Ask HN: Should I consolidate my blogs into one?

If you want to develop a personal brand in some area, such as entrepreneurship, then you need to run a blog focused on that issue.

At the risk of exaggerating, “my whole life” blogs are for young people and for people who don’t care about building an audience. LiveJournal was for teenagers.

The more specific the blog, the more you are able to develop an audience for that niche.

By contrast, a blog that contains everything in your life will only appeal to your friends.

There is a deceptive almost exception: people who are funny. They seem to break the rule. They seem able to talk about whatever they want, and they still have an audience. But in that case, they actually have a niche: humor. Everything they write is funny, so people who like humor read it all.

But unless you are reliably funny, stick to narrow topics.

Seconded. It might sound shallow, but I've unsubscribed from several blogs and YouTube channels when they stopped consistently delivering the expected type of content. It doesn't even matter to me if the content slows down or pauses while the creator works on other things, what matters is that the signal:noise ratio of the feed is high.

Likewise, I've chosen not to subscribe to coworkers' blogs because they were this "my whole life" style blog and I was only interested in their technical observations.

That's hard though, because I agree, but then also some of my favourites do a mix that I enjoy, and it just happens that they discovered the mix before I discovered the channel I suppose. If people followed that as a rule, I wouldn't get to watch Clough42 doing electronics one week, 3D printing the next, and then attaching it to a milling machine or something and testing it out. I wouldn't get to see Marius Hornberger pause woodworking to do a load of electronics/printed/mechanical upgrades to his drill press, or 3D print parts for dust collection, or build a new machine.

I suppose there is Matthias Wandel's approach of the 'main' channel being kept mostly pure woodworking (but still machine builds, wood strength tests, wooden mouse maze experiments) and then a 'random stuff' second channel for the electronics, more experiments, Lego, recently metal lathe, etc.

Yeah, this is fair. I do think that changing your mix is much more risky than just having a mix.

There is also a difference between what you're describing and the "my whole life" blog, which is that the mixes themselves form a proper category. It's not a woodworking channel that takes a pause for philosophical musings, it's a maker channel that happens to spend a lot of time on woodworking.

My guess is that the "my whole life" blog doesn't work well for developing an audience because the sum total of all of your interests is unique or nearly so—there will be very few people who actually want to read about every one of your hobbies and interests. If you want to connect with people you need to identify a subset of your interests that are shared as a set by many others.

I would argue that clough42 does fit a niche where all the videos are on a topic, in his case it's doing very ambitious projects/modifications that the average home-shop person wouldn't attempt. Another example would be nighthawkinlight, who does a wide range of projects but with a strong home-shop/diy science bent. If either of these channels started posting stuff like cooking or video essays, I would potentially unsubscribe. Those are both things that I also subscribe to, but having the different things all on one channel makes it too unpredictable what kind of content I'll be clicking on.

For a blog, many of the same rules apply. A blog relies on more external links into the content than a YouTube channel, but you still want a consistent theme. If I click a blog from here or another site, if the content is good I'm likely to read other articles and either bookmark/rss/subscribe via email. If the articles are a mishmash of topics, then I'm less likely to want to engage further since I don't know what I'll be getting. And you want that dedicated core group for a blog to be successful, since those people are the ones who will start posting links to your stuff on other sites.

An example from HN that comes to mind is brr.fyi, I know I'm not the only person who subscribed to his email notifications, since everytime I've gotten an email I've also seen the article posted to HN, so other people have been following and have been faster at posting the new article as a HN story than me.

i'd go the other way. you might lose some "subscribers", yes, but in their situation it's less about subscribers and more links and serps. in this case, i'd go the simplest possible, especially with their goals being improving writing and building a personal brand

if the goal was dominate seo for a specific niche, yes definitely separate it out. google will reward you for staying on-topic.

> most traffic is coming from me sharing links to new content, or people searching for a particular thing that is indexed by Google, thus leading to a specific blog post

That's the reason I never got much into Twitter. I'd follow someone for a specific topic, but then more than half of their posts was about sports, politics...

Depends on if you like their personality or not. Twitter was always for the person and eventually other types of accounts focusing on niches came around.

For this reason, I (want to) implement a tag-based newsletter where I can tag a post as "tech" rather than "lifestyle" and only those subscribed to the "tech" tag will get notified, whether by email or by some other way.

i split my blogs (see my bio) for these reasons. people need to know what theyre getting in order to subscribe. if you have the volume of output to support multiple blogs, then do it (most people cannot)

IMO, is this Good advice for hacker news itself. It contains diverse topics in one stream, such as history, Botany, and Coding. You can argue it is a feature or a bug.

how do I convince people that I'm funny

Saw a number of votes here for keeping them separate. Having struggled with the question for a long time, I'll voice my vote for unifying them.

I've been a SWE for 25+ years and an artist for longer, showing art online as early as 1993 (anybody remember Gopher?), and blogging semi-regularly since the early 2000s. Originally I kept a strict separation between the two out of fear that people interested in one topic wouldn't take me seriously if I had any trace of another.

A few years ago I finally decided that being "taken seriously" was perhaps not that important and I just threw everything together in the same pot, under a single domain and implementation. I do tag each post with one or more topics, and I have an RSS feed for each topic, so people with more specialized interests can subscribe just to the topics they care about. I also eliminated all analytics and comment features as distractions not relevant to my main goals, namely: capturing, refining, and sharing my thoughts about whatever topics I care about.

As a result, I've found I've enjoyed writing and looking back at my previous work more. I realized that my blog was for me, and the maybe five other people in the world who like it the way I do.

As for "building a personal brand" and "developing an audience," others would know much more about that -- I believe, without much evidence to support it, that it will lead to more happiness if you focus on finding your true voice and writing with integrity about things you care about, rather than thinking about ways to get more eyeballs on your pages. YMMV.

I hope you'll consider sharing your URL when you're ready. (http://johnj.com is mine.)

Indeed, one should think about whether they want to write for oneself or for others, as the two have vastly different approaches for effectiveness.

Speaking as someone that has an "everything blog" (https://xeiaso.net), it's been fun. I've actually been considering splitting things out so that some of my joke series are on another blog (such as the one parodying the onion) because people are simply unable to understand satire.

I've been told that my blog allows me to skip interviews because I am able to demonstrate competency in more than one field.

Try it and see!

Hey Xena!

Funny things, I actually checked your blog before posting this question, to see how other people do it. I'm not a frequent reader of your blog, but I was under the impression that yours is mostly consistent in terms of content. It still feels to me that you are sticking to a broad term of software engineering, but I haven't read all the content, so can't tell for sure.

Thanks for your comment!

It's mostly software as of late, but there's bits like this: https://xeiaso.net/blog/2024/the-layoff/

Nice fonts on the homepage? What are they?

Iosevka and Podkova!

I love this new generation of tech illiterate bloggers, would it be too much trouble to make www version of website working. So much for devops lol

The answer may be obtained via drawing a venn diagram estimating the audience overlap between the various topics.

Unless you’re being followed as a celebrity, the full context of your life is simply not that interesting.

So the answer is more often than not: publish different topics under different brands. Cross-link in the about section, if you think there’s more upside than downside.

Or in other words: if I love your software-engineering content, but your general life content turns me off, there’s a good chance that I’ll stop reading your stuff entirely. And if you commingle topics, that’s on you. If you keep them separate and I commingle, that’s on me.

So unless you’re a super rare source of unique insight,

Keep them split.

I used to have only one blog. Now I have a tech/professional blog and a personal one.

(I literally copied the repo and removed posts from each copy.)

Before I split them, I would get a ton of personal attacks here on HN and on Reddit because people would go to other posts on the blog, find some personal issue, real or imagined, that they didn't like. Once I split, people focused on the tech stuff.

I don't know for sure, but it got so bad that I suspect dang considered downranking posts from my domain. I think he even considered banning me. (I had thinner skin back then.)

Just host them all on the same server, keep the URL's hot because there's google juice tied to those URLs that you'll lose if you change them now.

Many ways to go about doing that. Wordpress supports it https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4751530/wordpress-multip...

As do many other platforms (namely ghost, which seems to have good google visibility)

I would take the approach of having an umbrella blog covering your personal stuff, with posts pointing to the more specialized blogs. That's indeed something I'm considering from the opposite direction: I currently have one "blog" that's been the victim of my writer's block because

1. Jekyll's becoming increasingly complicated to work with in $CURRENT_YEAR due to increasingly-out-of-date components, so I'm trying to decide between Fossil's wiki functionality¹ v. Scroll² (both of which seem to be right up my alley) as the migration path; and

2. it's a single personal website, and there's a psychological block of "well do I really want to have political posts next to religious posts next to technical posts next to musical posts next to miscellaneous posts?"

I haven't exactly figured out my end-goal with this, aside from possibly keeping the entirety of my main webserver's `/var/www/htdocs` (or some subdirectory) as a giant Fossil monorepo full of .scroll files (if I go with the Scroll approach) or a bunch of individual Fossil repos with wikis (if I go with the Fossil approach). But in any case, segregating topics would just be a matter of pointing the right domains to the right subfolders or repos.

----

¹ https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/wikitheory.wiki

² https://scroll.pub/

> Jekyll's becoming increasingly complicated to work with in $CURRENT_YEAR due to increasingly-out-of-date components, so I'm trying to decide between Fossil's wiki functionality¹ v. Scroll² (both of which seem to be right up my alley) as the migration path;

If I may propose an alternative, I'm extremely happy with Hugo as a static site generator. It's a statically compiled Go binary so you can keep using whatever version you want forever (or update to get new features), and it's simple with optional complexity. It works fine for the most basic of blogs, and it works fine for more complicated blogs with hierarchies and taxonomies. There's also a good collection of themes you can directly use or use as the starting point.

Re: Hugo

Be aware that the templating language is a bit difficult to learn if you're not already a Go programmer. The documentation is spread across the text/template and html/template Godoc and also Hugo's documentation of the DOM (e.g. attributes of a page object, which you'll need to display the page's title etc., if you're writing custom themes or altering existing ones). I didn't find the documentation of the DOM particularly good at the time (10 years ago now, may have improved), lots of examples but not much reference documentation if you want to do something other than what the example does.

Be aware as well that there are no hierarchies in categories, e.g. in WordPress you can have "dev" and under that "java", "go" etc. Go just has flat categories. If you want to have a "dev" category displaying all your dev stuff, you have to tag each "java" post as "dev" in addition.

> Be aware that the templating language is a bit difficult to learn if you're not already a Go programmer

I didn't find it difficult coming from Jinja, but it's not something trivial, I agree.

However templating isn't something you need unless you go into more complicated topics - most themes cover the basics pretty well, and there are a lot of resources online to guide you.

Hugo and other Jekyll-like SSGs are definitely on my radar, too. Hugo in particular seems nice in that the migration path looks pretty trivial. My big worry with such tools is that the templates tend to get real hairy real fast, and I think moving away from anything that resembles Jekyll is psychologically necessary to shake off that writers' block.

Main thing drawing me toward Fossil is that I've already been transitioning my personal software projects onto it anyway, and Fossil's Markdown dialect happens to have some very nice features that I like. Main downside is that it's very much not designed with blogs or generic websites in mind, so while I was able to come up with a decent prototype (https://fsl.yellowapple.us/website), there's still a bit of jank that'll take some more in-depth customization.

Main thing drawing me toward Scroll is its flexibility; it's cool being able to do everything "in Scroll" instead of having to switch between content v. frontmatter v. config files v. themes v. plugins. Main downside is that it lacks maturity and documentation, so trying to figure out how to use it is a bit of an adventure in its own right.

You could also check out Quarto [0]. It is maintained by the people behind RStudio. It offers a hassle-free blogging option. You can update Quarto via apt-get, and not worry about manually updating Jekyll or Jekyll-based static site generator.

I used beautiful-jekyll before, but I got really annoyed with manually updating the generator, so I stopped updating, so I later moved to Quarto.

[0]: https://quarto.org

Nice! At a first glance it looks pretty neat. The PDF output support might make this promising for the stuff I usually use LaTeX for.

JupyterLab and Notebook offer the most hassle free PDF making experience, besides Obsidian [0]. You have to have LaTeX installed in the system. And if you don't want full fledged ToC support, equation numbering, etc. Although I am sure that there are plugins for that. Just write Markdown, and see beautiful PDF rendered.

I still use LaTeX for book/paper kinds of stuff, but in all other cases, I use JupyterLab or Obsidian.

[0]: https://obsidian.md

There are, broadly speaking, two motives for blogs:

1) writing things out to clarify your thoughts on something, or make notes about how you did something to refer to later, or otherwise for your own purposes, and then once it's written why not share it as long as it's easy

2) writing things for other people, to reach them (to persuade, to get hired, etc.)

For purpose 1, do what's easier, which is probably one blog. For purpose 2, the SEO hit matters more, but you say you don't care too much about that. BUT, what you don't want to do is combine them, and then spend a lot of time trying to make them completely separable, and some of what you mention planning sounds like doing that. It can actually end up being more trouble than just having separate blogs.

So, if you want to combine them, great, but beyond some very basic tagging or searching (if it's super-easy), don't try to keep them separate, on one domain. If you want to do that, it's probably a sign that separate domains is the right way after all.

I started my blog in 2001, and by 2003-2004, I had a bunch of blogs on various topics. I separated them, not because I was smart but worried that I might offend the readers reading my primary blog - on my personal name's domain with a `.com`.

I got lucky with that decision (no, no strategy, no nothing). I sold quite a few of the blogs during the blog boom of 2000-2010. Some barely had about 10 articles or so but were on some good domain names. Right now, I just checked up a few of the domains/sites to see how they are doing -- most have become Spam farms, and another is doing pretty well as a Real Estate (Properties) website.

My personal domain, brajeshwar.com, was also offered good sums quite a few times around 2006-2008, but my ego seemed bigger than the offered price, and I never sold it.

Keep your online assets separate, just in case you need to walk out.

Don't consolidate them, I subscribe to some YouTubers who did that (mixed up kids and family videos with software engineering ones) and I unsubscribed the moment they started polluting the feeds with irrelevant content.

Why not all of the above?

Think of the websites as frontend interfaces that hook up to the same database. You can have one website (interface) for software engineering, one for general life things, one for entrepreneurship, and one for everything. Give them all targeted SEO, but cross-link the pages together in case somebody who reads one of your entrepreneurship articles wants to see one of your other interests.

As far as the complication of maintaining different blogs, it's fairly easy to set up and maintain a multisite wordpress instance. That will let you share articles across sites.

> As far as the complication of maintaining different blogs, it's fairly easy to set up and maintain a multisite wordpress instance

If you don't use any plugins and have auto-updates, yeah. Otherwise it can quickly become a significant chore.

A trick to make WordPress maintenance easier and security better is to use the simply static plugin and basically use WP only as a backend for writing, but statically compile all the content and push it to a dedicated place for static content (Netlify, AWS S3+CloudFront, CloudFlare Pages, Firebase Hosting, etc). It's more secure (only static content is public facing), it's faster and can scale to infinity, usually for free or very cheap.

I have 4 blogs:

- https://breckyunits.com/

- https://breckyunits.com/code

- https://scroll.pub/blog/

- http://pldb.pub/blog/

I designed scroll.pub to make it easy to manage multiple blogs.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Just 2c, I faced the same issue and I mostly write for myself and am not bothered about viewership (albeit it is very tempting). The pain of switching accounts led me to just ignore all the effects and just enjoy myself.

However, I know where you are coming from (#2) and there is good reason to maintain separation .. really identity.

I am trying to find time to make rather low friction approach to doing this as a side project when I get some time away from my day job

I had a blog and newsletter where I was writing about everything from rants to dev tutorials. But my bounce rate was high.

I decided to write on separate blogs instead and now I see that people are actually reading my stuff. I also receive emails from a few readers thanking me for my articles.

That's why I recommend keeping your domains separate so that people can read what they're actually interested in.

I think you already know the answer. Your current setup is too unwieldy, and it's discouraging you from writing. By all means, hack on something clever to support ~independent IA/UX for segmentation, if it's important to you. You can use the time and the stoke you'll regain by ditching your current fragmented / redundant workflow.

I’ve taken to follow only blogs with RSS feeds.

So, if you provide separate RSS feeds for different topics, I would be more inclined to subscribe to those of interest to me.

But if the RSS feed is a firehose of low signal to noise ratio for our overlapping interests, I’ll soon unsubscribe.

It's hard enough to maintain one, let alone two. I'd say not only join two into one but drop one and drop half of the other! :)

[Random advice from the internet]

Do what makes sense for you.

Do you want to care about SEO?

Do you want a single aesthetic?

Do you want compartmentalization or a mashup?

So I wrote that and realized it is not an either or. You can have several focused blogs and another blog that aggregates them if you want. And if you care about statistics, you can AB...or reach different audiences with the same material. Yes it's probably more work. Maybe you want that and maybe you don't. They're your blogs, do what makes you happy. Good luck.

Why not both?

You can syndicate however you want

I think you are massively overthinking things. One of the items you mention is "self-improvement". We can all relate to that.

Ignore SEO and all that shite and do you. Quite literally: you do you. Don't equivocate and fiddle around. Dump your thoughts on the world.

Did Shake that fucking spear bloke give a shit about SEO? No. What about a Yank wot said "Four score years and ..."

Keep us informed.

PS URLs of your blogs please!

This.

But also - if you just do it in any(?) of the popular blogging platforms then you can just use categories to separate your content and audience.

WordPress (dirty word round here I know but I'll live dangerously) for example gives you all you need to basically keep stuff separate if you want - even down to separate look and feel per category, sub domains per category, and RSS feeds per category.

Everything in one pot, but separated and separateable if you and your audiences want it. Much easier / cheaper / less fiddly all round, IMO.

I look after a few WP sites. WP is not a dirty word when it helps to pay bills. They are behind a HA Proxy with some URLs unavailable to the outside world.

You can do that at the individual web server level but HA Proxy is handy to apply policy across lots of sites.

feed all the text into chat gpt and ask it for a ten sentence summary. put that on your website and delete the rest.

Hey, OP here.

This blew up a little. Thanks everyone for replying. Don't want to repeat myself in replying to everyone individually, so I'll add a comment.

Many people suggest keeping them separate for the sake of lower signal:noise ratio. I get it, but I also feel like comparison to YouTube is unfair. YouTube is a different platform, and you generally don't watch individual content pieces of a creator, but rather subscribe to a creator as a whole. I agree that in the case of YouTube, it's harder to keep a broad channel. I have subscribed to people who provided content on Software Engineering, tolerated when they pivoted towards indie-hacking, and unsubscribed when their content turned into anti-government/establishment rants or personal story of how they overcame adversity over and over again.

But in the case of blogs, you can subscribe to a particular category. Say, you are interested in software engineering content, then just subscribe to it via RSS and get relevant content.

I tried to look at other blogs, one of them is Patrick McKenzie (patio11)[0], and I can't say that his blog is super niched down. Some content is very valuable for me, while other is not interesting.

Another thing is that I think most people misunderstood the "general life" thing. I don't intend, and never planned to, post about the food I ate or how I prepared lasagna on Saturday. I was aiming more towards self-improvement content, for example tips on time management. Where would you put that kind of content? In a software engineering blog? In entrepreneurial blog? It is relevant for both disciplines, yet it does not fit any niche if you plan to niche down.

One suggestion that I liked from the comments, is to treat the content as a DB. So essentially, I can keep 4 blogs: the one under my name domain will be the master, and the one I'll update. I can design the URL scheme is such a way that I can point individual blog domains to a particular category, so my software engineering blog will https://xyz.com, but the domain is pointing to http://me.com/blog/category/software-engineering. This might simplify things, while still keeping them separate.

Thanks everyone for the comments, I appreciate it.

Edit: after giving it some more though, I came to the conclusion that my problem is unnecessary complications in the way I manage my blogs. And as a good software engineer, I will probably redo my statically generated blog, unify everything to one big repo that will use common building blocks, but each piece of content will be segmented to one blog, under its own domain, and they all will be built from the same repo.

This will ensure that I can reuse common building blocks like OG image generators, JSONLD tags, and reuse parts of theme, while minimizing the maintenance to just a single repo.

[0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/archive/