normal memories
| of events fade within 5 years or so. The memories I do have
| from a decade ago are certainly not lucid but a bit blurry
| and sparse on details. I often wish I remembered better.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| > Depends on the person, I suppose?
|
| Probably. In my case long-term memory seems to be really
| strong down male side of my family so when I read my old
| stuff from 20+ years ago I remember it and know it was
| me, just a little different like 'damn, we don't wear
| clothes like that anymore' when you look at old pictures.
| The styles/culture/times change you are in and so you
| adapt to them, but you are still you. I hear this
| commonly though that some people don't feel like the old
| them is same person at all.
|
| For me: I have felt a continual sense of self since
| around kindergarten, before that memory is a little
| episodic (my earliest is going to hospital to visit my
| mom and sister after she was born, when I was age 2) but
| I feel the same 'me' in memories from kindergarten til
| now over 30 years later. I also do stuff like pick up and
| start reading a book, put it down, and then go back and
| finish from where I left off 3-4 years later. I've met a
| few other people that do that as well, but it's a little
| uncommon I think?
|
| On the flip side my working memory has always been really
| bad. My attachment to memory blanks under stress, some
| people will relate in things like public speaking. I
| remember in high school forgetting entire marching band
| drill one time and having to improvise because I stress
| blanked. The memory is there when this happens it's like
| it stops streaming to RAM, intuition takes over based on
| what it sees not what is known.
|
| What is incredibly useful, and this I always felt is for
| personal writing only (diary/journal)... writing allows
| for capturing a state of your own thinking/feelings at a
| time. I would often write to myself when major events
| happened (good or bad) and then later on I could
| interpret from the strong feelings what I was going
| through and see if I handled them or could handle them
| better. You don't need editing passes for this, it should
| capture your raw state. Probably good to do this if your
| memories fade as well, but I don't know. I will probably
| burn some of my old writing, things that have served
| their purpose. Apparently it makes you feel relieved
| doing it and some cultures have this concept.
| ghaff wrote:
| Sites like this one really emphasize monetization. Natural I
| suppose since it's startup-focused. But people used to be fine
| with blogs not having a monetary element at all.
| HeinzStuckeIt wrote:
| I wonder how much of that mercenary approach to blogging
| today resulted ultimately from the 2008 crisis. It feels like
| there was less pressure to make ends meet, and consequently
| no pressure to hustle, before that. And maybe it is also the
| influencer self-branding culture of Instagram being seen as
| the default internet, so when people do alt-internet things
| they carry over those same values knowingly or unknowingly.
| biztos wrote:
| Additional factors that come to mind: the slow realization
| that you could be writing for an audience of one (yourself)
| after a brief surge of "famous bloggers"; and the rise of
| other forms of writing (social media, etc) that at least
| give you the illusion of an immediate audience. "Engagement
| metrics" and so on -- even if they represent the opposite
| of attention.
|
| I think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes
| elsewhere, but doesn't necessarily stay bottled up in the
| mind of the would-have-been blogger. Even while pseudo-
| blogging platforms like Substack are having something of an
| upswing of esoteric low-audience content.
|
| And I can say from experience that it's tough keeping a
| blog going when you have near-zero readership, even if you
| still consider the act of writing something and putting it
| out in public to be instrinsically valuable to you.
|
| Just as a simple example, I have a once-in-a-while
| newsletter+blog on a niche topic, and I could get way more
| eyeballs if I'd just rephrase things as a Reddit post, but
| I'm nostalgic about it living its own life on the Free-ish
| Web. Or, I suppose, this comment right here, which could
| just as well be on a personal blog with a "backlink" to
| yours.
| ghaff wrote:
| >I think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes
| elsewhere
|
| That's been true of me. A paragraph or three that I would
| once have done as a blog now slip neatly and easily into
| social media of various sorts. Going to try to do
| something about that next year but this year ended up
| crazy for various reasons.
| HeinzStuckeIt wrote:
| Social media might be getting less attractive for that,
| though. Compare Reddit now to ten years ago, and you can
| see that even on more serious subreddits, everyone's
| comments have become very short, often little more than a
| single line. If one posts a couple of solid paragraphs as
| a reply, one looks like an autistic weirdo info-bombing.
| ghaff wrote:
| There's certainly a general trend towards shorter. At my
| last company, I was involved with our content folks (and
| created a fair bit myself). In the course of my time
| there, longer (say 3,000 word) whitepapers basically went
| away and most of the other content such as video almost
| universally got shorter based on monitoring what content
| people viewed/read and for how long.
| bluebarbet wrote:
| >If one posts a couple of solid paragraphs as a reply,
| one looks like an autistic weirdo info-bombing.
|
| As one should. The rando who spams a discussion thread
| with an impenetrable wall of text is like that guy who
| uses their "question" at the end of an in-person panel
| discussion to ramble incoherently for three minutes. Yes,
| here we can scroll past it, but it's still presumptious
| and annoying. This is not _primary content_ (that 's at
| the top). Here we're all nobodies to everyone else. For
| my part I try to remember that fact - and get to the
| point.
| bccdee wrote:
| > This is not primary content
|
| In a forum, the discussion IS primary content. That's the
| problem: Reddit has shifted away from being a discussion
| forum toward an endless-scroll content feed.
|
| > Here we're all nobodies to everyone else. For my part I
| try to remember that fact - and get to the point.
|
| Kind of an odd turn of logic. If being a nobody devalues
| your anecdotes or tangents, then it equally devalues your
| point. If, conversely, your point can be valuable in and
| of itself, then your anecdotes and tangents can be
| valuable in and of themselves too.
|
| > Yes, here we can scroll past it, but [...] This is not
| primary content (that's at the top).
|
| Incidentally, you don't have to scroll past anything to
| reach the content at the top of the page. It's at the top
| of the page.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > And I can say from experience that it's tough keeping a
| blog going when you have near-zero readership, even if
| you still consider the act of writing something and
| putting it out in public to be instrinsically valuable to
| you.
|
| There are other ways to monetize, which doesn't depend on
| a lot of eyeballs. If you write high quality niche
| content and sell related products or services, then each
| eye ball can be worth a lot.
| SunlitCat wrote:
| That's a trend I've noticed as well over the past few years.
| It somehow feels like it's becoming increasingly "important"
| to make money from whatever you do on the internet. The idea
| that you can just create things because you enjoy it, or
| because you want to share what you've made with others in the
| hope that they might like it and offer interesting feedback,
| seems to be fading away.
|
| I mean, I get it: the economic situation is tough for many
| people, and earning money matters. But the focus on creating
| something simply for the sake of sharing it seems to be
| disappearing more and more.
| HeinzStuckeIt wrote:
| I have seen it said in hacker circles that people in their
| teens and twenties now are not just more reluctant to share
| stuff for free like FOSS, but they are even outright
| suspicious of such endeavors. To a generation who grew up
| on platforms and apps that maximize engagement for maximum
| profit, a community that doesn't do that looks like a bunch
| of weirdos, maybe a cult.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not sure I've seen that personally although most of
| the tech folk I know are at least somewhat older.
|
| In fairness, I do think "side hustles" and the like have
| become much more normalized as the default. And even if
| the odds are poor, there are least enough anecdotes of
| Substack authors, influencers, and the like making enough
| money to perk many people's interest.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I suppose if I were younger that might be of interest. I'm
| not looking for opportunities at this point. I live in a
| small town, I have probably one of the best (local) tech jobs
| I've ever had, not strictly on pay but the pay is enough and
| the overall chill level and quality of life is something I
| would not give up.
|
| I've sometimes thought about blogging but for what? I'm not
| interested in promoting myself or my "brand" and I can't
| write about anything that someone else with much deeper
| expertise hasn't already written about.
| bikelang wrote:
| My blog is probably more detrimental to my "brand" than
| helpful. I also couldn't care less about the self-promotion
| or monetization aspect or anything of that sort. I find
| writing and the act of creating to be a type of catharsis.
| I write exclusively for me.
|
| If you feel the occasional urge to blog - maybe just be
| self indulgent about it? I get a strange sense of
| satisfaction from twiddling with the CSS on a rainy
| afternoon. Just my random 2p that nobody asked for :)
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| Struggle quite a bit to share hobby interest via anything
| including instagram. Might try this. Back to date of html 1.0
| and gopher ...
|
| I still sad about my favorite go to photography blog was gone
| dark because of the vendor is sort of gone I guess. Might be we
| have to live with Buddha worldview - nothing is permanent.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Jesus - writing will do you good. Start out with reading back
| what you wrote.
| devsda wrote:
| This is all true but I'm not sure about establishing
| credibility with a blog, especially when an LLM can help fudge
| the details.
|
| I like your idea of blogging about TILs. There are shallow
| posts about TILs(plenty on medium) and then there are posts
| that mention TILs along with specific gotchas they faced and
| workarounds on the topic. Those saved me hours of
| searching/debugging on couple of occasions and I'm glad that
| they did that.
| voxleone wrote:
| You are mostly right. But I suspect that a good writer will
| remain good [or even better] with LLM's. In my experience the
| bad ones are detected immediately.
| ksec wrote:
| My biggest problem so far is with cost. I dont like recurring
| fees. I could pay a one-time fee for say 100 pages and last an
| eternality ( or 50 years or something ). I also dont like
| subscription, and it has nothing to do with subscription
| fatigue, it is just the way I manage my money since before
| Youtube or Netflix took off.
|
| And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I
| use HN comments as more like a blog post.
| jjude wrote:
| I blog using 11ty and host with netlify. No cost. There are
| gitlab pages, github pages and so many different options to
| blog for free.
| jszymborski wrote:
| Codeberg or GitHub pages are free. For static website
| hosting, NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is... well... nearly free.
|
| https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing
| tinix wrote:
| sdf is great! https://sdf.org/?faq?WEB
| thombles wrote:
| HTTPS ain't cheap though.
| seszett wrote:
| What do you mean? I don't think HTTPS is a paying feature
| of sdf, and HTTPS is otherwise free thanks to let's
| encrypt.
| thombles wrote:
| MetaARPA tier membership (quarterly fee) is required to
| have HTTPS on your personal website - personal sites
| hosted on the main BSD cluster don't have it.
| brabel wrote:
| Netlify is also a good free option for non techies since
| you can just drag a directory to deploy it. I've also used
| Cloudfare Pages.
| jjgreen wrote:
| Likewise for GitLab, and a "nice" url <username>.gitlab.io
| simonw wrote:
| GitHub Pages gives you a neat URL - yourname.github.io - and
| is free forever and even lets you run GitHub Actions for free
| to operate a static site builder.
| runningmike wrote:
| "Free" is not free. The dependency on MS should be
| evaluated for you as user and for your visitors ..
| ghaff wrote:
| There are always dependencies to various degrees.
| kistu_ wrote:
| You could publish it as an onion service! Apart from keeping
| your computer running and an active internet connection,
| there isn't any other recurring cost.
| al_borland wrote:
| I recently setup a little blog on tilde.club. They had a
| built I blogging tool in the CLI, but I wasn't a huge fan. It
| gives some hosting space as well and supports php, so I vibe
| coded a little something that lets me throw markdown files
| with a date as the file name into a folder. Once created, it
| posts to the blog. Right now it's just one long running page
| (and individual posts can be viewed/linked). I'm debating
| between adding an archive or just only showing a certain
| number of posts and letting them age out (unless linking to
| the specific post). I also have php generating an RSS feed
| based on the markdown files, so they just works without any
| fuss.
|
| Of course my biggest issue is that I have started and deleted
| more blogs than I can count, so I don't have any useful
| history, like I would if I would have stuck with one thing
| for the last 20 years.
| kukkeliskuu wrote:
| I use GitHub Pages for personal blogs. Connect it with your
| personal domain name in case later you want to run it
| somewhere else.
| mrec wrote:
| I do this too (not the personal domain bit) but one thing
| to be aware of is that Google doesn't seem to index these
| sites unless you feed it each URL manually. Doesn't
| autodiscover, doesn't read a submitted sitemap.
|
| Not a showstopper for me since I don't expect anyone to be
| interested anyway, but might be for some.
| graemep wrote:
| Given the tiny cost of running a blog, especially if you
| have a domain name, is it worth the saving? Its not even
| much work if you use a static site builder.
| kukkeliskuu wrote:
| Reliability? It took me around 15 minutes to create a
| site with Claude Code using GitHub Pages with custom
| domain and somebody else is taking care that it is always
| running. What is the alternative?
| graemep wrote:
| Shared hosting still exists which means someone else will
| take care of a static site very cheap.
|
| You could use Claude, or you could use one of many static
| site builders.
| nathias wrote:
| I have supabase for data and cloudflare for hosting, its all
| free
| efilife wrote:
| neocities is free
| bell-cot wrote:
| Isn't Wordpress hosting still free, at
| [something_unique].wordpress.com?
|
| Biggest downside I know of: Wordpress is too much learning
| curve & overhead for a simple personal blog.
| ksec wrote:
| Thank You! This lead to me login and rediscover I actually
| had a blog 15 years ago.
|
| The thing that stopped me was much like what you said,
| learning curve and too much friction. Right now I have
| bearblog, mataroa.blog and nicheless, all with their own
| strength and flaws.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Biggest downside I know of: Wordpress is too much learning
| curve & overhead for a simple personal blog.
|
| That was the conclusion I came to when I was muddling
| through various options last year. I had a Blogger blog
| already and decided to just roll in whatever professional
| content I wanted to add, which was the right solution for
| me. It helped that various folks I knew didn't bother
| having hard boundaries behind personal and professional
| content and that worked for me as well.
| flpm wrote:
| In Digital Ocean you can host up to 3 static sites for free,
| includes HTTPS, your own domain names and automatic
| deployment from GitHub repos. Look for their "app platform"
|
| https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-
| depl...
| ghaff wrote:
| Believe it or not, Blogger still exists and is free. I did
| some research when I was looking to spin up a blog for
| professional purposes. I ended up just rolling it into my
| personal blog though, for various reasons, I haven't done a
| lot with it yet. Project for the new year.
|
| You can hate on Google all you like but it hasn't been killed
| by Google yet and has been a long time--and is simple,
| adequate, and free even if it doesn't handle all the more
| advanced use cases.
| philip1209 wrote:
| Or put a Mac mini in your living room:
| https://www.contraption.co/a-mini-data-center/
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| I enjoy having a place to write that I can call my own, and it
| is a major flex when a topic comes up for a client like, say,
| migrating giant Subversion projects to Git, and I can whip out
| [1] and say "ah, I happen to know a thing or two about that".
|
| [1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/reposurgeon/
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Do you use AI to write content nowadays? Or to review and
| format it?
| simonw wrote:
| I don't let AI write for me. I have a "proof reader" which I
| use - it's a Claude project with these custom instructions:
|
| > You are a proof reader for posts about to be published.
|
| > 1. Identify for spelling mistakes and typos
|
| > 2. Identify grammar mistakes
|
| > 3. Watch out for repeated terms like "It was interesting
| that X, and it was interesting that Y"
|
| > 4. Spot any logical errors or factual mistakes
|
| > 5. Highlight weak arguments that could be strengthened
|
| > 6. Make sure there are no empty or placeholder links
|
| I do occasionally use an LLM to reformat data - "turn this
| screenshot into a Markdown list" kind of thing.
|
| I had it write me an HTML price comparison table for this
| post: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/18/gemini-3/#pricing
| - here's how: https://chatgpt.com/share/6921b10b-0124-8006-93
| 56-8e32f6335b... - I carefully checked the numbers before I
| published it!
| ghaff wrote:
| The only time I used AI for writing was when I was cleaning
| up some reference architectures and needed some fairly
| boilerplate text for the intro background. But basically
| don't really use AI; maybe if I did more coding these days.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I don't see the point in using AI to blog. If I want to read
| what AI has to say about a topic, I'll just ask the AI
| directly.
| Sverigevader wrote:
| Great comment! I was inspired by this article
| https://every.to/superorganizers/how-to-build-a-learning-mac...
| about Simon Eskildsen, which led me to his blog
| https://sirupsen.com/, which then led me to create
| https://juliusrobert.site for myself. It's not a traditional
| blog per se but it checks some boxes and I have the same quote
| as you do here as a reason to do this
| https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/#writing-abo...
| cbzbc wrote:
| What are people using to edit entries - because while markdown
| is fine, a lot of the time I want to be able to drag in
| screenshots, snippets of other documents like rfcs and so on.
| So it ends up being easier to make those notes for myself
| rather than push them into anything publishable.
| qouteall wrote:
| You can use Obsidian to edit markdown. Obsidian allows easy
| paste of images.
| cbzbc wrote:
| Is there a Obsidian -> Hugo/Zola/Jekyll thing that's
| relatively robust?
| sathyabhat wrote:
| Quartz might be that. https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/
| bbkane wrote:
| https://typora.io/ allows pasting images into markdown. I
| use it for my Zola blog.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| About point 2: I have yet to have a job interview, in which the
| interviewer has even taken a look at my website. Well, actually
| I don't know that, of course, but what I want to say is, that
| none so far showed any sign or indication of having taken a
| look, and as a consequence also no sign or indication of
| knowing anything about any of my showcased projects. In 95% of
| the cases it was just that they want to do their one thing,
| their one test, and not consider the candidate as a person at
| all. No time for that these days, I guess.
| synergy20 wrote:
| or the job market is too crowded due to recent layoffs
| flpm wrote:
| Also a hiring manager. I always do. For me a good personal
| site is a huge step towards a phone interview. I look for
| things people do not because anyone told them to do (college
| projects, internships, work), but because they were excited
| about it. That initiative and excitement is what will set you
| apart from the other 100 resumes that look exactly like
| yours.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I hope you can "infect" others with this kind of view, so
| that more people adopt it.
|
| My CV currently also includes a link to my repositories and
| a page briefly describing some projects that got anywhere.
| Far from all of my 100 or so personal free time projects
| get finished, but some do, and those are described and
| linked in my CV and on my website.
|
| At least I do get interviews, which must mean at least
| something, and sometimes it's just the role that is not
| fitting. Often it is their tech stack and they do not
| believe in engineers learning things on the job, looking
| for a perfect match. Sometimes it was some test that they
| do, that presumes some knowledge about some library or that
| is some specific leetcode thingy, that I wouldn't code that
| way anyway, if I had the choice.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Please no, I don't want people making blogs just because
| they want to get a job from it at some point, they should
| be making blogs because they love to blog.
|
| Imagine everyone having some cookie cutter blog, just a
| standard part of a resume.
| ozim wrote:
| Just look how it goes with GitHub everyone has some BS
| repos and then also they spam projects to get
| contributions for CVs.
|
| Hacktober was the worst but I think it went away because
| of BS spam contributions.
|
| CVE and in general security issues reporting has this
| issue nowadays where everyone wants to get CVE on their
| name to have it for CV. It is worst stuff ever.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| At least pre AI it was easy to identify if a blog was
| done due to interest or for self advertisment.
|
| I haven't been recruiting recently but goes it's even
| simpler to identify blogs full of loveless AI slop and
| people who care about a topic. (Even if they use AI for
| language assistance etc)
|
| Topics, which details being presented, frequency, ...
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| what kind of companies do you work for?
| miketery wrote:
| That's a good signal for you. When you find the person who
| did look you will know they stand out.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Only question is, how long I can comfortably hold out, not
| doing a shitty job, until I see that signal flaring up,
| because they seem far and few between, so far. It might
| also just be a Germany thing, this kind of hiring, that is
| blind to the genuinely curious and creative people.
| Joeboy wrote:
| I do. I find interviewing pretty awkward and am happier if I
| can find something interesting to talk about. I'm bad at
| maintaining my own blog though.
| taude wrote:
| That's wild. I first typically LinkedIn search someone, and
| then web search someone, even before I get too deep into the
| resume (they've already been filtered and ranked for me).
|
| In the past I got a job I had for 8 years through my blog, a
| startup that eventually sold....
|
| So, it's been pretty good for me, and doesn't actually take
| that much extra effort on top of the learning you do daily
| working in tech.
| rustystump wrote:
| You likely are interviewing at big companies. I have worked
| across the industry and the smaller the team the more they
| look at my website work etc. some even asked about game
| reviews on my blog during the interview.
|
| However, even at big companies it can be useful depending on
| context but you have to bring it up in relation to why you
| are a fit for the job. Genuine enthusiasm goes a long way
| especially in the dry corporate world.
| fabianholzer wrote:
| I'm involved in screening CVs and interviewing candidates. If
| there is so much as a email adress that indicates a personal
| domain, I look it up to see whether behind it there might be
| something like a personal website. When the CV is good and
| Github repositories etc. are mentioned I also take a brief
| glance there. But indeed, it is very rather rare that I make
| the content a part of the interview.
| isodev wrote:
| And it's very easy to start with something that is also
| "social":
|
| - https://write.as - a https://writefreely.org instance that
| also syncs with Mastodon, so people can see/discover/subscribe/
| comment on your posts without extra hassle of setting up
| comments or other privacy invading tools.
|
| - https://bearblog.dev - just text, very simple and quick to
| get started.
| geekamongus wrote:
| I started following your blog when you were like, 14. Cool to
| see you here. I've kept up my blog for 25 years, and you were
| an inspiration along the way.
| spragl wrote:
| 6. It is good training for your communication skills.
|
| But write it yourself, dont let LLMs do it. Otherwise forget
| the sixth reason.
| simonw wrote:
| Yes!
|
| Good written communication is one of the key skills needed at
| the senior / staff engineer level. Blogging is a great way to
| exercise those skills.
| rr808 wrote:
| > 1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone
| else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about
| something with an audience in mind is an effective way to
| capture some of that value.
|
| ugh, I hate this. Often when doing a search for how to do
| something I get 100 beginner blogs that cover the absolute
| basics but have no depth. People who know what they're doing
| are drowned out.
| simonw wrote:
| The solution to that problem is to boost the people who write
| the most useful stuff. Blogging is a great way to do that!
|
| Here's a few of my recent link blog posts that exist purely
| to boost great writing about technology:
|
| - https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/21/dependency-cooldowns/
|
| - https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/13/nano-banana-can-be-
| pro...
|
| - https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/11/scaling-hnsws/
| wkat4242 wrote:
| The problem for me is, wordpress is a security disaster
| especially the plugins. I don't want to constantly worry about
| updating in time. One day too late and you can be screwed. I've
| seen it happen with other people.
|
| I'm a huge fan of self hosting but internet facing stuff I
| don't want to run myself but all the commercial blogging
| services like medium have scummy tracking and analytics built
| in, or try to get my readers to subscribe to things.
|
| Then I tried substack but they lean too heavily on the
| "newsletter" paradigm which I hate. Also they are starting to
| enshittify now too.
|
| I don't mind paying for a service but they always want to
| double dip in tracking readers and selling subscriptions to
| them as well. Yuck.
| caseyohara wrote:
| This is where static site generators can be a good option.
| I'm in the same boat. I don't have any appetite for self
| hosting and maintaining some internet-facing application with
| a web server and a database and a million dependencies in
| between. So for my personal site, I generate it locally and
| stick the static files on S3. No database, no servers, no
| headache.
| simonw wrote:
| Yeah, static site generators solve _so many_ of these
| problems. There 's a lot less that can go wrong if your
| hosting is entirely static files out of S3 or Cloudflare or
| nginx or similar.
| bostik wrote:
| Or as in my case, lighttpd, with all its CGI, user-input
| processing or dynamic execution modules not even loaded.
|
| Makes for an attack surface that gets delightfully close
| to zero.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Agree, static HTML seems the only thing that is at all
| future-proof. Any hosted blog or platform will have the
| risk of shutting down or abandonment but if your source is
| HTML you can host that anywhere, with little setup. Even so
| I'd keep my posts in a text-based precursor format such as
| Markdown or Org-Mode. I don't think HTML is going away soon
| but it's not inconceivable.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Seems like "you like to write and expect to enjoy it" should be
| high on the list.
| hlassiege wrote:
| This post really resonates with me, especially points 1, 3, and
| 5. I started blogging in 2001. I have old articles lying around
| that are completely obsolete - about PEAR, Swing, GWT,
| Subversion, etc.
|
| I did it to share without having any idea who was reading or
| not. Probably nobody back then.
|
| But it became a habit. Beyond tech topics, I started blogging
| about broader subjects: organization, hiring, salaries, company
| building.
|
| And it's incredible how much I relied on it later as a sort of
| documentation, especially for everything related to company
| building. It's so valuable to re-read why we made certain
| decisions in the past. And it's also so valuable to be able to
| point new colleagues to that knowledge base.
|
| And technically, I had fun. I went through Joomla, self-hosted
| WordPress, wordpress.com. I built my own plugins. Then I
| developed my own open source static blog generator
| (bloggrify.com) in the Nuxt ecosystem. That's when I created an
| English version of my blog.
|
| Then I started feeling the need to share differently. I had the
| impression that blogging was becoming outdated, that younger
| generations weren't reading anymore. So I tried video format on
| YouTube.
|
| I really enjoyed video production - there's still so much to
| learn: equipment, techniques, new tools.
|
| But I realized that each format has its pros and cons. It's so
| much easier to update text when it becomes obsolete. It's also
| so much faster to produce. Video is so hard to make. So I got
| back into writing and even took it further by creating a
| blogging platform (writizzy.com).
|
| In short, I learned a lot because I documented everything I
| did, which forced me to dig deeper into each topic to avoid
| saying nonsense. I also learned a lot because I wanted to test
| approaches, make videos, learn to build a static site generator
| and many other things, purely for the sake of learning.
|
| Today, one piece of advice I give to every senior dev is to
| take the time to write. Doesn't matter if it's to publish
| somewhere or not. But to lay out your ideas, dig deeper into
| them, get perspective.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| There are just not enough ways to discover personal blogs.
|
| HN is a great source, but you'll notice over time there are
| always AskHN posts asking something like "What is a site like HN
| for..", and people trying to build HN clones.
|
| Reddit was good for a while for this, but hasn't been for a long
| time.
|
| I'm hoping people rediscover/reinvent slashdot.
| simonw wrote:
| If you blog I think it's really important to develop a habit of
| linking to _other people 's_ blogs. That's how blog discovery
| used to work back in the 200xs and it can still work
| effectively today.
| HeinzStuckeIt wrote:
| If you mean creating a blogroll to show other blogs you
| recommend, that is no longer so effective now that mobile
| phones are most of the world's default interface to the
| internet. Themes for common blogging platforms like Wordpress
| generally hide the sidebar, blogrolls included, on mobile.
| simonw wrote:
| No not a blog roll - more a link blog or a habit of linking
| back to pieces you found relevant or interesting.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| Agreed on this. Blogrolls are okay for people wandering
| the blogosphere but you only get so much from "check out
| this peer of mine". Topical links (here is another
| informative post about x) are much nicer for a reader who
| is already reading about x. And link blogs are great
| because they endorse specific content from someone.
| immibis wrote:
| Like this page: https://www.immibis.com/outlinks/
|
| It's just a list of hyperlinks to other sites with brief
| descriptions. I think it's a good idea and everyone should
| create one on their small website.
| gibsonsmog wrote:
| Everyday we get a little closer to web rings and I'm here for
| it
| tclancy wrote:
| Next someone invent RSS and feed readers and the circle of
| life can continue!
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| There's https://kagi.com/smallweb
| raincole wrote:
| The animated basketball makes me dislike this page instantly.
| Amazing how much attention a 30px height can rob from the
| main content.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| Noone uses Kagi.... compared to the big engines.
| pajamasam wrote:
| You don't have to use Kagi's search engine in order to use
| Small Web.
| AlexAplin wrote:
| Cloudhiker is pretty healthy as a StumbleUpon revival. I've
| found lots of great personal blogs and sites across a lot of
| categories through it. https://cloudhiker.net/
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| Marginalia is great. Also take a look at
| https://outerweb.org/explore
| postalcoder wrote:
| Try hcker.news' small web filter[0], which uses Kagi's small
| web list[1] to show a hacker news timeline that consists only
| of personal blogs.
|
| It works really well if you're looking for a cozier timeline.
|
| 0: https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true
|
| 1: https://kagi.com/smallweb
| soiltype wrote:
| This is really cool, thanks!
| postalcoder wrote:
| Glad you like it!
| emschwartz wrote:
| I built Scour to help me sift through noisy sources like HN
| Newest. For each article in my Scour feed, I can click the Show
| Feeds button to find what other sources that post shows up in.
| I've found that to be quite a nice way of discovering people's
| blogs that I wouldn't have found otherwise.
|
| You can also scour all 14,000+ sources for posts that match
| your interests.
|
| https://scour.ing
| BruceEel wrote:
| While we are here, may I ask what are some blogs you guys read
| regularly? (Regularly as in: going back to read new articles as
| opposed to a one-off link shared on some other platform.)
| lenkite wrote:
| I really wish someone came up with an reddit alternative -
| perhaps stick to STEM + lifestyle topics only to keep things
| free of national/international politics - and thus free of
| interference/censorship.
| nelsonfigueroa wrote:
| Yeah there could be better ways but I've found a handful of
| sites that are useful like https://indieblog.page/. I actually
| wrote up a list of my favorite personal blog discoverability
| sites here: https://nelson.cloud/how-i-discover-new-blogs/
| raffael_de wrote:
| > A list of all sites indexed by Kagi Small Web is on GitHub:
| https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/main/smallweb.tx.
| ..
|
| As a Kagi customer I have to say that's a disappointingly
| short list and static approach :/
| wiether wrote:
| A a Kagi customer I have to say that finding the Small Web
| list "disappointingly short" is kinda hilarious
| raffael_de wrote:
| If you consider how huge the web is then 23887 websites
| is not covering a small but a tiny part. Also the
| approach of maintaining such a list manually seems fairly
| uninspired.
| immibis wrote:
| If you just go by the number of websites, most websites
| are promotional slop though. The top 23887 websites that
| are actually good probably covers a large part of the
| subset of the internet that's actually good.
|
| Anyway, Kagi Small Web is not a list of websites but a
| list of RSS feeds.
| yoz-y wrote:
| I just follow people on Mastodon and read stuff they link.
| zingar wrote:
| What are your servers and or people to follow? My mastodon
| timeline is a wasteland
| ghaff wrote:
| Bluesky isn't the Twitter of old but it's at least
| something. I gave Mastodon a spin for a while but it's
| pretty desolate in my experience.
| yoz-y wrote:
| I'm on a small boutique instance. I guess the trick is to
| follow somebody who reposts stuff from people around.
| fsflover wrote:
| https://wiby.me
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| My search engine has some not-very-obvious tools for exploring
| the link graph, that will occasionally turn up interesting
| things.
|
| Similarity navigation: https://marginalia-
| search.com/site/simonwillison.net
|
| Backlinks: https://marginalia-
| search.com/site/simonwillison.net?view=li...
| bryanhogan wrote:
| Something cool I noticed while living in South Korea is that
| Naver Blog is very popular and a large amount of people use it,
| either writing content or looking up content for recommendations,
| e.g. where to go when travelling.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I was around when the blog got invented and I never felt the
| need. Now I am starting to. Even if no one reads it, it is still
| a better way to organise my thoughts and at least celebrate my
| own achievements like I would want to without the suffering
| modern social media.
| unsungNovelty wrote:
| I wrote about it when I started as well:
|
| Why do I host a website? -
| https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/11/2019/why-do-i-host-a-...
|
| And state of blogging:
| https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2024/life-of-a-blog-b...
|
| I started this journey from scratch. Despite not pushing for
| numbers and regular schedule, my website still have 20k viewers
| since I added analytics (didn't have analytics for 2 years in the
| beginning). That might be a small number for most, but it means
| that there are people who want to read what I write. That is all
| that matters. Atleast to me.
| brynet wrote:
| I guess mine is more blog-lite? It's a mix of microblogging (an
| embedded view of the rss feed for my mastodon) as well as some
| static-HTML blog articles below that.
|
| https://brynet.ca/
|
| https://brynet.ca/article-x395.html
| taneq wrote:
| How much more niche can you get than a personal blog? It's
| literally about the smallest number of people you can get.
| khet wrote:
| I've been curating some of the last few personal blogs in one
| place for a couple years now (http://boredreading.com).
|
| It always makes me happy to see more people bring back blogging.
| I hate that everything is on platforms like substack, and would
| much rather see a million wordpress or ghost installs.
| grayhatter wrote:
| Wow, I really wanted to like this site. The domain name is
| perfect. But it's a sad example of what's wrong with the web.
|
| The top 25% is the nav bar, ok, maybe that's reasonable? the
| next 25% is a "new here", please join upsell. The next 20% is
| another upsell, please give me your email so I can spam you.
| The bottom 35% is tags, and the bottom 25% is finally links...
| but they're mostly covered by another upsell. Holy shit!
|
| And to top it all off, even with uBo enable there's a full
| sceen popup/modal add dimming the whole page, begging me to let
| them help me with my overwhelming debt.
|
| WTF is wrong with people who do this stuff?!
| moralestapia wrote:
| What I'd really like to see is blogrings back!
|
| Here's mine (but barely incomplete drafts, I started it last
| week): blog.moralestapia.com
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| Creating a blog is like a fart in the wind. You have to do
| everything. Marketing, dissemination etc etc. Good luck. Do not
| feed the AI overlords for nothing.
| jjude wrote:
| I have been blogging since 2003. My reasons,learning, and rewards
| and why I still blog:
|
| - It is a personal blog = 1st audience is me. Best self-
| improvement investment I made - I blog for my present self: I
| blog about what I read, what I'm thinking about a topic, what I
| learned etc. But also I blog for my future self: the trends I'm
| noticing, how I should prepare and I am preparing - Since it is a
| personal blog, sometimes I blog about books I read, sermons I
| preach, technical notes. All mixed up. - This year got about 40k
| YTD traffic, which is not bad for a personal blog. Highest
| traffic came for my post on openwebui.
|
| Benefits I've seen: - I am not selling anything or running ads.
| So there are no first order monetization - Since I blog about
| topics that matter to me (career, tech trends), I already have a
| clear thinking on those topics. So when they come up for
| discussions, I am able to speak clearly and with depth. That has
| landed me in promotions, faster career growth, coaching
| opportunities, and more - People share my blog post when certain
| topics come up for discussion. This has increased my influence
| and their respect towards me.
|
| If you are interested to see how my blog has changed over time, I
| have kept a changelog: https://www.jjude.com/changelog/
| flpm wrote:
| I love the idea of a personal site/blog changelog!
| lightveil wrote:
| the problem I always have with starting a personal blog is that-I
| want to write about my projects, but I also want to write about
| introspective life things. And I'm always fearful that
| introspective life things would detract (perhaps significantly,
| if they are too revealing) from employers/etc looking at me as a
| potential hire. This is not so much about politics (I don't find
| a strident need to blog about my political opinions (yet?)), but
| just writing about friends, life events, what I thinka bout
| those, etc.
|
| I've thought about two potential ways of getting around this:
|
| 1. Maintain two separate blogs, one professional, one personal,
| make the personal blog pseudonymous, and put all the things I
| don't want employers to see over there. This seems fine, but also
| feels like too much work in practice? (perhaps the work is just
| of selecting where to put the post after I'm done writing it,
| though.) 2. Maintain one blog, and not care about market hire or
| anything like that. This...would work, but I'm not sure about
| potential bad effects because of this. I could just choose to
| write completely pseudonymously instead. I'm not sure.
| cube00 wrote:
| Start with two, you can always merge them later.
|
| > This seems fine, but also feels like too much work in
| practice?
|
| Once you've finished procrastinating on your perfect stack to
| run/generate the blog, it's easy to set up a second.
| peterspath wrote:
| I have done the second way. I have split it up in categories,
| so people can subscribe to different categories rss feeds if
| they don't want the whole feed. I have ~1000 daily readers now.
| With all kinds of interests.
| crackalamoo wrote:
| My two cents: if you're not doing anything too political or
| controversial, it's fine or even beneficial to mix in the
| occasional personal essay with the professional.
|
| After all, many of your readers are also human beings with
| lives, maybe even lives similar to yours based on your
| professional content. (The rest of your readers are LLMs.) Your
| readers might appreciate your perspectives on random life
| things or just getting to see what their favorite blogger is up
| to.
| wonger_ wrote:
| I feel similarly. Sometimes I feel like spinning up an
| anonymous account on bearblog.dev or matatora.blog where I can
| write freely without any hassle. For now, though, I have a
| microblog section as a secondary stream that mixes tech with
| low-stakes, personal, non-tech bits (music, pictures,
| showerthoughts, etc).
| wiether wrote:
| > I could just choose to write completely pseudonymously
| instead.
|
| That's the route I decided to choose when I started my
| professional career. I already had a personal (pseudonymous)
| blog. And that's where I put the stuff around work.
|
| I decided to go this way for many reasons.
|
| First, because I don't want it to be a source of pressure. If I
| talk about work stuff and make a big mistake, then people can
| call me out on it and it would tarnish my reputation.
|
| Second, because I want to share things for free and to help
| others first, not to help myself/my career.
|
| Last and related, if I was using it as a self-promoting media,
| I would focus on things that would help my career, not on
| things that I find funny or that I think can help someone else.
| So it would BE work. And it would only take a few months before
| I would be tired of it.
|
| Also since I've mostly worked on heavily regulated things, I'm
| quite limited about what I could publicly communicate.
|
| Now, I have my own personal room on the Internet where I can
| discuss everything I want, without feeling any pressure about
| how or what or when I should write about anything.
| stared wrote:
| Depends a lot on the context.
|
| I mostly post tech things, but at some point I wanted to share
| a few thoughts about a touchy subject like dating. I had the
| same dilemma - the last thing I wanted was for it to backfire
| professionally. At that time I was a consultant and freelancer,
| so looking for a job wasn't something I did every few years,
| but more on a continuous basis.
|
| My girlfriend back then encouraged me to post under my name, as
| long as I was comfortable being asked about it and defending my
| words (I was, so I did).
|
| The reception from friends was positive. To my surprise, it had
| a neutral to mildly positive professional impact, "this is a
| tech guy, but he has soft skills".
|
| And as you can see, there are quite a few posts like that (side
| ideas, physical and mental health, relationships).
|
| ---
|
| Of course, your mileage may vary. Tech is one thing, but for
| many jobs (especially government, public service, primary
| education) it might be different.
|
| It also depends on the general norms within a country--what's
| taboo, and how far you're willing to cross it.
|
| At the same time, when I've heard of someone being rejected due
| to their online presence, it was mostly not about the views
| themselves, but about how they were expressed. Raging hate
| might be off-putting--even to those who share a similar bias.
| chemotaxis wrote:
| If you're working as an individual contributor, I'm sure it
| _can_ matter, but usually doesn 't. It's widely accepted that
| people have personal opinions and politics, and that it can
| even extend to not liking some of the decisions made by the
| company you're applying to. There are workplaces that might
| screen for ideological purity, but it's rare. Both because it's
| illegal and because hiring is hard even without additional
| self-imposed constraints.
|
| I think the only thing that can derail a job application is if
| your personal blog makes you look patently unreasonable, either
| by supporting causes that are socially unacceptable ("it's OK
| to hit women") or getting way too angry over mundane stuff
| ("everyone working at Microsoft should be shot"). But if you
| just happen to have an opinion about a politician, whatever.
|
| Where it gets dicey is if you're in a leadership position,
| especially director and above. Then, you're sort of paid to
| keep your opinions to yourself, because when you have an
| organization of 100 people or more, at least several will
| disagree with your politics and will then judge your actions
| through that prism, leading to drama and possible HR fights.
| jamietanna wrote:
| I have both types of blog post on my site - deeply personal
| like talking about my ADHD
| (https://www.jvt.me/posts/2022/10/04/adhd/) or salary history
| (https://www.jvt.me/posts/2022/09/21/year-later-salary-
| histor...) and weekly notes, but also a lot of tech stuff. And
| as an IndieWeb website, I use it as my social media too, so
| people can read posts/replies to social media all in one place!
|
| I don't feel like I've had any negative impact from that, or
| I'm very privileged to be able to say I don't care if I have
| had any impact from that - I've done fairly well for myself,
| and I can remind people I'm a full human being!
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| I maintain list of personal domains, together with many other
| things in a database
|
| https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
| akikoo wrote:
| https://github.com/outcoldman/hackernews-personal-blogs
|
| List of Public Blogs of Hacker News users
| bowsamic wrote:
| The issue with blogging is that now people are absolutely brutal
| about quality. I wouldn't be comfortable sharing my understanding
| online on a blog, even if I'm an expert. I just know that what I
| write will be endlessly picked on, probably mocked in some
| cliquey discord channel
| ArcHound wrote:
| Hello, as someone who does this for years, don't worry.
|
| People out there are generally nice. People mostly don't care.
| And even if someone mocks your stuff in private - it says more
| about them than you.
| Havoc wrote:
| Could just disable comment
| grayhatter wrote:
| > I just know that what I write will be endlessly picked on,
| probably mocked in some cliquey discord channel
|
| So if you started creating content to teach other people, it
| would then live rent free in the heads of people who cant do
| it? If anything, that sounds like a reason _to_ start blogging.
|
| I don't mock people who write about stuff I already understand.
| https://xkcd.com/1053/ was kind enough to grant me immunity to
| that. I do mock people who write incorrectly from authority,
| without curiosity. Equally I look down on those who try to use
| their knowledge as a cudgel against people still learning. I
| would mock those trying to weaponize knowledge, but I try not
| to punch down.
|
| If I wrote something, and found out it was being mocked in some
| discord channel, that would make me laugh, much more than worry
| or feel ashamed. In order for me to value some criticism, I
| would first have to value or desire their opinion. I can't
| imagine a single person who's feedback I would be interested
| in, if their version of humor is trying to dunk on someone who
| is learning, and sharing that learning. They're too stupid for
| me to waste my limited attention to care about what they think
| say.
|
| Chances are, there is someone out there who would be grateful
| you explained something in a way they could understand, when
| everyone else failed. That's how the intersection of knowledge
| and shared context works.
|
| You don't need to value the opinions of idiots. Let them be
| idiots. It's ok, and even desired to focus your attention on
| making something good with value to people who aren't stupid.
| mandeepj wrote:
| > Personal blogs are back
|
| They didn't go anywhere! Ask the folks who have consistently
| maintained them regardless of current fad
| zkmon wrote:
| Blogs are back? You know, you need to present some evidence.
| bjhess wrote:
| If you'd like to dip your toe in the blogging pool for the first
| time (or again), I'd appreciate if you gave https://pika.page/ a
| look. It's free for your first 50 posts (that's a lot).
| xyzal wrote:
| I sometimes think about the best way to create some kind of semi-
| offline local diary. Like a RPI with a public AP, disconnected
| from the greater internet and with a default gateway page eing
| the diary. Are there any standards or customs for such a thing?
| zahirbmirza wrote:
| Medium, Substack, Reddit and even X, are all evolutions of
| personal blogging. How do we over come the issue of promotion of
| independent blog pages?
| lambertsimnel wrote:
| Perhaps these options aren't mutually exclusive. POSSE (Publish
| on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) could also be an option:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35636052
| ovo101 wrote:
| niche blogs feel like the natural next step -- focused,
| resilient, and more trustworthy than generic feeds.
| gethly wrote:
| Decentralisation for the win. Coincidentally, my project
| Gethly.com just recently added a new feature - paywall as a
| service. Which is perfect for personal blogs with some valuable
| content.
| jeswin wrote:
| Back where?
|
| The ecosystem and interconnected-ness has completely vanished. If
| you look at the late 90s or early 2000s, people had RSS readers,
| and sites had feeds, blogrolls, trackbacks/pingbacks, a
| commenting system which worked, and social bookmarking sites
| (like del.icio.us) which were somewhat mainstream.
|
| All of this is gone. Blogs are not going to survive in the
| current super-noisy consumption architecture.
|
| For blogs to be back, you'd almost need a new internet.
| stevoski wrote:
| The premise of this article is 100% incorrect.
|
| Personal blogs are not "back". The article has zero evidence for
| this.
|
| Ironically, Darren Rowse (the "problogger" person cited in the
| article) hasn't published a new blog post since 2024-07-24, more
| than a year ago.
| greyman wrote:
| Yes indeed, and also the title promise - I looked forward to
| read how the personal blogs are back, only to discover the
| author didnt provide any evidence, but not even examples. Maybe
| they are indeed back, if we count Substack newsletter archive
| as a "personal blog".
| Separo wrote:
| What app can I use to aggregate all the blogs I want to follow?
| entuno wrote:
| Many blogs support RSS (even if they don't link to it - check
| the page source), so that's usually the best way to do it.
|
| There are lots of different RSS readers out there depending on
| whether you want a web based or local one. Personally I use
| Thunderbird.
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| I have never been much info blogging, but I am in the habit of
| writing things down in small text files on my computer. It has
| almost the same benefits as a personal blog that has no outside
| readers, and a bit less stress about having to write something or
| worry about what I can say in public...
| motbus3 wrote:
| I did return my personal blog but I adopted an model that is
| terrible for scraping data from
|
| Not only because it sucks they do it, but because I host
| everything.
| apples_oranges wrote:
| Why bother. When you publish something good, AI will fetch it in
| 0.01 seconds from you..
| grayhatter wrote:
| I don't read AI generated output.
|
| I read and enjoy content from people who want to share
| something.
|
| There is no chance I'll read anything within 0.01s of it being
| posted, but there is a chance I'll find it eventually. So if
| the first thing to read the content is all that matters, or if
| having complete exclusive control so that only the people you
| like can read it, and importantly only in the way that you
| decided they should read it.
|
| Then don't bother?
|
| But if you want to create something of value for someone else,
| and the exact time it takes them to find it, or the browser
| they use isn't actually important. Seems like it's still a good
| time to write stuff. Maybe even better, to resist AI content
| drowning out new stuff.
| NoiseBert69 wrote:
| I have nich'ed tech blog too. Mostly about self-developed things.
| Sadly this is the most valuable data source for LLM fuckers.
|
| But honestly: without having an efficient way to fight them
| crawlers I'm not willed to write for it anymore.
|
| Is there an efficient solution I can add? It lives on a Shared
| Web Hoster. For self-hosted stuff there's Anubis. Also willed not
| to use Cloudfare.
| goodthink wrote:
| Basic Auth My blog: https://chalculator.com/blog Use
| Credentials: User: croquet Pass: yadayadayada Pain in the butt,
| links won't work without the creds, but they only need to be
| entered once.
|
| Also, my blog comes complete with an IDE in the browser!
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Much of the value of platforms like X and Mastodon is in
| discovering and bookmarking long form articles and blogs to read.
|
| I have written close to 3000 blog articles over the last 25 years
| (and many books) - primarily because I like writing, otherwise
| the top post here today nails it listing reasons to blog.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| Just head to https://problogger.com/
|
| I started blogging 20+ years ago - and this was is still the
| number one go to reference after all.
|
| He started as one of us, and started posting tipps - until... The
| story continues.
| DLion wrote:
| There are so many benefits around having a personal blog that I'm
| surprised about reading all these negative comments.
|
| I started blogging about tech and security when I was 13/14 years
| old in my native language. Then, when I felt more mature, I
| switched to a new blog where English was the main language. I
| started improving my language skills, getting some donation from
| kind strangers for my blog posts and using it as a self-branding
| forever running-side project.
|
| Now, 20 years later I still have my personal blog and I still
| write about tech, but only recently I created some "personal
| related" tabs, like the "/now" page, enriching it every month or
| having a more personal about page. Why? Because I like going to a
| blog a see that behind that address there is a real person with
| emotions and dreams, it's like entering in their home and have a
| look around.
|
| 1. Improve your language skills
|
| 2. Self-branding
|
| 3. Memorize better topics you care about
|
| 4. Share what you learned with others
|
| About LLM, I don't care if they scrape my blog, I use LLMs every
| day, and if some stuff I write helps to enrich an LLM with a
| positive impact I would be more than happy to let it happens, the
| more we write, the less fake-news and low-quality content would
| ingest and used.
| cushychicken wrote:
| I think there's a lot of people out there who don't want to
| believe written communication skills like these are as
| important as raw technical skill.
| bbarnett wrote:
| I recall when I entered college. The first thing was
| mandatory, required, english classes.
|
| The logic was, if you cannot communicate, you cannot explain
| why your job, or what you're doing is important. If it has
| value. If _you_ have value. You cannot hope to explain
| requirements to others. Or explain the logic or reasons, the
| "why" of a technical path.
|
| You're likely correct that a lot of people think this
| unimportant. To them I'd say, they're severely limiting their
| career, if they don't think communicating is important.
| Kerrick wrote:
| That's really interesting to me. I consider writing to be a
| "raw technical skill." Programming and writing are
| inextricably linked. The lexicon of software borrows heavily
| from writing: language, syntax, grammar, statement, and
| expression. Even the way we critique code heavily overlaps
| with how an editor critiques writing: consistent, readable,
| elegant, concise or verbose, and follows a style guide.
| OakNinja wrote:
| It's interesting how you end up being a part of the current
| trends whether you know it or not.
|
| I actually set up a blog on the 15th. No real content yet but
| I've almost written a first real post. Seeing this made me
| chuckle - I thought _I_ had an original thought around missing
| blogs but I'm obviously just a part of the hive mind. I truly
| hope this trend is here to stay.
|
| I also want to share this video on the topic "The reason no one
| has hobbies anymore", it was shared by a podcast I was listening
| to the other day and I think it's well worth watching.
| https://youtu.be/IUhGoNTF3FI
| nickjj wrote:
| I'm not sure about this.
|
| I've released a new post every week for 10 years straight.
|
| My traffic in the last 2 years is worse than the first 2 years.
| At the blog's peak I was getting around 180k unique visitors a
| month for years.
|
| I was able to build a whole business around selling tech courses
| and doing contract work for the last 10 years but now traffic is
| so little that this is no longer feasible (not even close).
|
| Just looking at the numbers, it's very likely related to Google
| not sending as much traffic as they used to because they either
| inline my content on their search engine results or AI results
| are used now instead of people visiting individual sites.
|
| I still do it because I enjoy the process and my main motivator
| was never money but at the same time you need to be able to
| sustain yourself too. It's a bummer to be honest.
|
| On that note, a ton of great non-money related opportunities came
| my way due to posts I've written in the past so I won't be
| stopping. I hope these continue.
| pardon_me wrote:
| Personal blogs are completely different from a web-based
| business which relies on SEO to be profitable.
|
| The idea of personal blogging is for your own growth and
| history.
| nickjj wrote:
| > The idea of personal blogging is for your own growth and
| history.
|
| That was why I started. Any business I got were byproducts of
| writing organically about the things I was working on.
| Courses were also a byproduct of doing the same type of
| contract work for many different clients.
| eloisant wrote:
| I think it's a combination of:
|
| - Google no longer sending traffic
|
| - Users staying on social media
| (facebook/x/instagram/youtube/tiktok) and not even clicking
| external links
| october8140 wrote:
| Next bring back rss.
| Peteragain wrote:
| I am always delighted when I come across a good one, but finding
| good ones is the problem. Ross Wilkinson (CSIRO) many years ago
| said there were 3 ways to find things: browsing - from were you
| are, look about. If you're in the high street and hungry, walk
| and look. It is no use knowing what is 5km away or what was
| available there 6 months ago. Categories are another - think
| Dewey Decimal system. These are expensive to produce and get out
| dated, but you know when something is _not_ available. Third is
| tags attached to items and a search engine. Content words at good
| tags but the challenge is to stop vested interests gaming the
| system - telling you you can get it through Amazon tomorrow when
| you could get it from across the road today, or when The State
| doesn't want you to know what "the Russian Narrative" is (other
| than "it's bad"). A search engine specifically for blogs would be
| great if we knew how to make it work in the long term.
| croisillon wrote:
| blog softwares should facilitate the production of a feed
| river: what a specific author likes is sometimes as valuable,
| or more, as what they write
| Peteragain wrote:
| Yes. The challenge is to understand how the river comes
| about, and at the same time, preventing it being gamed by
| vested interests.
| xtiansimon wrote:
| I took a MOOC course for teachers which advocated long form
| blogging for course assignments + social media short posts with
| appropriate tags to publicize/connect with classmates.
|
| At the time they suggested using Twitter or Facebook. And while
| I had a twitter account, I rarely used it. Over the period of
| the course, I managed to cultivate a nice community out of a
| largely unused account, and connected with like minded
| individuals on programming and, due to the course's target
| audience, teachers.
|
| The course then taught you to analyze the social media posts
| using the Twitter API. Turtles all the way down. It was the
| best MOOC I ever participated in.
|
| So this experience has become my prototype for blogging and
| publicity--blog+social media.
|
| I've not continued the blogging (the class was in 2010?), but I
| have tried to cultivate, for example, on BlueSky a community of
| _only_ my personal and professional interests (not unlike HN
| content), but politics, entertainment and sports keep muddying
| the waters.
|
| It's impossible to control your feeds these days, so I don't
| know if Blog+Social is a pattern that works _today_ with the
| current crop of social. Not sure if people who are NOT _in it
| for the money_ can achieve the personal engagement necessary to
| carry on.
|
| Small aside, during COVID NYC Python community met on online.
| It continued for over a year and then fizzled out. But oh what
| a glorious year of weekly online meetups. And every one had the
| good taste to keep it to Python and their ruddy projects. Hehe.
| Peteragain wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. I think that, today, Ross is wrong and
| there is another way.. much like (I think) you are
| describing.
| adiian wrote:
| IMO blogs were killed by big tech and social media. By creating
| centralized ways to distribute information. They started by
| killing rss, was way too decentralized. Facebook, Twitter, every
| single platform are just gate keepers that have complete power on
| what you see. They all start in the same way, making it
| convenient to access information, by centralizing it. Once you
| change your habits, they make it in such a way that you get
| locked in, and they start inserting in the feed all kind of junk
| you don't want, until a point when you are sick of it and jump to
| the next place, which is still in phase one, convenient,
| enjoyable. Then the story repeat, you end up seeing 90% junk,
| just to be able to see some of the posts of the people you
| follow.
|
| Somehow there is a lot of truth in this fake quote: "Those who
| would give up essential liberty to decide whom to follow, for
| getting a little temporary convenience in exchange, deserve
| neither to chose what to read nor convenience"
| llm_nerd wrote:
| _IMO blogs were killed by big tech and social media_
|
| The social media part is true, though in a way that is more
| user-benefitting than many bloggers (such as myself) appreciate
| or will acknowledge. And HN is one such "social media" site
| that invariably helped "kill" blogs, so there's an irony that
| this is being discussed here.
|
| Before HN / Reddit (others will put Twitter / Bluesky /
| whatever else in here), I had a list of "must read" blogs that
| I would monitor to, essentially, keep up. My feed reader
| alerted me to their entries, I would pay attention to "must
| read" blog lists, and so on.
|
| That process yields a lot of chaff for the wheat you yield. An
| enormous amount. Especially after many bloggers started
| thinking that they need to have daily content (bloggers like
| Atwood proselytized that the key to being successful was
| overwhelming quantity), however facile and useless, to hit some
| quota. I would rather have a feed that was quiet but then once
| a week a banger hits amongst dozens of authors, but instead it
| was just an enormous amount of filler.
|
| Eventually I just stopped monitoring it. With sites like HN,
| and various Reddit subs, my (proven) hypothesis is that the
| good content will rise on social media, and the chaff will sit
| in obscurity. Kind of like torrent seeders, this relies upon
| the few who are willing to dig through the chaff, /new, etc,
| however I'm okay missing content if only the well thought out,
| high effort content rises to the top.
| adiian wrote:
| I would partially disagree here regarding reddit/HN. They are
| closer to the old forums than to blogs. You do not follow
| people, you follow themes, concept, "ideas". They are
| constituted by a bunch of impersonal people with a common
| interest.
|
| But those forums were also killed by social media. Reddit/hn
| along with a few other platforms are modern impersonations of
| those forums. Also the groups on social media are replacing
| those forums.
|
| In m opinion "the good content will rise on social media",
| eventually. But you will have to see 9 junk promoted content
| for an eventually good one.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > IMO blogs were killed by big tech and social media.
|
| They were killed by search engines not indexing them anymore.
| Search engines are now curated guides that have nothing to do
| with the search engines of the past, which were basically just
| grep. Their purpose now is to direct you to revenue generating
| products, and they will simply change or ignore your query in
| order to do that. Individual people doing individual things are
| of no interest to the money machine.
| abhish16 wrote:
| I genuinely feel that search engines, especially Google after
| 2020, played a major role in wiping out personal blogs.
|
| There was a time when searching for anything online, say best
| running shoes or how to install a WordPress plugin, gave you a
| healthy mix of personal websites, hobby blogs, and commercial
| sites.
|
| Then Google rolled out EEAT or whatever and the spotlight shifted
| almost entirely to big commercial websites. These companies hire
| professional writers for every niche. People with degrees,
| credentials, and polished resumes that an individual blogger
| simply cannot compete with. Naturally, Google's algorithm began
| pushing those sites to the top over individual bloggers assuming
| better information and content due to more impressive writer's
| resume.
|
| So now, if you search for the same things like running shoes,
| WordPress tutorials, anything remotely informational, the top
| results are all from big commerical websites and strangely total
| "unrelated" garbage after the 3rd page.
|
| Sometimes it reaches an absurd point like search results showing
| Forbes or similar outlets giving you medical or legal advice
| right in the first page if not the first suggestion.
|
| Google seems to forget that these articles often come with an
| inherent bias, a subtle (or not so subtle) push to sell
| something, regardless of how qualified the writer is.
| rimmontrieu wrote:
| Someone mentions bearblog, medium, substack, etc for hosting
| blogs but my favorite web stack to run blogs or any content heavy
| websites nowadays is just https://astro.build/ plus cloudflare
| pages, deno deploy, netlify, vercel or any cloud provider with
| edge caching.
|
| I host both my gamedev tutorials and web game portal websites
| with cloudflare pages and so far they're pretty decent:
|
| - https://raizensoft.com/tutorials/
|
| - https://ookigame.com
| tclancy wrote:
| Yeah, when I got restarted, instead of trying to spin up the
| entire old Django platform I had built for my business a decade
| before, I just exported the posts to text and found a good
| static publishing engine and stuck it all on GitHub Pages. All
| of the network traffic problems solved, easy to maintain and
| update and port. Plus I can point a custom url at it.
| wdm0006 wrote:
| I think the main point of a personal blog is to write
| consistently about things you think are neat, and allow the world
| to find it, assess it, and those who also find those things neat
| will stick around.
|
| What is neat means different things to different people, for some
| it may be one nice narrow thing, for some it may be an erratic
| mix of topics tied together by the tiniest of strings. But what
| makes personal blogs different than marketing blogs for SEO is
| the wanton disregard for all things not-neat.
| masylum wrote:
| We are building https://fika.bar for that! Niche experts that
| like to write!
| masylum wrote:
| We are building https://fika.bar precisely for that. Niche
| experts that would love to write, but they don't know how, or
| don't have time to.
| garganzol wrote:
| I don't think personal blogs have made a comeback. Most modern
| blogs are ego-boosting camouflage, the same content you'd find on
| social media. This kind of content isn't intended to disseminate
| useful information, but rather to hijack your emotions and force
| you to react in a way you've been told. It's a form of psychic
| vampirism.
|
| I have fond memories and miss profoundly the innocuous purity of
| 1994-2005 internet era. Back then, the content was created mostly
| by enthusiasts, not by attention seekers.
| cal85 wrote:
| Camouflage in what sense?
| NaomiLehman wrote:
| in the sense that the supposed topic of the blog is not what
| it actually is about. it's about the emotion that it's
| selling.
|
| just like the OP blog
| azhenley wrote:
| What are some great technical blogs that I should consider
| following? Many of my favorites have quit.
| jxf wrote:
| "Personal blogs are back", says article, without providing any
| data or evidence to substantiate this claim.
| theletterf wrote:
| I chose to make my personal site a blog. I guess they'd call it a
| nice blog, since I only write about technical writing. It's great
| for networking and your career. Personal brand and all that.
|
| I would never return to personal blogging, though. That ship
| sailed around 2007, when social media appeared and trolls killed
| the last remaining personal blogs. The GeoCities safe haven vibe
| died then.
| unsungNovelty wrote:
| I have been hearing that blogging died since I started my
| personal website. The spotlight changed since social networking
| sites. That is all. Blogging is still alive and well.
|
| And I wrote about this after RibbonFarm's retiring post as well
| - https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2024/life-of-a-
| blog-b...
| topherjaynes wrote:
| I still check https://www.swiss-miss.com/ to this day, more of
| this please!
| tiltowait wrote:
| I recently started a blog to document some service migrations and
| other random musings as I adopt FreeBSD (after a decade-long
| hiatus). It's fun to write and think about this stuff in a
| shareable way, even though I expect no one[0] to ever read it.
| It's also been fun using a new-to-me SSG (Hugo).
|
| [0] Correction: I have had three visitors, not including myself.
| moffkalast wrote:
| So two LLM scrapers and Google's indexer then? ;)
| pessimizer wrote:
| > This is a largely non-commercial movement.
|
| That's strange, because literally the only place I see blogs
| being back is on Substack. And the only way to get people to
| visit Substack is through social media; twitter, really. You
| start a Substack when you get good at twitter, then you start
| doing podcasts and cross-promotion after your Substack starts
| doing well.
|
| I actually like this, except that the platforms are all pretty
| much monopolies in their spaces. But it's very commercial. 10000
| people paying $2 a month, and you can make a nice living.
| Alex04 wrote:
| Thanks for the info.
| d_sem wrote:
| Any 101 tips for starting a blog that will stand the test of
| time?
| intrasight wrote:
| Just deep dive into the technology of your choice. Write
| clearly and comprehensively about your projects, the roadblocks
| you faced, and how you overcame them.
|
| Another recommendation is to blog on a collaborative project.
| Could be with just one other person. That way you're reaching a
| wider social network.
|
| What's very satisfying is googling on some technical problem
| and finding in the top search results my own blog article from
| several years back.
|
| Blog early; blog often.
| lylo wrote:
| Good article. I build and run a new(ish) blogging app (Pagecord -
| https://pagecord.com) and I'm seeing all sorts of niche blogs pop
| up from cookery, photography, tech (of course!), gaming and
| science.
|
| Great to see blogging making a resurgence - RSS next!
| apparent wrote:
| It seems like the primary "reader" of blogs in the future will be
| AI. Then some small sliver of readers will be people who clicked
| through from links shared in an chat with AI.
| joshu wrote:
| sounds like something an llm crawler would say
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