Ask HN: How do you find personal tech blogs? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you find personal tech blogs?

24 pointstarkin28 comments

When I'm interesting in something (say vim) and I search then I get a tonne of tech tutorial websites.

These are useful, certainly. But I often want tech blogs of actual /people/. Not CEO-focused tutorial websites aimed at selling ads.

The web used to be full of such personal websites. They gave the internet character, an element of human community. But search engines now show you CEO-optimised ad selling, albeit useful, tech tutorial sites instead.

How do you find these personal such websites these days? Do people even make them anymore? Is it just difficult to aggregate them? I vaguely remember some initiatives to find the personal websites of old.

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How I find personal tech blogs? Simply by chance; when I browser around on HN, Twitter, chatting with people in Slack, following outbound links from blogs I already read...

I don’t even use an RSS reader. I just check in to some of these blogs from time to time.

That’s a very ad-hoc process though. Could it be organized somehow? Maybe! The question is how.

In earlier days of the web, before Google and RSS took of (roughly 1996-2002 or so) there used to be curated directories where people would submit their web sites. E.g. Yahoo[1] and DMOZ[2]. Perhaps it’s time for something like that again...?

There are still lots of people making their own websites. Some use old-skool systems like Blogger and WordPress. But these days I would warmly recommend Hugo (or another static site generator). Perhaps together with Netlify or Sanity.io. (I prefer to self-host but YMMV.)

Of course I, like everyone else, use Google a lot. But not for finding stuff like this. When I Google I’m mostly looking for a specific answer to a specific question. These days I rarely use Google to just browse around.

There are some efforts like Tilde.Club. I’m not sure if it’s my cup of tea but you might want to have a look: https://tilde.club/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ

Sites like Hacker News and reddit seem to do a decent enough job of aggregating 'em.

It also helps to be the change you want to see in the world; if you think the world needs more personal websites, ain't much stopping you from pitching in and doing your part to make that happen :)

Aye. I have one. I'd just like to read other people's. And that doesn't seem so easy.

The thought has been thought to death, but Google Reader really had this ability and nothing has replaced it well.

I mostly subscribe to blogs on RSS when I find a good article on a personal blog on HN or Twitter.

I exported my Feedly list for you, there's a bunch of good personal tech blogs in here:

https://gist.github.com/trishume/5a32594aeb8e80af13b35e5efd0...

When someone has something to share, platforms make sharing easier than a website. YouTube, Medium, Substack, Twitter, Facebook, etc. remove virtually all the dull chores that a website requires. Moreover, they facilitate clearing the biggest hurdle — discovery. I mean I could have read your question and written about it on a WordPress backed blog...but you probably wouldn’t be reading this sentence now. Or ever.

A dedicated website is either a business proposition or a labor of love where a nontrivial fraction of the love is committed to the idea of a website at the expense of time devoted to the subject of the website. People have websites in part to honestly say “I have a website.”

And from that having of a website, there comes motivation to create content. But if the big motivation is making content, then a website is only one possible option and among less efficient ones.

Interesting question. When I look for software, I usually look for the awesome-lists, like awesome-selfhosted.

Let's concentrate effort in one of those, for blogs?

https://github.com/rapulu/awesome-blogs https://github.com/pgilad/awesome-blogs https://github.com/jkup/awesome-personal-blogs

When I want to find the best books on a tech subject X I google "best books X" and usually find good lists on blogs or websites. You could maybe find some good blogs with that same search, or "best blogs X". Good books, and blogs, tend to be mentioned on other good blogs!

>Is it just difficult to aggregate them?

I bookmark resources that I find interesting on reddit, HN, twitter, etc. I maintain resource lists for a few topics [0] (which includes vim). To explore blogs, see if you can find blogrolls by someone whose work you are familiar with. For example, I have this post [1] from Julia Evans bookmarked.

[0] https://learnbyexample.github.io/curated_resources/

[1] https://jvns.ca/blogroll/

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