Hacker News Reader

Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

I recently wrote a blog about “Dutch Oven Fried Chicken”[1], I don’t think it’s particularly interesting and anyone can do it. However, now I can send a link to a friend and go back and make the recipe myself.

Blogging for me isn’t about popularity. It’s about being able to share ones ideas and document your interests. I send links to my blog all the time, because I wrote about topics I found challenging / fun. I don’t think it’s the best, but it is my own thoughts.

Speaking of which... I’ve written about learning through storytelling[2] and blogging[3].

[1] https://austingwalters.com/dutch-oven-fried-chicken/

[2] https://austingwalters.com/how-storytelling-effects-learning...

[3] https://austingwalters.com/learning-through-blogging/

View on HN

> I don’t think it’s particularly interesting and anyone can do it. However, now I can send a link to a friend and go back and make the recipe myself.

I used to have a blog or two back in the day and two things I noted back then was:

1. If I figured something out that I hadn't found a solution to elsewhere on the net people would find their way to my site. No further SEO necessary. (I don't know if this would work anymore.)

2. Sometimes I would Google [0] a weird problem and find my own page.

[0]: yep, that's what I did until three years ago or so)

Edit:

FTR I never made any money on this. It wasn't that popular.

Also I recently started writing again at https://erik.itland.no just to contribute some stupid posts like those you'd find on the old web I used to like. Hopefully I can start adding some links to stuff I like to read as well, and deliberately not add any dum nofollow or other stupid CEO. My wesite, not Googles :-]

Edit 2:

Could we have a tread were everyone who wants posts their imperfect personal web sites? Or has there been one and I have missed it?

You're actually touching on the reason why SEO is an anti-pattern for society. Search engines (ideally) eventually find the best source of information for a query. SEO artificially skews these results.

Agree, which is why I think we (random people with technical skills who like to hang around the web) could do something good and useful just by creating genuine websites for no other reason than the art, fun and knowledge sharing.

If we all did we could soon have something really awesome going on.

If there ever was a good time to do this again it seems to be now.

> No further SEO necessary. (I don’t know if this would work anymore.)

This still works. I wrote about a topic awhile back o help me understand it and when I search for the topic, my post still appears in the search results.

I didn’t write it to get to the top of any search result but for myself so I could understand it. Now when I see the post there, I’m glad that I’m not the only one who benefitted. As other people have pointed out:

Write. Put it out there. Do it for yourself first and not to be popular. If it helps you, it might help someone else. And who knows, someone else might even point out something you didn’t know before.

You should consider using a trivet to keep your chicken off the bottom of the dutch oven/where the temperatures are more consistent.

Thank you for the trivet recommendation. In addition to purchasing the 5L ditch oven and thermometers after reading the recipe blog post I've now purchased a trivet to go along with it.

I was kind of thinking along the same lines as the OP until I read your comment, in particular "It’s about being able to share ones ideas and document your interests". I really like the idea (and it seems obvious to me now) that you could use a personal website as a documentation hub for various things that come up and that could be useful to others. Ha! The original point of the internet. I might have to set up a site now.

Hmm... let's call it a Personal Open Document (POD) or something like that.

Yep.

I took a deep dive at one point into understanding concurrent transaction behavior in MySQL and its ramifications. Probably go back and reference that post about once a month...

Thank you for sharing the fried chicken recipe. I've ordered the oven and thermometers and will be attempting it this Friday night.

Have you considered crowdfunding further development of your recipe, like the infamous potato salad Kickstarter?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com