Comment by shantnutiwari | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shantnutiwari | Hacker News Reader

I've had a blog on and off for many years (link in my bio)

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.

> moved to Ghost this time-- its a better (simpler?) version of Wordpress

For clarity, Ghost is not a fork of Wordpress. They're written in different languages.

> Ghost is powered by a modern technology stack using Node.js

https://ghost.org/vs/wordpress/

Ghost's overall initial pitch was definitely "Wordpress without the things people often dislike about Wordpress". It's definitely aiming at the same fast install/nice web UI space that made WP dominate the web for a long time.

Originally Ghost was a reaction to the problems some (many?) had with WordPress, it was deliberately trying to be less while doing specific things better (more efficient, easier to design/populate). I've not actually used it despite watching closely early on (I've not used WP significantly myself either, but know people who do/did, who I've helped out on some technical matters) mainly because my own making-content-worth-publishing projects have all come to very little thus far!

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.

Interesting, nice that you like Ghost. I went to university with one of the founders, and I was kinda considering applying for a job there, they seem like a pretty cool company.

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.

> 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.

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)

> The strange thing is you can never tell which article of yours will blow up.

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.

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