You should make a blog! | Hacker News Reader

You should make a blog!

drewdevault.com

37 pointsmiles15 comments

As much as I'd be greatful for being paid to start a blog, I'm not sure what the point of it is. Aren't there like a bazillion blogs out there already that are absolutely desperate for traffic.

And on the other hand, as a consumer of such information, I find it harder and harder to find original indie blogs. I'm still looking for a good blog search engine that allows me to find blogs on Niche topics. does anyone else have this problem? or is it just me? the best i can usually find is something on quora.

I thank bloggers for all the times I've had tech problems that I wouldn't have solved had it not been for them writing up their experiences.

Maybe the idea is to crowd out all the click farms with stuff with actually decent quality?

Blogging is really for two main reasons, order depends on your priorities.

1. For yourself, to help clear your mind and clarify your thoughts.

2. For convincing your future employers you’re not a con artist.

I have been meaning to write an article on my first experiences with Rust and embedded development, coming from a JavaScript/TypeScript background or my experiences in switching from Windows to Arch or Vim as of late, but I feel somewhat discouraged from writing, as if it might lack quality. Do you have any tips on overcoming this feeling?

It's a shame, because I see a lot of value in writing down one's thoughts, e.g. more easily noticing gaps in knowledge of a subject.

Writing takes practice like any other skill. When I go back and read my earliest blog posts, it's a total cringefest. A stumbling start is nothing to be ashamed of, and is a requirement for a strong finish.

Are you only interested in blogs from people with and about technical skills, or is any focus tech related all good?

I evaluate them on a case-by-case basis.

I have been wanting to start a blog since I joined college. It's been more than a decade now. I want to keep it simple. I finally changed my website to html, css only. No js, no plugins, none of those cool static site generators. None of those fancy effects. Simple text and it looks pretty clean and simple on mobile too. And it's fast! Finally after years of playing with my website (my landing page) after having tried dozens methods and tools I am happy with it.

I think that's how I will write my blog posts too. Whenever I want to write a post (that won't be frequent) I'll just add a html page in my /blog dir on github pages and link it on /blog.html with date/title and all. I am sure there are tons of such blogs out there. And then I will request OP to donate to Internet Archive :)

I understand the no js/plugins, but why not a static site generator? Static site generators (at least most) are the only "new" technology that seems to make things simpler instead of more complicated, and SSGs are a massive time saver regarding themes, sitemaps, robot, optimization, etc.. and there are no dependencies at all. It also helps me writing. I run `hugo serve` that autorefreshes in the background, then I have split up my screen with right being my vim and right my browser. Takes 1 second to see the result of what I am doing.

Writing a blog is a nice way to reflect. I've written a couple (unpublished) books so it's pretty obvious I love writing.

Listing my blog, which I'm working on adding a bunch of features too next week (it's my own static site generator etc) including subscriptions. It's all very technical stuff and I plan on writing more.

I plan on writing about my month long trip to China as well, that will probably be on a new blog though.

http://blog.winricklabs.com

EDIT: https is broken and does a weird redirect. Will fix when I'm back home.

Https fixed https://blog.winricklabs.com

Adding rss/subscriptions next

I need to update my blog. I was using Advent of Code as a way to jump back into it, but life happens and I haven't been able to keep up with the problems and the write ups and life.

I do love this list as an opportunity to find some new blogs to read!

I will list mine here in an effort to not be a wuss and for anyone who also likes collecting interesting blogs.. though I wouldn't categorize mine as interesting yet.

https://logancollins.us/blog/

Drew: unrelated question having just read your software distribution post and noticing you use Alpine - have you tried NixOS? What does Alpine have (or lack that others have)?

Not OP, neither an Alpine user, but tried it once.

For me, the main selling point of Alpine is that it's not what RMS would call "a GNU/Linux distribution", since it doesn't use the GNU userland. This means, no GNU libc (Musl instead), no GNU Coreutils (Busybox instead), etc.

It became kind of famous thanks to Docker because an Alpine image is (or at least, was) only sized at 6MB.

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