Reasons you aren't updating your personal site (2020)
brianlovin.com
brianlovin.com
I've such a list. Currently at ~10K entries. At such high number it's actually counter productive as choosing from abundance of options requires more effort. The popularized term for this is paradox of choice. I wonder how M. Richard does it (https://matt-rickard.com/archive) and has written a single post every day for the past one-two years. Leaves me really impressed.
Someone would ask a question on a forum or a mailing list. I would then blog out that answer and keep sharing it repeatedly to the same questions asked over and over again. The blog post would then be linked and discussed by sites such as Adobe, etc. Bam, you feel like writing more.
Now, I have a query or a topic, and there are hundreds of answers that people have already written about. Or I will know that is stupid; I need more information and in-depth research -- then I would get lazy and focus elsewhere.
Finally, I'm beginning to get addicted to the quiet and loving the new intoxication of silence.
Offtopic: The website's design is brilliant. Is this a theme or custom-rolled? A quick source did not reveal much but I would really love to steal a design similar to this that I can adopt.
No one might read it, but it's primarily for your own reference.
Wiki got a new name these days. Now wikis are Digital Gardens.
From personal experience, using Apple Notes as the sole interface to my personal site has resulted in new, unexpected behaviour. I publish shorter items, more often.
We need a new, more unpopular discovery engine for tech people and geeks?
[0]: https://teclis.com
TBH I only really started looking at traffic in the last year and I'm gratified it gets a bunch. But honestly not for the topics I would imagine (and often hope for).
The other useful aspect: writing about a topic flushes out my areas of ignorance and clarifies my thoughts. That's a useful exercise.
I'm one of the few that kept going out of a love for writing. It was only three or four years that I put GoAccess on my server, ran analytics, and realized that I actually had traffic!
If the motivation is intrinsic, it will keep happening until traffic comes naturally. If it is not, then it is easy to stop.
I wrote a niche blog for several years. Why did I stop? Simply because hardly anyone was reading the blog!
At first, I was writing for myself and an audience was not important. But over time, I came to realise that, although the size of the audience was not important to me, the interest and engagement of readers did matter (especially for a blog with a very niche topic). Hardly any readers commented on my blog posts - which was important to me.
I don't regret writing the blog at all. Writing down my thoughts, experience or research all helped me better at writing.
On the not promoting it side of things, there is too much disdain for self promotion. It's often looked down upon to promote yourself. So some people won't do it because they dislike others doing it. Their refusual to self promote hurts them more than others. The people who do self promote have a higher chance of success because they told everyone about themselves.
The giving up too quickly side of things, it takes time to build up a following, to build a reputation. You're not going to get 1000 views daily on your blog overnight. I've written multiple high traffic blog posts that are widely linked to, translated into other languages and even then, I barely get 100 users a day on my site when I'm not actively promoting it and creating new content. Most of my blogs probably get 1000 users overall. Very few get 1,000 users in a day. Sure if I keep building up my content and I'm more consisent it'll eventually get to the point I'm getting 1,000 users a day. But it's going to take time. And most people aren't willing to invest that time.
I heard this one idea in a software development conference a while back, that went along the lines of: "Your keypresses will be more valuable if more people benefit from them." which was essentially talking about private notes possibly being more wasteful due to less impactfulness.
That's kind of why I still write things in my personal blog (and am actually working on a blog/video series about opinionated software development) even though it's not too popular.
So that in a few weeks/months/years when something that I have previously jotted down will be relevant, I'll be able to just share a link and offer up my points without trying to recall all the minutea.
That actually extends to writing about the failure modes of software, e.g.: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/nginx-confi...
It doesn't have to be the best writing out there, or even correct 100% of the time, it just needs to serve as a historical record.
It's also that I have nothing to say anymore. I'm not sure which is the bigger reason. I didn't have all that much to say in the past I think. I just found random stuff interesting and wrote about it. But that goes back to the top issue. Anyone can tweet or post to their facebook in moments so it feels mostly pointless to try to share in an ocean of sharing.
At the moment having a well made Youtube channel seems like the new similar outlet. It's hard enough that it's semi rare. Sure anyone can post themselves just talking about stuff but not everyone can make Veritasium, Primitive Technology, Kutzgesagt, CGP Gray.
Let me also add, at least for me, it wasn't a small amount of work. A typical post took ~8hrs. 4~5 writing, editing, correcting and another 2-3 hrs editing images. There were shorter posts but the ones that made it feel worth doing were the longer posts.
I love the lowkey dev blogs, they don't try so hard and often have unique insights.
I think my biggest obstacle is finding the time. Writing something worthwhile requires a decent chunk of time and brain real-estate. I have many other projects that also require the same, and juggling them all is hard. I kinda wish I had more time to write, because I really enjoy it.
This isn't a bug, but a feature so that everything I write is because I want to, not because I want to chase traffic.
On the one hand, the first youtube video I uploaded got 16 comments and about 1000 views in 50 days. Obviously this isn't "viral" but it's a lot more engagement than I've ever gotten with blogging or microblogging.
Also I think of it as a filter, if a client is superficial enough to not like me cus my CV site is not pretty, then good, I probably dont want to work for them.
Biggest source of traffic is probably my mom. I don't care, it's my living diary.
And yes I'm aware of the irony of an HN user saying this.
It’s possible to write for yourself. This is why for many years I had no analytics and no comments on my blog.
A wrote on this 6 years ago - https://podviaznikov.com/writings/on-obsession-with-numbers - I think I have even more ideas on this topic now.
The actual reasons: lack of purpose and strategy, combined with permanent record.
A resource is only worth as much as it is requested. No readers? No updates. A personal website: if you are not looking for a job, you won't update it. A blog: if you have nowhere to passively promo your website (no twitter followers, no youtube subscribers, no newsletter readers, and you are not otherwise famous) then you must either actively promote it on HN/Reddit (takes a certain mindset) or again you won't update it (a strategy where you write first and then promote might help but target payoff must be so good to outweigh that, and again certain mindset).
You'd ask why not just practice around, write stuff knowing no one will read it? Permanent record. Screw up once on your personal domain and 98% of the time it's OK but 2% that's it for life.
I do share the technical posts from my websites on HN and Reddit hoping to get some feedback but that's not the primary motive. Also, there were no HN and Reddit in 2001. Back then I used to write for myself and I still do so now. My personal website is a way for me to keep an archive of some fun things I know so that my future self can look back at them when needed or desired. Only a few days ago, I added a jokes page[1] to my website just because I thought it would be nice to keep my favourite jokes somewhere easily accessible.
As years go by, I've found that the friction of editing and publishing new posts or pages to my website has only become less. First came virtual private servers that swayed me away from shared web hosting services. Good riddance because the shared web hosts often had terrible security. Then came Git which made it incredibly efficient and convenient to keep a change history of my website and sync it to any system.
I write my pages in plain HTML using Emacs. Then git add; git commit; make pub[2] and the updated website is published within seconds. A Common Lisp program reads all my HTML pages, adds a common theme and template to them and writes them out to a directory Nginx can read from. It is as low friction as it can get while maintaining complete control on the design and code of the website.
It has been 13 years since I wrote the first line of HTML and I am still having fun!
[1] https://susam.net/maze/jokes.html
[2] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/Makefile#L144
I had thrown in your https://github.com/susam/texme few times to quickly send Markdown files for reading. :-)
If you put in some effort and write something a few paragraphs long, or that took some research, or where you realised you had knowledge other commenters didn't, copy-and-paste it into the blog.
It's kept mine going for years. I write for a living; I rarely have time or inclination to do more for free. So, repurposed anonymised comments it is. Keeps it active and I have a few readers.
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* _One night in Bangkok_ reference
Normally I do it alongside FOSS contributions, etc. - but with a full-time job, that's much less frequent than I'd like.
There's been times where it's been very useful though, both for my own reference and to show others e.g. on stuff that I did in my PhD ~10 years ago.
The big change for me was making the effort easy - Nikola to generate static content and push to Github Pages is about as low effort as it gets, since jupyterlab completely solves the "markdown with drag and drop pictures" problem and Nikola can take that and just publish it.
If you have an Apple device, check out montaigne.io. We're building it to make building a website as easy as possible - users can create, edit and publish a website without ever having to leave Apple Notes. And drag and dropping pictures is super easy in Notes.
- it's domain is like a home address on the internet, the website is the home on the web BUT we normally do not do much on our homes to show things to others, they tend to be used just internally showing nothing particular to the outside world;
- using it to share some personal projects it's ok-ish in the sense that if the project grow it probably get a project website, if not is probably not much interesting for others being almost unreachable due to the lack of really effective semantic search engines;
- using it to publish CVs and alike is ok-ish since such publications can't be targeted so they are a bit too generic to be of effective usage;
- using it to publish personal articles is ok, but normally no one except professional journalists have something to publish regularly.
IMVHO real personal websites:
- MUST NOT be blogs, blog idea IMO was a tentative to milk more personal information in the early stage of surveillance capitalism before smartphones came out using the peoples desire to show themselves to the world not caring much if the world is interested or not;
- they should be REALLY personal, in the sense hosted on a homeserver because in 2022 ANY home should have an internet connection and any user a domain name so a static IP and a bunch of domains with vhosts for any family members for email, IM, file sharing, ... AND personal website as a way to publish something you like to share casually;
- RSS to offer a mean for friends to follow the site without manually visiting it (full articles in the feed);
- a personal web-app for file-sharing and things you like when on the go.
These are my only personal list of reasons to have, and so to keep a bit up to date, a personal website. Stating clearly that personal website does not mean blog.
- despite actual blog usage blogs was named as a contraction of web logs in the sense of human being web life logs, or "just post what are you doing, what you've just done" etc, they NEVER succeed for that of course, but that's was their original idea and design before "infinite scrolling" was a thing. Personal publications are more articles from a personal website and it's purpose unfortunately remain not that defined...
- I do not state tie a domain to a home nor to a human, but ideally I hope a day we all have a home server, we actually have outside ours control in general and improperly named "router" (well, improperly in the sense that such 'boxes' are actually multi-purpose small servers not just mere routers) but "at least any humans should have at least one domain name starting from the high school beginning" and it's purpose should at least be for emails/federated IM/file sharing/* the user want from it's own iron...
- I understand that static IPs might represent an issue for some reasons including file sharing coupled with other activities, privacy etc BUT dynamic DNS is an extra layer and honestly I prefer a real dome IPv6 deploy for anyone with privacy extensions BUT also with a global per any device we own...
Essentially: IMO it's hard to find a real unique and clear purpose for a personal website but since we more or less have all some set of needs to have a personal machine accessible from the internet and the web is the most common tech over internet... Well... At least "please try to integrate tools we have widespread to do something useful" to make the modern real Mundaneum Otlet/La Fontaine and many others have dreamed for more than a century :-)