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Comment by ZeWaren | Hacker News Reader

I document technical things on my blog and hardly anyone reads it. But later on when I need that thing again, I just go there and I have the perfect documentation available for the topic (it's perfect since I wrote it hahaha).

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I used to do that, now I just keep a OneNote with the things that would have been blog entries once upon a time - it's available across all my devices and I can export it to PDF when I do need to share something with someone - and I don't have to worry about someone defacing or hacking the site hosting it.

I used to do that. Use OneNote. And then I discovered that OneNote really sucks when it comes to 1. Syncing across devices. 2. Large documents

I searched high and low and found Obsidian. Now the idea of using OneNote sends shivers down my spine.

In my experience, OneNote syncs more reliably than Obsidian. Although, I still prefer using Obsidian for other reasons.

I'm not a heavy blogger though I have a bunch of StackOverflow answers, gists etc.

It happened to me a few times that I forgot I wrote something down, only to find it via google search.

Same. I keep a couple of blogs on different topics and try to write up any challenge I come across. Not only does it help to cement ideas in my head and expose areas I'm foggy about, but I've referred back to my previous experience this way countless times.

Do you get any traffic? Does it feel worth the extra time compared to just doing local notes?

I don't know. I stopped bothering to look, since it's never going to drive income or anything. It's worth it to me because 1) I get to help others, which brings satisfaction and 2) I can read what I wrote from anywhere and send someone a link if necessary.

This happens to me all the time. I could make notes about how I did something and lose them, or I could spend an hour or two extra and convert it into a blog post, and I'll be able to refer to it over and over again.

Same, I created https://softuts.com exactly for this, to write fixes to technical issues I encounter, when I can't find another solution via a Google search.

There starts to be some traffic, I am happy to assume that any person visits my blog for a fix will probably save a good amount of debugging time.

That’s why I blog. It’s basically long-form GitHub gist, publicly available on the internet.

I blog for own tech support. TopCoders.cloud

Hopefully you are also contributing knowledge to AI so that it becomes more discoverable to others as well.

It’s like building your own personal knowledge base

Over the years, my blog has become exactly that.

Care to share your blog‘s url?

I guess it's https://zewaren.net , the content looks exactly like GP described it

Your intention is still to pass on the knowledge though regardless of traffic otherwise why even publish if it’s just for you? What is the difference from the Documents dir at that point?

I can stay in my browser and use Google, DuckDuckGo, or even my on-site search (I use Apache Solr, I'm a little weird compared to the typical hosted blog) and don't have to go into some webapp or search on some local notes app.

I can also add permalinks to any of the posts from anywhere, and share them in public documentation or bug reports and such, a handy feature.

I do not understand the need to never-leave-the-browser especially with modern window tiling, but I respect it as a preference that other people have. As for syncing I just use file sharing (Syncthing), I hardly live collaborate on documents and if I did everyone else in the group ended up doing the typing. Otherwise it’s write then get reviewed then reiterate. So unfortunately nothing about the online text editors really strike my fancy. I also find the browser almost too distracting and often get sidetracked while using it for research during writing time.

I can’t access my computer’s Documents directory on my phone when I’m away from home.

Syncthing, Dropbox, etc.

People occasionally stumble on it and find value.

Right the intention to share knowledge.

But not the only or main intention. He's never stated that he didn't want to share knowledge and he doesn't have to, it's already implied.

Sure but the intention exists none the less.

If you nominally have an audience (if you feel like you do, regardless of the reality), you'll perform differently, same as with speaking. This may be a good thing.

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