Re: Do people IRL know you have a blog?

During the early days of Blogging (I meant the early 2000s), when we met up in person during conferences, we talked a lot about blog posts, etc. I once let one of my cousins tag along as I spoke at a conference organized by Macromedia. I did the usual thing with others there, talking about blogs. When we returned home, my cousin said, “You are kind of a deal. People know you by your blog - brajeshwar.com.”

I’ve been lucky to have been recognized by a few people in the wild (IRL) who walked up to me and asked, “You are brajeshwar.com?”

These days, I just write for myself.

Fast forward 15+ years, my daughter somehow decided to search the Internet for me, and she said, “You are like a ChatGPT-powered Discord bot, answering questions on an antique Reddit forum.”

https://x.com/brajeshwar/status/1630852614303924224

I love personal websites but I don't really like blogs. I prefer when people can rework/refine some of their pages instead of publishing new blog posts related to previous ones when revisiting a topic. And as a writer it allows me to write whenever I feel like to. With a blog you kind of feel guilty if you don't publish on a regular basis, and end up abandoning it altogether too easily if you cannot sustain a rhythm. A web page doesn't force you into a rhythm. A blog might be useful for historians in the future, when chronology might be useful but as a publisher and casual reader I find it lazy and unwelcoming for the reader.

I do like however personnal pages that have a small log mentionning the updates to which I can subscribe to.

The thing about irl blogs is how, if it's tech related, then it kinda follows you. So there's a pressure to keep things corporate to not scare away job opportunities.

There's a reason why LinkedIn reads like garbage, and even if it's obvious, people neither point it out or stop.

I showed my Mom my personal website a few years ago, and her only comment was it needed more pictures, so I added a picture of a window plant to exactly one page. I haven't showed it to anyone else IRL.

https://brynet.ca/article-x395.html

I felt very seen by this blog post. I sent it to my partner and she replied with “Sounds like you. What is IRL” which perfectly sums up the disconnect on some topics that the author also mentioned.

I just spend the past month rebuilding my blog, even though there’s nobody reading it and it really only is my “online home” to play around with and be creative.

My main source of traffic is random Google visits for some “I’ll write this down for myself in case I run into it again” type posts.

I love when friends do this. It's hard to keep up with people and what they're up to. Publishing and letting people subscribe to me is a great way to share things. A few examples of some friends who are doing this:

Justin Searls (fairly known in Ruby and Rails community) mostly quit a lot of various social channels though publishes on some of them one direction. He started a podcast that wasn't meant to be guests of some specific topic, it's just him updating you on things. What he's working on, what he's learning, random stories, etc. - https://justin.searls.co/casts/

Brandur who I've worked with at a couple of places (Heroku previously, and now Crunchy Data) who writes great technical pieces that often end up here also has more of a personal newsletter. While there are technical pieces in there at times he'll also talk about personal experiences my favorite one is some of the unique experiences hiking the Pacific Trail (https://brandur.org/nanoglyphs/039-trails).

The point of the article is one I align with: You're writing it for yourself, 99% of the time. The other 1% is the future you.

I blog for work. I don't discuss it with family. I think I'd find it very stressful answering the "why did you say that" questions.

The corollary of this, is that I write notes by hand in almost every meeting I attend, and never ever read them again -But for things like IETF I do a mixture of .org and meetecho (markdown) because there is at least some possibility others may get value from the shared log in meetecho, and I know I will use the .org to .. write the blog.

Lars-Christian, your site got a little attention today :-)

No post I’ve written has ever gone viral.

I also have a personal website. If anyone notice what I've written it's a very nice added bonus. For me it's also about personal ownership of my content, and perhaps also a reminder to myself of the old internet - which I miss.

I have exactly one IRL friend that cares about my technology stuff, but he lives far away and we don't see each other in person too often. My ex tolerates me talking about it a little bit before he tells me to shut up, but that's it. It kind of sucks. I've just re-internalized to that nothing I do really matters, and therefore neither do I.

Yes, and I have been surprised by at least one who told me that I needed to blog more often. We have very little interaction since graduate school.

I have been running the same website, which has undergone several redesigns, for 25 years and counting.

It is also interesting about having a personal domain name. People pause when you give the email. No, I really did mean first@lastname.com. Yes, I've had this for decades. My sister tells a different variant, she at least once had someone comment on it and then stand up straight - which she interpreted as being a little impressed as if my sister was a celebrity or something. Very interesting in a world where most people do not have a domain with their family name.

The challenge for me has been that over time it morphed from a personal site, to a professional site, to a corporate site. Now that I have employees and this work supports my family I have less freedom to do just anything I want with it. It has to be on topic. That constraint does also bring freedom in its own way. I do not have a good place for personal interests that are not related to my cybersecurity work any longer though.

Ah, Lars-Christian! No one wants to talk to you in real life about your blog because you're in Norway. If you lived here in the United States, you'd have a perpetual string of very interesting conversations about your personal website because Americans are all about technology and hearing how any of us peons are fighting the power, man.

At least, I think that's what my wife's reaction is before she leaves the room to find a book to read. And my friends who think a blog is just part of my weird, personal brand, like using a phone with a keyboard.

Since 2016 I publish a new blog post once a month. A long lost friend (20 years no contact) found it, read a handful of my deep dives and then offered me what I consider a dream job based on my content and perceived writing ability. I got to jump from an IC track to an executive role. My then company of 15 years did not offer that opportunity. I recommend a blog just to show the world your chops. You don't know who might read it.

I think you can either have a “corporate” blog attached to your name (whose purpose is to bolster your professional reputation, among other things) and an opinion-based blog with a pseudonym. The two can never touch.

My philosophy on this is that anything worth saying, that isn’t some tepid opinion about pizza or your pet, will probably irritate some people. And while the internet isn’t forever, it’s got a fairly long memory.

I have a blog that's connected to my academic website. While my homepage gets some traffic from people googling papers, my blog gets much less. I post a few times each year, mostly about stuff I've been reading. I did have one post go viral-ish a few years ago (https://bcmullins.github.io/foreign-affairs-100/).

I was surprised to find that some workplace acquaintances and even students read my blog. A colleague out-of-the-blue messaged me about some python function I'd written (https://bcmullins.github.io/parsing-json-python/). A student asked about reading recommendations and how I choose books. So people you know IRL may be reading your stuff (or some of it) but just not mentioning it.

As another post mentioned, I feel much more pressure about my writing after learning that IRL people read it.

Even many personal blogs these days are suspect, they’re building a brand.

I like this guy is doing his own thing.

I haven't been on traditional social media for about 6 years and so the way people keep up with me is via my blog. This way they get an update maybe once a month about what it is I've been doing/thinking about, then they reach out to me via email.

Even the IRL people know I have a blog, but I guess it kinda comes up since I also run a blogging platform.

Huh, kinda funny, I feel the exact same way. Few people IRL know about my website, 2-3 people occasionally write in a year about something, but weirdly it feels like the idea of a personal, non commoditized internet space has become so rare it's seen as odd.

The people in your real life don't give a shit about your blog.

But random strangers do! At least, if you're contributing something to the world which is wonderful and useful.

In my experience, the posts which get the most traffic are simply not going to be the ones you think they will be. I am thinking of both my public and internal blog posts at my company - the most read articles are dumb basic shit that nobody thought to write down (but should have), and my greatest masterpieces languor in obscurity.

A website is a Presentation of Self extended to artwork and 2D media.

What is a Presentation of Self? It comes the book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman.

The two primary senses of humans are sight and vision. If you take the time to write down and enumerate the ways by which people understand the internal state of others, you realize that a computer simply communicates impressions of people over long distances, some of which have limited correspondence with who a person really is. Photos could be fake. Videos could be scripted and a certain impression. You don't really see someone for who they are except in real life, talking to them for a duration.

Most people talk to or avoid certain people internally based on how they act and what they say. But once you realize the structure of communication, you feel like a robot talking to others. What was implicit becomes explicit.

So yes, a website matters, if the increasing trends for humans and human ability are greater knowledge consumption, production, network communication over locality, and so on. It reveals your internal perception, taste, intelligence, and processing of information, by which people use to judge you and ask how relation to you improves the group fitness.

Having a website selects for intellectualism. Social media is also a presentation. The question could be rephrased: Do people know you have a TikTok or Instagram?

People such as his wife and digital people have increasingly different lifestyles and diverge. Had the author made his way to a metropole or more major place, it's likely having a personal brand would've mattered more.

The thing I find most interesting, every time something like this gets posted here on HN is that in the comments, depending on the day, dozen or hundreds or even thousand of people post some permutation of "hey, I feel the same"

And that makes me smile because on the one hand people keep repeating that blogs are dead, but on the other you're all proof that it's clearly not the case.

I remember back in the early 00's someone at work found out about my blog and news got around the office (it was a personal blog, more like a diary and I was in my late teens so it was kinda "edgy"). Anyways... within a few days I started getting a bunch of troll comments and it took all the fun out of it knowing everything I wrote was being read by my colleagues.

Some do, mostly when the problem they are trying to solve is somewhere in my blog past. I've learned over the years not to advertise the blog/page, due to weird questions I get, for example: Q: How costly is this? (A: it's free, minus my time), Q: Why is it so ugly? (A: When you write your perfect jekyll skin, I will use it, you know it's about my future self searching for the info, not about beauty), Q: Why? (A: I always find something interesting to read in my blog, unlike your corporate page). p.s. The long-tail effect has been predicted at least 20 years ago, so I understand that views will be low or none: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail

My blog: https://brontosaurusrex.github.io/

I've recently had the morbid thought that perhaps my loved ones could appreciate my blog if I died prematurely. I don't maintain my blog much and I certainly don't think anyone reads it. It is much more for intrinsic benefits of working through thoughts in a structured way.

When I moved to Berlin, I had a blog mostly for my mother :-)

I have a blog that has all my book reviews that I've written over the past ~17 years. It's got over 1000 reviews on it.

I post them all to Goodreads as well. Hardly anyone read them on my own blog.

It's convenient for me to have them all in one spot so I can export them and whatnot.

I've had one review that a successful blogger (now substacker) linked to and that probably resulted in more than half the hits the blog ever got coming in about two weeks.

Posting to Goodreads people seem to appreciate more. My reviews get some reaction a few times a week there.

A few people IRL know about my blog and reviews on Goodreads. I don't generally tell people about it but if people really read and it comes up I tell people.

I keep it largely separate from my Twitter account and Linked In profile.

Earlier in my career, every single person in my team had a website. At lunch we would talk about how we built it, servers, fail2ban, zipbomb, etc.

Many years later, one coworker has a website under construction, and others say they have nothing to say online. When i bring up a blog post I wrote years ago, relevant to a conversation, I feel like a charlatan trying to sell a product.

But hey, I'm happy to write in the dark. Especially after some of my posts have literally landed me on TV. I felt like everything I Wrote after was scrutinized. But the world has forgotten about me so I'm free again.

I had personal site on shared hosting with blog, microblog, "lifestream", photo gallery in the late 00s. It's been a 'placeholder' status for redevelopment since I think about 2011-12.

I got a job and started (over)working. Bugs/exploits in the PHP framework I was using took the site down a few times. Maintenance lagged, and I eventually zipped everything and shut it down.

I've found a better work life balance over the years, but just haven't connected the dots to ever doing something new with it. I think the last attempt foundered on picking a static site generator.

Most of my IRL friends and family barely use Facebook so I'm pretty sure few were ever very aware of what was on there.

I've attempted to show my website to my family a couple of times, but I'm a techy in a generally non-techy family, so they're not particularly interested. I mostly use it to talk about things I've done and I have referred back to it on a couple of occasions when I know I've solved a problem before and want to see how I did it at the time.

I attach it to my CV so I keep it professional enough for someone else to look at that I would want to impress, but still pretty casual because I try to write like I'm explaining it to a friend, someone who knows basic programming stuff but is a novice to the actual topic of the article

My blog has some of my recipes, and some of my friends appreciate that. Otherwise my blog is a beacon to other nerds on the internet, extra material for people who are curious about me. People do check it and reach out, so it works.

My blog is mostly just me sharing things to my friends; some of them IRL. Short tutorials, highlights from books, etc.

https://kenhv.com/blog

I've had a blog at the same URL since 2000. Search engines are disallowed, comments are closed, I'm not on social media to announce it. I don't talk about it. Twice a week I publish something, but it's meant as a record for me rather than other people. The only reason it's on the web is so I can access it easily from different computers. Once I checked in Feedly, and it said that there were two people subscribed to it. To the best of my knowledge that's the readership.

Yes. I've (re)started my blog a few months ago. Some articles went viral. Some people mentioned my blog IRL (and I didn't know they were following it). Some of my blog posts led to nice discussions online or offline. Some people have asked me to write about specific things.

So right now, I'm quite happy with how it's going and I have a list of articles to write. But writing a post takes multiple hours, so I don't know what the frequency will be on the long run.

I think, a little ironically ofc, opening yourself up like that ends up capping how personal you can (are willing to) get. Not always a bad thing, but I believe the modern internet is missing a lot of soul that comes from being vulnerable. Lord knows social media personalities and corporate brands will never do it.

https://foreverliketh.is/

In the vein of the discussion here, I think it's relevant to highlight Kagi's Small web [1] initiative, which is intended to give more discoverability to sites like this. I find it to be admirable and it gives me some small hope for the future of the web.

[1] https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

I have a blog that I consider permanently unfinished. Being (still) too embarrassed to share it is a pretty good motivator for adding things, and it's nice to have something you can be a perfectionist about without feeling guilty.

Formally, it's an exercise in learning the W3C Accessibility standards, but the content is very much "write for yourself".

I have multiple blogs (the link to one of which is in my HN profile). The tech stuff is pretty safe, and so some tech people in my life know about it. The other blogs are reserved for people who are involved in other aspects of my life.

In general, I find I compartmentalize a lot, and there are very few people in my life who are part of multiple compartments.

While I don‘t write much, my website is directly associated with my real name. As a result, friends regularly stumble upon it.

Most of them don’t care for the topics I write about. However, they usually get a little excited, as if they found a real-life Easter egg.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke... I've been wanting to read that too! Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell has been one of my favorite and most immersive books, absolutely brilliant!

Too bad Susanna Clarke got CFS, a very ill researched illness :/

People who read blogs, especially in the software industry, are still a tiny minority.

There are maybe tens of millions of software engineers, designers, product managers, entrepreneurs and other tech-adjacent workers in the world. HN is one of the most popular tech sites among hardcore techies, at least in my circles.

And yet the top posts of all time get thousands of upvotes. Add 10x lurkers and you get tens of thousands of users. That's still 0.1% of the total above.

I have a 3D printed shopping trolley coin with my blog written on it, and even offered a couple of them to friends. That being said the blog's been inactive for a couple of years now :D.

I kinda get it, but the opening paragraphs betray the author's problematic, arrogant attitude --- passive-aggressively complaining about his wife for not appreciating the grand genius of his blog. My wife, my parents, my friends etc are all aware of my website. My wife enthusiastically shows my website to our friends. I have a blog post about food recommendations that is very popular with my friends.

It occasionally comes up in conversations. But I don't think people are that interested. Although I will say my programming hot takes occasionally do get popular.

Interesting question. A sometime co-worker does, and a sometime neighbor. On the whole, I figure that my family gets enough of my opinions in conversation.

Dude is right, no one except for the audience cares.

I was a successful blogger in the 00th years and with a side business around Made for Adsense because once you understood SEO it was inevitable, if this rings a bell.

Reading a blog seems magical. Just imagine “Do ppl IRL my print magazine?” to use another metaphor. Nope and yes. Same goes for artists, say singer and songwriters: “Do you listen to my stuff?” Why should they?

Understanding your readers and fans is not easy. Statistically speaking, if all your close friends read your blog, you either are on to something or you get lied to.

So if all around read your blog you might be some truly impressive author with a huge fan base - and 99,9999% won’t fit in here.

As a side note, I still know quite a fraction of successful YouTubers. They are publishers, content creators. It is work for them, maybe evolved from something they did for fun. These dudes always prioritize money now - because they know their niche a bit better now and want to appeal to it.

My late brother once sent me a link to an article in his blog. After he passed, I was far more grateful that he'd sent it to me.

They're pretty much the only people who know it. Because I get no visits, it's mostly cathartic.

The key is to write stuff worth talking about IRL.

Yes, because my blog is basically a collection of things people have asked me more than once.

* How do I rent a motorcycle in Taiwan?

* What's a coding bootcamp like?

* What's your emacs config?

* Got any book recommendations?

* You got into Raw? How was it?

* Didn't you parents come to Taiwan? Mine are coming next month, what did you do with them?

etc. I'm constantly dropping links to people at networking events or when they come into my restaurant. I also just forget things constantly and so my blog is basically my external brain.

Yes, There are 2 posts from 2007.

All the important ones

Yeah, well, in today's shallow and blood thirsty culture, one mistake and you're fucked. And doesn't have to be today, it will follow you all your life, when you're more comfortable, bam! Someone finds something you said 15 years ago that no longer fits the increasingly edgy sensitivities of today and you're canceled. Doxxing you, trashing you, death threats, you name it.

Unless you walk on eggs more carefully than in Stalin's Russia and only talk of weather and puppies, you are liable for being torn apart by an angry mob of mediocres who finds fulfilment in destroying a defenseless guy's life.

Nope. Nobody wants to read what I have to say.

I'd say I'm banned, shadow banned/flagged, or otherwise censured on social media all the time.

Please. People who know me online don't remember about my blog, nevermind IRL people.