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Comment by sircastor | Hacker News Reader

There was a brief time where I thought i could write regularly and make money off of having a commercialized personal site. It turned out that it wasn't for me. I pay the bills every year and I write somewhere between 0 and 5 posts a year. They're usually write-ups about projects I have completed, or interests I'm pursuing.

It's really nice to not have to worry about how popular something is or isn't on my site. And occasionally I'll have someone send me a note saying thank you for some helpful piece of information they found there.

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> And occasionally I'll have someone send me a note saying thank you for some helpful piece of information they found there.

This is related to one of the reasons I like having a personal website. Countless times I’ve found answers or learned something cool from another’s personal website, and I hope that I can help other through my efforts.

The original article mentioned something about not being able to change the world through a personal website. You can have an impact in a persons life though, and I think that makes it worth it.

This is the reason that I maintain my website. About once per year, someone will contact me regarding something I posted. I don't get very many hits on it, but it's quite gratifying if it saves someone time.

Same for me!

I don't quite understand the author's framing of "brave knight fighting a battle against the commercial/corporate web"... Personal sites are what they are (usually more pleasant than the corporate), everyone is free to do what they want, I'm not forcing anyone to read my blog, nor is anyone forcing me to read corporate websites. Where is the battle?

The cost of a VPS where you can host stuff like this is far less than a Netflix subscription. You can just do it for the entertainment or satisfaction that it provides without worrying about what it costs or "monetizing" it.

> And occasionally I'll have someone send me a note saying thank you for some helpful piece of information they found there.

I do exactly the same thing! And for exactly the same reasons!

I just occasionally write to crystallise my thoughts. Sometimes I get insights just by writing up a project, in the same way I sometimes think of an answer while writing a question into StackExchange.

This is what I do with my personal blog. I actually kind of use it as a personal documentation guide. If I can write it for someone else to use I can re-impliment it myself

A few years ago I flirted with the idea of doing a more serious and focused travel-oriented site and went so far as to get a Wordpress site for it but the ambition lasted for about a month.

My site is mostly pretty static. There's a fairly nice templated front-end but the actual content is just on some fairly simple, mostly hand done HTML. My actual blog is on Blogger but a lot more of my content goes in other places these days. That may well change in the future (again).

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