I wonder if part of this has to do with fewer people writing in their own space anymore. Most people post in sanitised UIs of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. So seeing a personal page is confronting, unless it's a vanilla theme. Not sure. Either way, I'd love to see more people maintain personal blogs again. And with RSS! Maybe we need to resurrect something like Technorati.
Cheers :)
The idea of being a "serious professional" is entangled in that of "the personal brand" and thus in your identity being your property. But it's not just that: it's also that this property has some assumed virtuous pattern of development(in the sense of Aristotle), and something that is not that pattern is incorrect, and possibly threatening because it disrupts their preconceptions of what is right - and it's always a preconceived thing, young kids aren't afflicted by this. They'd like to take the content - because it's valuable - while protecting those beliefs, so an urge rises to lash out, dismiss everything, give "helpful hints" about what to do better, or call it degenerate, because changing a belief is hard within oneself.
It's not just the blogosphere. This trend is everywhere. People don't just post vacation photos for friends, they try to become influencers. They don't throw parties, they try to be come DJs, they don't hack on little open source projects, they try to start passive income lifestyle businesses.
Everything's a hustle, everything's for money.
I don't know if this is born out of economic necessity because the middle class is hollowing out, or more just culture shifting to equate "success" with "rich". But it seems like fewer and fewer things are just... fun... anymore. It's always gotta be for something.
I will be building a new RSS reader/platform soonish. I will definitely think on the topic of resurrecting Technorati.
This is the kind of thing I miss from the web of the 90s and early 2000s. A vocal minority might complain that it doesn't look like Medium with the useless hero image of a laptop in a desk, the 45 trackers and analytics and paywall, but I silently enjoy both the content and the personality, so thank you both.
Might be the culture I live in or I'm getting old and stopping to care, but I frankly wouldn't have a problem putting this as a reference link in some internal documentation or in Slack. We have a Manga Guide to Databases in our work library since forever, so maybe the mascot is fitting. A furry-themed blog would fit too, of course, as we have a few O'Reilly books (but none with a wolf unfortunately). Jokes aside, I find the mascots of both sites tasteful and nicely drawn, btw.
I've been preoccupied lately with how we can encourage more people to blog again. I think everyone has something interesting to say, and shouldn't be constrained by what a specific social network permits (technically, or with content).
Not trying to say you should just interested in your motivation :)
The basic problem is that in terms of foregone consulting hours, writing a personal blog and hosting it using custom software is roughly the equivalent of purchasing and then purposely totaling several Teslas per year.
Things you need to run a blog:
1. Server, preferably secure. This can be set up in an afternoon, maybe on a Saturday or Sunday. You can also probably find Ansible or Chef scripts to automate the provisioning.
2. A directory on the server to hold website content - time to set up is dependent on latency to your server, but is essentially instant.
3. A web server set up to serve content in said directory - probably an hour or two to get a reasonably simple setup.
4. Probably an SSL cert - can be automated with Let's Encrypt, including making your server aware of the cert. Initial setup, maybe another hour.
5. Something to make the content. I like Hugo, but there's lots of other static site generators. Choose a pre-made theme that is the least objectionable to you. It might take another afternoon to get this all set up between browsing themes and writing some seed content.
6. Something to get the content to your server (or you can just keep the whole setup on the server!). I use rsync to deploy a build whenever I commit to the Git repo holding my blog.
Nice to haves:
1. A domain name. It makes your website easier to find, and people are more likely to remember that over an IP address. This will be about a half hour to an hour to set up depending on how shitty your registrar is.
All in all, I spend $5 a month running the server that hosts my blog. I maintain it and built it during hours when I wouldn't have been paid or worked anyways. So I'm out $60. Everything else is free (mostly as in beer, but some is also as in the other kind of free).
Not to mention that once you've created software like that, each individual blog post might well take literally hundreds of hours to write.
(Also, a basic blog system is really not that much work if you decide to go for it)
Fair enough, I just assumed it was running software the author had written himself, didn't see that it was actually Hugo.