Own your work
josem.co
josem.co
My advice is always to forget about the details and just write. Set up a medium account, or substack, or blogspot, or get a VPS and install Wordpress or Ghost, or just tweet out your article line by line. If there is value in what you write then the readers will be there. And they will follow you if you decide to move your work elsewhere in the future.
Also I can’t say that I enjoyed tinkering with Go templates, finicky file syncing etc. just for publishing some Markdown text in a pretty package.
If I had to do it again, I would choose Substack, and keep my Markdown files backed up just like I do now. In the event of having to switch, I can always just publish those files elsewhere.
And if Substack also supports custom domains, I would also use that to avoid dead links.
There are cases where your own site is needed however: for unique presentations like those on ciechanow.ski, for sites where the visual look is a defining feature of what is presented etc.
[1] https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/How%20I%20write%20this%20blog...
I don’t think that’s true anymore. Of course, it depends on how you define “value”, but I think having something “special” to share not always attract readers. Controversial takes, click bait, hate bait, exaggerated praising to a specific niche, all of this works better than “value” in your writing to get readers. Even if you stick to “value”, you have to do it for months or years to get readers. So consistency seems to be more effective than said value too.
I think that’s similar to SEO. 5 to 10 years ago the common advice was that you should just do white hat SEO because Google would always catch you because they were so smart, thousands of the smartest engineers on earth against your silly tricks. Google would always won. But, now, it seems clear to me that black and grey hat SEO beats Google most of the time.
I get the point of results counter to common wisdom though. The pendulum is always swinging so sometimes one side is right and sometimes its the other but that doesn't make it wrong. Life requires timing along with critical thinking.
If you do use a third party, please regularly download backups of your work. One of the reasons my blog was so popular was because it also has an archive of articles that I shamelessly copied from other sites (with attribution), most of which have since gone defunct, their content otherwise lost.
This reminds me of an old tip[1] about bringing your own thin dry-erase markers to onsite interviews, because you would get more whiteboard space that way.
[1] https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goo...
Most people who blog don't aim to be influential writers. It's more about self expression.
> they will follow you if you decide to move your work elsewhere in the future
Except this almost never happens in the real world
Some do. It's not black and white but there are losses.
In such a case you are not a writer, you’re a tinkerer/mechanic.
Just like with other products and services: you market it.
For instance, I might publish a clip on my own site first, then mirror it to places like YouTube, TikTok and Reddit so more people find it. Or post an article on my own site first, then repost it on Medium and Substack (with a canonical saying my own version is the original if possible).
That way you're not tied to a specific platform, and can just find another place to share/post your work if any of them go to hell.
Results: Much learning. Fun. Friendships. Kind notes from strangers. Occasional satisfaction.
I agree with you, Jose. Thanks! -Cliff
It also compelled me to seek out some American band that was mentioned in there called The Grateful Dead.
Life changing in two ways.
How did the number of interactions change over time?
Off-topic question - have you ever heard of hypercubing? As in solving Rubik's cubes in 4 dimensions (and more?) It's a growing niche that I'm involved in and I think it might fit your interests. Would love to tell you more about it if you're interested :)
(For the record, the way we solve cubes in 4 dimensions is by simulating them on a computer, but there are also "physical versions" of the 4d puzzles.)
1. You still own your work if you post it other places, just not the platform.
2. You own the platform if you host it on a VPS, but not the hardware.
3. You own the hardware if you host it at home, but still, only license the software which runs it.
4. Many more.
You want real advice? Ignore this guy, and just start. Most of you people concerned on where you should start blogging/pocasting don't even start because of all the choices and the fearmongering (like this guy).
Just write something and hit send. Not doing that is the only guarantee of failure. Everything else is fixable.
At the end of the day, any service trades control for convenience/access. I run a podcast hosting service that's slightly more expensive than hosting yourself with WordPress. Paying me to host your show gets you a platform that's had 99.999% uptime for years. You don't need to think about renewing your domains or certificates or installing WordPress/Apache/nginx/Ubuntu/whatever updates. You don't need to think about how to get accurate analytics or filtering out automated requests from your log data. You don't need to worry about your show being protected by a single auth factor. If your time is worth $60/hr and my service is $10/mo, is your podcast taking more than two hours a year of your time (minus hosting costs)? Some people don't want to make that tradeoff and that's fine, but it's simply a better choice to find a third party that you trust to do stuff for you.
Who even cares about this? Everybody's first few blog posts suck. It is better to be prolific than perfect.
Too technical?
Use one of the platforms that makes the domain registration and linking it up easy.
That basically happened with James Mathe. He was the owner of Minion Games, and he had an incredible tome of board game publishing on Kickstarter advice on his blog.
He died suddenly one day in 2019, and his self-hosted site went under. You can still read it to a certain extent thanks to archive.org[1], but as thankful as I am for archive.org, they don't have the best user experience.
Meanwhile if he had posted it on blogspot or on BoardGameGeek (which supports user blogs), it'd still be fully available today.
I think it's important to have a self-hosting solution, but I think you also need an alternative. The POSSE solution mentioned above would be better than only self-hosting.
Ideally these websites would have better data preservation and archiving processes, though, and too many just don't have anything in place. Because you're just not going to be able to convince everyone to host their own.
I'd settle for automatic conversion to text-only archives, that could be good enough while making the required space much more miniscule.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190617212658/http://www.jamesm...
Totally true, but good luck getting the customer to your site. Way easier to put your product on Amazon, eBay, Etsy, wherever people are already shopping AS WELL - and take a hit on profit (at least initially) and figure out how you build off that.
Leverage all the social media and blog sites and substacks and whatever that you can. Build a base and then figure it out from there.
This was basically the only option in the early 90s before geocities etc... So most of us who were on the web in the 90s did exactly that. Difference was, when you turned your computer off for the night, your site was down
If you were really fancy you had a dedicated T1 line, but those were for rich people only
I've been on my own domain for well over a decade and my CI process hasn't changed from "drag and drop a .html file written in notepad onto a BSD private-colo server via WinSCP"
Literally never fails and my kb size pages don't crush anything.
The internet is ephemeral. Blogging platform user accounts, domain names, VPSes, IP addresses, home servers, and software like Wordpress, Apache/Nginx, or Linux distributions don't last forever and require frequent maintenance and updates. If you passed away tomorrow, it's unlikely your content would be accessible online for more than a few years from now.
If you want your work to survive as long as possible, print your texts on acid-free materials and store them in a plastic bag within a Thermos-like container to protect against temperature, humidity, and light changes, as well as water and chemicals. Distribute copies globally for redundancy against disasters and fires, and there's a reasonable chance your work will be around for at least a thousand years.
However, we blog and put our work online not for ownership or preservation, but to get it out there. The internet is a communication tool, and it has short-attention-span readers anyways. The goal is to disseminate your work rather than own or preserve it. So does it matter if it's on a platform that will die in a decade?
If you want your work to be preserved for many hundreds of years and in a way that's accessible to everyone, you need to build a monument. Otherwise, you can pick one of the two: dissemination or preservation. Though of course, improving the longevity of your content on the internet can be done and it's not entirely black and white. But if we are looking at the big picture and using words like "forever", I don't think internet is a medium for preserving anything on that scale, nor will it exist in the form it does today a hundred years from now.
I described the thought process I went through here: https://jmmv.dev/2016/01/medium-experiment-wrapup.html and am currently using Hugo to build my site. Granted, creating content via Markdown is slightly more convoluted than using a web UI, but the feeling of control and future-proofness I get cannot be matched.
This is overstating it. You cannot "own" a domain name. Domains are essentially rented and eventually (whether on purpose or by accident) your domain name will expire.
For broadcasting, use platforms you don’t own but where people are.
Use one or both depending on your goals.
Actually I try to do both. I have started working on a static hand made homepage in addition to my blog. But whatever the approach, I still have to produce the actual content. Sometimes I feel that is the hardest part.
That said, the dumped data is not in a format that can be just uploaded to a different platform, or to my own site. That's not an issue for me, because I can write a little code that will transform the posts exactly how I need them for upload to a different platform, or my own site. When I end up needing to do this, I'll probably add custom styling that will look better than Substack's anyway, particularly in reference to code blocks.
I feel for nontechnical people. How do you decide where to invest your time? What do you do when the platform shifts in a bad direction, or closes entirely? AI tools will probably help a lot of people in this situation, if they were good about maintaining backups in the first place. I imagine "Can you convert my Substack archive to a format that will work on x_new_platform" would probably be a useful prompt.
But generally speaking, sometimes you have to leverage platforms that have the current attention of the world as that is where you will drive engagement to your platform. It is fairly rare to just win organic search traffic especially starting out so you have to "hijack" some attention here and there where applicable.
If you follow any notable person online who writes, creates content, etc, they are not afraid of going where everyone else is going whether that means they may have to be exclusive with their creations for awhile or whether that platform allows them to retain the rights to their creations.
At the end of the day, it all helps them build an audience that they can take anywhere and there's many possibilities depending on what you'd like to do with that platform.
Substack is that popular thing right now because it combines both the content and email list ownership that you can then take anywhere were it to go under tomorrow. It is a very accessible way to "own your work" today, especially for those who don't want to bother setting up a wordpress blog or similar.
The only thing you have to do if you want to run a blog is to write. Everything else is defintiely not mandatory.
ChatGPT is a great litmus test here. Ask it to syndicate the main ideas of your content to a respective platform.
You can do it, I’m not arguing against it.
And maybe that would result in more readers. I’m just saying it’s not mandatory and there are alternatives.
The idea here is something that allows you quick recreation and copying. You can just copy over static files. You can put it on your Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. and even on your external hard disk or whatever backup solution you use.
Usually the main dynamic thing for writers is actually creating posts. So if that is some offline software that just spits out static files it becomes incredibly resilient.
One might think static site generators, like Hugo, but there is also GUI applications that essentially equal what the admin of a blog or CMS see.
I have ported this to go for myself. Works really well for my use.
There is no friction anymore, and yet I still don't put up new blog posts on a regular basis.
The problem is me, not the tech.
One particularly large one that shut down with zippyshare is 'Holland tunnel drive' which has been captured by archive.org in a couple of locations below.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170711205314/http://hollandtun...
https://archive.org/details/jillem-full-archive
Many similar sites had gone through similar isssues with shutdowns of megaupload and similar. Or being kicked off blogspot etc. The ones that survive are generally self hosted. But few older ones been archived on archive.org like this has.
Regarding the topic of this post, use social media, blogging platforms, your VPS, etc. Just keep in mind that things die, and you should be able to recover from them. I am not suggesting any particular way for the way you share your writings; do what works best for you. However, I suggest not going to the extreme and abandoning everything that ends. Think of how you can make use of these mortal platforms and have a backup plan for when they eventually die.
So yesterday I was reviewing my options for rebooting my tech blogging, and went looking at the platforms. I was steering towards HashNode after reading the advice from another technical blogger to say to just focus on your content. It does look like a quality site for technical blogging. But for me a must-have is the ability to write off-line and it doesn't look like that is possible with HashNode. It has an API but it's WAY more complicated than is warranted and seem to exist just for the purpose of saying that it's technically possible to upload your content instead of using their online editor.
Another thing that happened yesterday is that after searching for over an hour, I was still unable to locate my old Blogger site where I was writing about computer vision some time around 2006. I've changed computers several times since then, and whatever notes I had did not make the transition to my newer workstations. So sad. Clearly this could happen even if you self-publish but I think it's less likely. I still have all of my original self-published blog articles, and those were from around the same time.
Anyway, yesterday I had settled on either using Blogger again, or using HashNode. But after reading this article and the HN discussions I'm not so sure. I am going to look back at my self-written SSG from ~2008, and see how hard it would be to have those same semantics in the cloud (wasn't an option back then). A static site is fine if you don't need the social and collaborative features.
Another thing I'll mention - in the context of the POSSE principle mentioned by others - is that IFTTT is like $5/month and seems well-suited to the POSSE approach of publishing.
I'm developing my blog in Svelte, and I trust that (despite being kind of a niche framework) it will last for long. But if it gets abandoned by its developers then I'll have a problem.
The only way for me to own everything on it would be to do develop as much as I can by myself, like quit using Sass and Svelte in favor of plain CSS and vanilla JS, and also self-host it instead of relying on a VPS. And that's not even mentioning the dependencies of the API, which is made in Rust and its less mature ecosystem
I think that the path to software preservation is a long long road
If you thought that Musk was going to be beneficial for Twitter in any way, you were deluding yourself about him. Tesla and SpaceX were only successful because competent people did all the thinking and spent a lot of time managing upwards.
I changed publishing tools so many times, but all the content still lives on the same domain name and I try to support same URLs.
I obviously cannot analyze my own style because that is my style and how I write so reflection from other people are so fascinating.
And thank you for commenting on this specific essay. I’ve just read it again and unfortunately it still holds, almost 2 years since it was published.
But I think I am starting to develop my own tools to work against general tendencies at least in my personal life. I will think more about it!
I've yet to see an answer that satisfies me here. Many times, inquisition is indeed used as a plausibly deniable mask for ideology. Similarly, I don't think you or I will ever reasonably be free of our own personal ideologies.
If I had a good answer, the post wouldn't be interesting to me. I could rattle off one of the common answers (technocracy, degrowth, investment in education, something something social media bad) but those seem tired and wrong to me. This kind of topic is one where it's easy to find the obvious target (this person, this system, this policy, this organisation) and start shunting blame, but that's ironically falling afoul of the problem itself circularly.
There's no solution I stand behind with enough confidence to state it on a public forum like this.
For now, I'll just have to keep asking questions.
I think I found a temporary shortcut/patch for myself that I can apply on the personal level.
If I see something outrageous online I bring it and discuss in person with few people and we have more nuanced conversation and I see that questions are asked and it’s not as crazy as online.
And it calms be down and relaxes and gives me hope back. Because old dynamics - of asking questions and having nuanced conversations - they still work.
Solution: Markdown in Git -> HTML -> Firebase Hosting over own domain (easy to migrate and replace)
I do use Blogger though. Twice I have switched to self hosting on my domain, and on my web site using Jeckal. Both times I switched back for convenience.
In my case most of engagement happened on social media, and I saw little benefit from my website; so eventually I stopped updating my webpage and started posting directly to social media platforms.
the closest to this most of us ever get, is the 'sense' of ownership evoked by competent managers.
notice that it is a 'sense of' ownership. not real ownership;
anything that I create by myself, on my own, is not work; it's a hobby, it's fun, like really good games.
by this point I even think of work as all the other things I must do to afford rent, food, electric bills, chores, etc.