Cool things people do with their blogs | Hacker News Reader

Cool things people do with their blogs

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246 pointsecliptik32 comments

I almost killed my blog like the many other websites I had. Then I realized I could write for my daughters. I will keep my blog for my kids to read. I'm still looking for a way to collect and continue to write a memoir-ish journey of my life for them to read.

I have always been fascinated by -- what stories will you tell your kids.

My first daughter has even started making fun of me, "Dad, how did you go to school in your days?"

She likes other stories and I have repeated the one where I went to an army encampment in the mountains to help fix computers, slept in the wooden bed, peed on the hillside surrounded by the army with guns pointing out. My friend and I returned home hidden in an ambulance with a pregnant woman on her way to deliver in the town's hospital.

I need to write them down.

> Use your own site to publish checkins instead of Foursquare

I never understood why people publish their location. Why does anyone care except maybe your significant other, who you can just text? Do your friends really care? Does your family? Do your coworkers?

My friends and family do. I check in at a place on Swarm and get comments from friends, or if friends are already out in the area but we didn't explicitly coordinate we will find each other if desired. It's also nice to look back and try to remember that one restaurant we went to in that place with the great dish that we now cannot remember and look it up in check in history. It's been a great mechanic for my friends and I.

Thanks for posting - you are the only person whose posted a reason why he does this.

One time as a highschool delinquent I realised a lot of the girls in my class would leave Instagram's location tagging thing on. Not sure if its still a feature - but you could literally see a map of where their posts were taken. I figured some of the "clumps" of posts on the map were significant locations like their house or their friends house, etc.

I never did anything with that information but it boggles my mind why people leave that on/turn it on themselves. Pereaps they didn't even know it was on, but I'm not sure.

I can imagine some niches (like freelance war correspondent) where it could make sense but it can also be easily abused for nefarious use. We should IMO always lean to: no, unless [..]. Where unless could include question of does the pros beat the cons? Why share it? What could be the repercussions? For example, we could assume nobody wants to kill a freelance war correspondent but if you look at the current major war in Ukraine I don't believe that to be true.

Ten years ago when location publishing was novel, there were worries that it'd make it easy to burgle people, since you'd know when they weren't home. I haven't heard of any burglaries specifically attributable to someone posting their location online, but it's what I think about every time I see someone do this.

> I never heard of any burglaries specifically attributable to someone posting their location online

Upcoming Brooklyn rapper Pop Smoke was robbed and murdered under this exact scenario about 2 years ago. There are abundant sources, but here are two:

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-pop-smoke-put-a...

https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/entertainment/sde2017/200140...

It seems like he wasn't robbed because he posted his location, but because he posted his location as well as ludicrous amounts of cash, jewelry, and vehicles.

Perhaps that's a factor, but having expensive jewelry and luxury vehicles around is commonplace for pretty much all upcoming rappers.

I don't doubt they are targeted by robbers for valuables whether they're explicitly posted or not.

I'm sure it happens all the time. I even learned recently while bingewatching that social media is how the Bling Ring burglary teens would figure out when Paris Hilton, etc weren't home.

Also, social media location services have been used to figure out where people were in order to follow them and murder them e.g. Molly McLaren. (Social Media Murders Episode 3, I said I was bingewatching...)

For this reason (logical or not) I always feel avoid posting pictures of myself while on vacation and have a tendency to post a "summary" after I return home.

If you just share your location within swarm it’s unlikely anyone else beside a close group of friends would know.

However anyone with a public Instagram account can easily guess where you are by watching your Instagram stories.

8/41, I think? (https://maya.land)

This is a really cool list especially because it shows how varied people's aims are. Some people want a certain golden era of Twitter/Foursquare-type social media, but under their own control. Some people want to stretch the format of blogs beyond that of feeds. Some people want to go all-in on feeds and see what they can squeeze out of them. Some people are dicking around with RSS because they just like it. Blogging shouldn't all look like different styles of Wordpress.

I thought the same thing. This is a cool list simply by way of the variety on display. It's remarkable how people can organize their thoughts in unique ways, when they aren't held back by the one-size-fits-all layouts of blog themes and social media account pages.

That was a really fun list. It made me wonder what I could add on my personal website to make it more personal.

A few years ago, I added achievements. I don't know if anyone ever cared to chase them.

My blog is about my hobbies: drawing, painting, sculpting and modeling.

As I blog about my projects and their progress, my static site generator will aggregate posts tagged with the same project name, so that the project's page will show a chronological build progress, as opposed to the typical reverse chronological listing on the blog's front page.

I think it's kinda neat and I haven't seen many other blogs that do this.

I do this for a bunch of pages for the same reason—series pages, for example, but also tag pages. I like how it subtly undercuts the recency bias of the reverse chronological “stream” that is the default.

That sounds really interesting -- I'd love to take a look. What's the website?

Thank you! The website is [1]

A good example of a project page would be [2]. It shows the complete scratch build of a model tank, and is one of the more detailed step by steps.

[1] https://www.vigilantesculpting.com

[2] https://www.vigilantesculpting.com/projects/2021-08-19-storm...

You could consider adding something personal to spice it up. With the exception of website comments (which few people bother to leave), blogs are usually a read-only experience.

From one example.. I spent a summer hacking a great last.fm server together & oops i deleted the damned thing by accident. This was a decade ago, but still pains me. Idiot.

Ah, I really like the /now page movement from Derek Sivers: https://sive.rs/nowff

Reminds me of .plan and finger.

Really fun list. I'd add this daily blog by Tiny Projects[1] that's written with pen & paper

[1] https://daily.tinyprojects.dev

  > Implement a simple client-site search using lunr.js

I did the same thing on my site, and it was surprisingly easy. The lunr.js indexer can persist its internal index state to JSON, and the search is fast enough to filter results in real time as the user types.

> Sync your laptop battery, local weather, and current location with your site

Why would I want my location available to anyone at all times?

No one is saying that _you_ do. Now, if your question is why the owner of that website does, well, you'd have to ask them. I'd imagine they just thought it was fun.

I really love JWZ's approach to linking to old related posts with "previously" https://www.jwz.org/blog/

How do you found out those blogs? Is it generally exploring some topic on the web and you made a bookmark?

Every once in a while, links from these blogs will be shared on HN. Many blogs themselves keep a "blogroll" visible on their site. The blogroll is a list of links to other blogs the author likes. That's a common way for readers to discover new blogs.

great websites! some of them i already discovered before. good inspiration to make new features on my website.

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