What do you expect from personal blogs?
That I'm wondering: What do personal blogs/websites need? Originality? Minimalism? Design diversity? Social media?
They need to have personality and talk to me like I’m their friend and we are having lunch (ie I don’t wanna be bored)
They need to be written in a way that makes it easy to read too (ie no long paragraphs)
They need to be helpful, interesting or entertaining (preferably all 3)
I use my personal blog[1] as knowledge Archive for myself. Writing stuff down helps me to understand and remember. And a organized readable version of my personal thoughts about a topic is way better than a simple brain dump in logseq. If someone else is interested, great. If not, it also is ok.
I did have the thought of earning money through affiliate links. The "feature" is there, but to be honest I don't really care any more. It's just good to have a place for my structured knowledge dump - and I call this a success :-)
[1]: https://pilabor.com
https://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/C-H-speech.html
Case in point - this is one of the best pieces of writing I've read in a long time. It's not even the right format (written transcript versus original audio). And the webpage could hardly be uglier. Yet it's everything (and more) that every real writer could want to be
I will get modded down and probably flagged for this because it's not just dissent but existential threat on HN, but this means:
Don't ever use AI generated content [0]. The pictures, the words, the video, the voices, any of it. Because not caring about creative choices poisons your integrity.
e.g. for illustrations:
- if you can draw well, do that. Find a way to capture them consistently, use those
- if you can manage a half-arsed sketch, do that. Find a way to capture them consistently (or use some of the minimal tricks in an iPad drawing app to fix them up). Make a virtue of it.
- if you can't draw at all, do you know someone you could ask? Or are there relevant sketches in the Flickr Commons or whatever. Or get just good enough that you can make a virtue of being crap at it.
For photographs:
- if you can photograph something relevant, do that
- if not, use a stock library. Pay, preferably, but credit if not. Or use the Flickr Commons and find something relevant
Failing all this, illustrate with something irrelevant but contemporaneous. Write your stuff, and shoot photos on your phone of your day as you write. Use a photograph from your phone that captures the day you wrote the article. Write a little caption to do it. Make a virtue of this sort of separate parallel stream of your content.
But no AI-generated content. Ever.
[0] except maybe when you're writing about AI-generated content. But please, if you can, find something else to write about. Integrity 102: don't shoehorn AI into every conversation.
What's not great is when the blog's sole purpose to exist is to market something, or to get clicks on affiliate links/ads/whatever.
A theme is good too. But if the writing is good, it could be about food or electronics or 80s tv shows