Ask HN: Blog options and experiences? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Blog options and experiences?

3 pointsMz9 comments

If you have a blog, what are you using as a platform? Is it a good or bad fit? Why is it a good or bad fit for you personally or what do you like/dislike about it? How often do you update? What do you typically talk about? What prompts you to post to it? Of course, a link to the blog would be nice too.

Any thoughts or discussion on the general topic of blogging is welcome.

Thank you!

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Yeah, I think other forums might be better suited for talking about blogging in general. Here are previous discussions about blogging platforms on HN:

http://www.google.com/search?q=blogging+platform+site:news.y...

For my two cents, I've been using Wordpress a lot, but I'm currently working on switching to custom blog software because of the continuous security problems with Wordpress.

Thanks for the link. That might be plenty of information for me for now. I tried playing around with Wordpress and it just didn't click for me. I have done better with Textpattern but I am still wondering if there is something out there that is a better fit or if it is merely a matter of time stress right now.

I am now using posterous (even though I'm not blogging heavily). I can have a domain name working with it, multiple blogs from one account, I can set up a favicon, and more. I like their approach better than wordpress.com, and I'd rather focus on other tasks than set up my own wordpress install, adding plugins etc.

Is posterous the one where you can email your blog posts? I was thinking about that. It has a lot of appeal. I email myself a lot of stuff, and often cannot find it again later. :-/

Yes, you can email to post, and you can also post from the web, and post links to other sites/posts via a bookmarklet javascript thingie.

I wonder what no comments from last 7 hours mean, either people here are bored of blogging or answers to your questions are too obvious.

I have a long history of completely sucking at starting conversations in online forums. Typically, conversations I try to start either get completely ignored or go down in flames in the worst possible way. Over the years, I have tried to work on this. I go down in flames less, so there has been progress. After I make the observation a few times that I suck at this, I start getting "pity vote" comments -- ie people reply just so there aren't zero comments. I think that may be worse than getting zero comments. I don't remark on my total suckitude to whine. It's just an objective fact. My last submission to HN generated zero comments and the one before that generated pity comments along the lines of "Gee, that's tough. Maybe you should look elsewhere for support". Of 4 submissions here so far, I've managed to successfully generate conversation/meaningful, useful replies one time. That's probably about par for the course for me.

New questions to add to my above list: How would you ask this question/introduce this topic such that it would get replies? What did I do wrong?

:-D

I hope its not your objective to generate comments. I am not an expert (under 200 karma) but will advice anyways :-

1) Ask something when you need help and its not something obvious. Googling on your question before posting might help. For example, "What is the search engine you guys use ?" is a bad question.

2) Show something when you have something worth showing. Many people here are creating something and they like seeing what others are creating. If you are proud of something you built, show us.

3) People usually tend to contribute to a discussion when the original author seemed to have done some research himself. Take the "Brag HN" thread for example, I wonder if the author hadn't posted some examples about what kind of "about you" he wants to hear, it would have generated so much discussion.

4) Lastly, follow your instincts and have fun.

I wasn't really looking to generate comments when I replied to you. A) I'm very chatty and don't like to just ignore people who are speaking to me. (I've actually had to work on learning when to let it go and that some comments do not really need a reply.) B) I find something very humorous about my poor ability to start good conversations online. I'm infamous for being very talkative and for having a habit of generating big reactions completely unintentionally. Somehow, I haven't mastered the art of "bottling" it, so to speak.

Anyway, I am pleasantly surprised to see a couple of other comments. So it's all good. :-) (And would have been all good even if no one had replied. I figured I was doing it badly when I wrote it. I left it up to see where it would go anyway.)

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