Why have a blog? (2020)
robinwinslow.uk
robinwinslow.uk
I wrote a post several years ago about my struggles with being autistic. I didn't think much of it at the time - I just wanted to vent a bit and I had been using my blog for that since I was a teenager. I applied for a job a couple of weeks after I wrote that post and I was asked during an interview how I thought my autism might impact my work. I was confused at first because I never disclosed that information to them, but perhaps understandably they Googled my name and found my blog at the top of Google.
I started my blog back in 2010 when people didn't care so much about anonymity online. The idea that an employer might check your social media or Google your name was still quite new back then, whereas today I'd guess around 80% of the places I apply to seem to Google my name before conducting an interview. In hindsight I wish I kept the blog anonymous, but there's also technical content on there which I'm proud of and want associated to myself. Either way I'm now in a difficult position where I can't really use my blog candidly any more because I have to consider it more as an extension of my CV.
If you want to express yourself I'd keep it strictly anonymous. If you want to write technical content which you want associated with yourself you should probably do that somewhere else and never mix the two. Having a blog at [firstname][lastname].[TLD] where you express anything personal, especially if that includes political views or thoughts on cultural events is probably not a good idea in this day and age. Arguably even anonymous blogs that discuss politics are dangerous.
I'm scared of backlash, but I think it's also kind of my dream to have that sort of influence. But I can well believe that I couldn't handle it or take advantage of it in practice.
I see a number of people express this opinion that surprises me; I'd love to know the demographics/background/media consumption of people who would/wouldn't agree with it.
As a straight, white, fairly well-off, more or less neurotypical man, I'm sure I should be in all the privileged groups and so should feel pretty empowered. Maybe that's why I feel like I should be able to blog under my own name.
But I completely understand what OP is saying. I definitely have the fear, and I've toyed with the idea of having an anonymous persona before.
It's impossible to guess what subset of appropriate speech in 2022 will still be appropriate years or decades from now.
If you want to build any kind of public profile or have much influence in life you kinda have to face this risk head-on to some extent.
(Also, it seems like holders of this opinion think there is non-zero risk but also zero upside. This is strange to me and seems like it must have to do with the specific views people are biting their tongues on.)
God that makes me angry. Of course I don't know what jurisdiction you're in, but the company should be sued for this. Of course I know it's easy to say this in theory but most people can't afford litigation. But really that should be extremely against the law. You should at least name and shame the company.
On the anonymous thing - yes I know what you mean. I really struggle with overcoming the fear of publishing any significant opinions as myself. But I also find maintaining any sort of anonymity to be a very daunting thought. I'm such an open person generally, and I like that about myself, it would be very strange for me to try to hide like that.
I’ve had a couple opinion posts go viral here and elsewhere over the years, and while I found it really exciting, it’s weird how the negativity sticks with you. There was a particularly mean comment probably ten years ago that I still think about when I can’t sleep.
It's is clearly nonsense, the same kind of logic as people who hate movie critics, but it's gotten a rent-free place in my head for years now.
Something just about the tone of the comment made it stick in my brain.
I guess by that logic the person shouldn't be criticising your criticism of the language until they've tried criticising the language themselves .
I see something cool or spend some time figuring out something, I write it down.
I used to write Gists for those things, but I ended to turning Gist into a pseudo database and built my blog to use it as a backend.
For many years, I shut it down-- changed it from Wordpress to static html and hosted on netlify. Ignored it completely for 3+ years.
Then last year, I restarted it-- moved to Ghost this time-- its a better (simpler?) version of Wordpress. Tried a dozen static generators, hated all of them, as beyond the simple "write 5 blogs and publish" they become hard to use. I like Ghost's front end, like that they take care of hosting. I've had a few articles blow up on HN/Reddit, Ghost managed the spike.
The strange thing is you can never tell which article of yours will blow up. One of mine flopped on HN, 0 upvotes. Then someone else submitted it again, this time it was front page for several hours, got 60-70k visitors in a day. also blew up on Reddit/Linkedin, had random poeple trying to friend me.
Other articles I thought would be useful and in line with what people were discussing here-- vanished without a trace. Or they got 5-10 upvotes, and then vanished (with 0 comments).
I keep the blog now because I see people still find old articles I wrote useful. There is a small expense, but tis worth it, as when I have something to say, I dont have to worry about seeing where I will share it. If nothing else, the few poeple subscribed will see it.
I no longer write to a schdule (which is what marketers advise-- write every week! promote!), as that made me hate it. Now I write what I love. Still try some promotion by sharing here /Reddit, but thats about it. Quit Twitter/FB years ago, so never go there.
So yes, I would recommend people have a blog, even if you publish once every few months. ITs nice to have a platform you control.
For clarity, Ghost is not a fork of Wordpress. They're written in different languages.
From comments (on HN and elsewhere) in recent years I get the impression that Ghost is still a better optimised solution than WP for some common use cases, but has switched direction a bit and started to experience the feature creep that is one of WP's issues which Ghost aimed to avoid.
The HN "new" page is lightly read -- a bit tiresome to page through all the chaff there. So a lot of good thought ages out, content link not followed.
Yes HN seems to be largely random chance. I've had this and one other post do quite well on here recently, and both times it was resubmissions that succeeded, with the first submission getting basically 0 votes.
I would also think it's worth keeping my blog around for the few articles people might find useful (there's one about Docker networking that keeps getting visits, even though surely docker must have fixed that bug by now...)
FWIW, my Jekyll + GitHub Pages + Cloudflare blog is free to run & handles HN traffic no problem (apart from the small cost of the domain name, which is sort of optional). I'd be happy to tell you more if you think it might save you some money.
This is often the case. The list of new posts on any given site will be full of junk, so it is down to luck that your content that is worth bothering with gets noticed by people who it is relevant to. As well as voting it up, some of them are likely to post about it elsewhere, or maybe forward the link more privately, and (again with a large luck factor) you might get a chain reaction of interest or it might just fizzle out.
The real luck of the draw comes when someone with a significantly sizes circle of followers forwards or otherwise mentions what you have posted, or⁰ just comments on it, as this increases the change of that chain reaction of interest happening.
The key¹ is to not care for wide dissemination as a goal, just consider it a happy accident if it happens, and instead write what is useful to you and/or your close circles (personal or professional, depending on the nature of the content).
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[0] if the platform highlights such events to others
[1] I assume, I've not got any of my stuff out there ATM due to lack of time, lack of motivation, and choice paralysis²
[2] which or the many many possible things do I do first?
[3] writing about things can aid understanding, or just help you decide further direction, in the same way that more generally doing can be more effective than reading (after initial research at least)
Worth a shot?
Though, have you looked at the Wayback Machine Site Map and URLs views for your blog? On the off chance that the Alexa crawler could already extract URLs from JavaScript back then, there's a possibility that additional requests were captured that can't be played back in the Wayback Machine. (This all assuming the site was served over HTTP to the crawler--otherwise it would have only gotten an 'unsupported' page, right?)
The Wayback Machine has not archived that URL. This page is not available on the web because of server error Click here to search for all archived pages
I always thought it was a pretty awesome way to collect things.
I struggle to (a) come up with things to write about and (b) get motivated to blog (which is probably the reason for (a)). I also feel that it's a lot harder to reach people now ...not sure if I'm writing about less interesting topics, or if my previous year-long hiatus drove away my readers. But whatever it is, it feels a lot more like a chore now than it ever did.
All I can find online is those marketing articles. HN Brain must have some better advice.
Substack seems to be a decent technology; the problem is that it's owned by Y Combinator, which means it can't be trusted--if you piss off whoever's running YC at the time, you can be suddenly banned and have your data stolen.
I settled on Hugo myself
Personally I would go with Hugo though. The main reasons for that: a) Native Markdown support – you can store your blog posts in a Git repo. b) Much much easier to write a custom theme for Hugo than for Wordpress.
The CMS part of Wordpress is quite good!
There are downsides if you do this the free way; anything dynamic stops working if it was a WP module (forms, search etcetera). However, if it's a basic blog, it'll work just fine. SimplyStatic does have a paid version that supports search, and if you need low-volume forms you could probably use JotForm or similar in JS/HTML embed/iframe mode.
Before I switched to static export of WP, I had OTP auth enabled for both the admin and editor accounts. That hasn't changed. I also use a webp plugin that rewrites all image elements (in posts at least) to picture elements; browsers can then pick between the original JPEG or the converted-to-WEBP image. Static export respects this element rewrite.
To enable static exporting, I
* migrated the live site to a new subdomain, * added the Simply Static plugin, * configured SS to not go near wp-uploads - I don't want to double my disk usage, * configured nginx to alias the wp-uploads from the dynamic subdomain to the static site, * configured nginx to HTTP-auth protect the dynamic site - belt/braces approach on top of the existing OTP auth.
I don't care much about publishing from the Wordpress app on my phone, so the HTTP auth hasn't been a problem for me.
Publishing is "create new post, review it on dynamic site, open the SS generate page, click button". It could be automated, but it doesn't bother me enough to do that.
A side-effect is that the blog is never down due to things like Wordpress upgrades (ie, the maintenance page that shows up), because it's not actually powered by WP.
I used to recommend Wordpress.com. I don't anymore. Self hosted Wordpress has its own issues. Even with no plugins, you still have a very real prospect of malware finding its way onto your site if you don't keep everything fully up to date.
e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
But I switched to hosting my own static blog with an always-on port-forwarded computer, Pelican and Isso.
I've written a blog post about Mataroa: https://pivic.blog/blog/mataroa/
What I enjoyed more was writing my own blogging engine and renting a cheap VPS. :)
For publishing, I use netlify (which does the build and hosting). Their free tier is more than enough for me. The domain comes from namecheap.
As for using GitHub to host it, it's still free and you can use a custom domain which is nice.
They both work and it's unlikely that either will limit you. Just pick one (I recommend flipping a coin) and go.
Here’s the hackernews discussion around that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23134101
This is the code I run in a cron job: https://gitlab.com/BenWiser/googledocsblog
You do however need a server and your own domain.
- For some it might be writing HTML and CSS directly and upload the files to some server via FTP.
- For others it would be using a static site generator, and uploading the files via FTP or hooking up a git repo that builds deploys automatically.
- There are hosted blogging services that provide a GUI, hosting and other affordances.
- There are services that are part aggregator part blogging platforms, similar to the above but with social media bells and whistles.
All of the above can essentially be hosted for free or very cheap. Alternatively you can host them yourself which is more involved.
IMO for the tech savvy the second option is likely the most attractive and productive (SSG + git), the third option (blogging platform) is great if you want a GUI and an all-in-one experience that includes hosting. The fourth if you like social network stuff. The first is fast for starting out and can transition into the second down the line if needed.
- to set the blog up, fork the Jekyll Now repository, and configure it to serve GH Pages
- to add a new article, just add a markdown file to the repository, and push it
"Forking Jekyll Now" is a different concept from "Using Jekyll".
"Jekyll Now" is a preconfigured repository for a blog, that can be used straight away (after configuring the author and blog name in the configuration file, of course).
This is probably an extremely simple way to publish a blog; using bare Jekyll and configuring a blog from scratch is definitely much more work, and I don't classify it as "simplest solution".
If you want to post only from your computer, then you can go with any of the thousands of static-site generators that are available out there.
If you're OK with posting by pushing a git commit on a repository, then you can post from multiple machines provided that you set up all the actions or CI/CD pipelines to make it work. Some people love setups like this, but it is not for me.
If you want to spend more time writing than fiddling with your blogging system, you can go with a ready-made one such as Wordpress, Ghost, Write.As, Blogger, etc. Usually they have both SaaS and self-hosted versions. Keeping a self-hosted Wordpress safe requires constant attention to updates.
I wrote about how my own blog works[1][2], which is a setup that I don't really recommend for those that just want something simple.
If I were you, I'd invest in a VPS and self-host something. If your objective is blogging for the long run, then you need to own your own platform. SaaS come and go, they change, your data need to be under your control if you're gonna do it for years to come.
[1]: https://andregarzia.com/2022/05/How-this-blog-works-or-embra...
[2]: https://andregarzia.com/2022/05/Got-metaWeblog-API-working-w...
Keeping a journal has a ton of value, people have known this for a long time.
You could just buy a notebook and pen at Walmart for $2 and start writing down your thoughts.
I can't think of a bigger waste of time at this point though than to start writing down your thoughts with the only intention of monetization. If you don't care about other people reading your thoughts, things become really simple.
You keep the files in markdown in a Dropbox folder, and the blot service uses the files to update your blog. This makes it easy to use my preferred editors on my phone, iPad, and windows or Linux desktop pretty seamlessly.
It actually became pretty popular once upon a time. It became powerful enough to bring products in the limelight of other people (mostly developers), and even bring down a small business (I felt so bad, I took my articles down and apologized to the business owner). I remember helping launch quite a lot of Startups in their very early stage.
Once, in winter of 2010/11, someone walked up to me at HackerDojo (Mountain View), and asked me "Are you brajeshwar.com?" I live on the opposite side of the Globe, so that felt nice.
It became popular enough as a single source of revenue for me and my pre-kid family to survive in a sprawling Mumbai sub-urban locality.
Now, it is rather bare, no analytics, and I don't quite write anymore. However, I would still love to have my own blog for as long as I can. Perhaps I need to start learning something entirely different from what I do or can do, and then blog the hell out of the experience.
Be it blog posts as documentation that I can come back to (more info https://www.jvt.me/posts/2017/06/25/blogumentation/) to discussing my salary and job applications, to writing about what I did that week.
It's been so useful just for me, and the fact I get ~20k hits a month, with no ads or anything to boost traffic non-orgsnically, shows that the things I'm solving are useful to others too. It's nice to give back, but it's also just for me
I recently added my newly re-re-re-redesigned blog to my HN profile, haven't linked it anywhere else or told anyone and already I'm getting tons of bot traffic trying attack it as though it were a wordpress site.
Write a blog, but understand that the interwebz isn't as naive as it used to be.
I created a wordpress blog but I didn't want to pay for it going forward. I bought a powerful Hetzner machine as I wanted something to play with at the same time. But my desktop was powerful enough for playing. So on GitHub people can use issues to reply to thoughts and I create a new repository when I get to 100 ideas per post. I have people submit examples of the ideas going forward when they are created. Or if I didn't know the idea already existed.
I use Github as my social network and share my code and try use it to talk to other developers.
1. Professional blog where I showcase my different approach to my profession (operations for high tech companies), thoughts on tools, and commentary on industry news. It's kind of boring, but it's for me.
2. Portfolio site. This is where I showcase processes, systems, and tools that I have developed for the companies I have worked for or consulted for.
3. Self-therapy secret blog under a pen name that I use to vent to myself and to the world about my challenges (main is that I have anxiety). I need an outlet where I can be unfiltered.
4. Passion blog for one of my hobbies.
5. Passion blog for one of my projects related to my hobby above.
WHY I BLOZg:
Main reason: Writing makes people think better, and better thinking is the secret sauce for better life and better professional performance.
Secondary reason: Yesterday I received a job offer for my next job. It has been a long journey that took me >6 months. Very few of my peers have an online presence and nobody has a portfolio. Having those put me on a different plane than everyone else. Interestingly enough, while I target exclusively Innovative companies, most people (CEOs and CXO) had mixed feelings about my online presence, but a few really liked it and appreciated my commitment to my craft, and my technical knowledge when it comes to web publishing.
So, there's that.
TL;DR: writing will make you think better, and will give you an advantage in your career. And it's self-therapy.
[1] https://disquiet.com/2019/06/16/word-blog-20th-anniversary-1...
https://silvertaza.com/startup-paths/
It is still more convenient to do blogging in Substack, but for potential dev content it is too limited in terms of what you can post there. One of my posts has a computer vision based game that leverages the webcam, and that would not have been possible there.
But then life happened, and I stopped writing posts.
Then last year, I realized I was missing it, and I started again. It's interesting to see how my writing muscles have atrophied over the years, and how much harder it is now, but still, maybe those will get strong again.
It's a skill that transfers well to other places.
I guess I also waste a lot of time on internet as well.