You Should Start a Blog | Hacker News Reader

You Should Start a Blog

timkastelle.org

31 pointstimkastelle29 comments

> Blogs were invented to teach. The mission of blogging is to empower all of us to go directly to each other with our expertise.

>Blogging helps you turn your flow of ideas into a stock of content.

>You create opportunities. I’ve met a ton of cool people through my blog.

>Finally, blogging helps you build your skills. Remember, the big gap is the one between doing nothing and doing something, not the one between lousy work and great work.

Although I recognize this very positive post is not intended in this way, this ends up seeming to me at heart a rather cynically narrow definition of blogging, one that has little to do with self-expression and sharing and a lot to do with making an investment in a work-related product that will make you more effective and marketable.

I don't disagree that you should start a blog right now. But starting it for the reasons listed in this post is only one way out of many, and if you ask me a sort of outlet for workaholism.

Deep.

In my an elective at my college, we had to create blogs for our projects. My professor insisted on that for one main reason - "You think once when you develop. You think twice before presenting it. But you think thrice when you put it down in a blog".

When I had to blog every week about my project, I didn't just verify what I had written, but was compelled to read a lot more because what I write can be viewed by anyone else! So we take that _extra_ care in putting down right content. And when we do that, the concepts sink down deep! I think that's one of the good parts of blogging I enjoy the most!

Which is why tumblr is a wealth of researched and thought through, informative posts.

I'd love to. What platform should I use? Requirements:

    * No Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal
    * Easy to configure and deploy
    * Internal comments subsystem preferable

I was looking at rigging up Dokuwiki. It obviously has the ability to publish data/articles, it has plugins to give a discussions page, user/ACL support and it's pretty simple to deploy. Drawback is it's not designed by default with the "reverse chrono" ordering, tagging of articles, etc...

I'm lookin at Jekyll for static content, which is pretty much what a simple blog can be, but I keep getting errors trying to use rubygems (not a rubyist, here).

What errors are you running into? Jekyll is actually a great choice. Deployment to S3/Cloudfront can net you a highly performant blog at a very low cost. Comments can be brought in using a service like Disqus.

Or just deploy it to GitHub.

Yeah, I forgot about that. Github Pages work great for this.

Use Pelican then. It's built on Python. https://github.com/getpelican/pelican

Why not use WordPress? It's simple to install, configure, and deploy. Works on any web host. Internal comments. Auto-updates to keep you running on the latest version if you want.

wordpress as default does not handle lots of traffic without crashing. You need to use cache plugins to make it work well with lots of visitors. Not a "solid" solution out of the box.

If your blog crashes from too many hits, congratulations. Few people write that well. Their audiences tend to forgive them.

Most blogs die from loneliness- even more never launch because it's so much easier not to write.

I've seen default wordpress installations on simple vhosts crash at 50 daily visitors, basically every time two people visited at the same time. You do need caching, and you need to set it up manually, and that's probably Wordpress.com's sales pitch nowadays.

If your blog is getting 50 daily visitors, congratulations.

Really ? That's kind of low, though. I would have thought most blogs get at least a couple of hundred visits (and not bots) every day.

Here's an example from a couple of months back when I received too much traffic from HN on my wordpress install and it made the server explode: http://pandoralive.info/?p=2243

It went up to 133 simultaneous visitors and then... poof!

After that I installed a Cache plugin, and since then I've had a couple of articles hitting HN again and going over 200 simultaneous visits with the CPU remaining at low levels. So yeah, Wordpress can scale, with the right plugins :)

Assuming millions will read your articles yes.

I had a "wordpress as default" blog hosted at DreamHost and it handled up to 1.000 visits a day without crashing. More than that, and DreamHost turned it off to prevent it to impact other users.

Now it lives in a Digital Ocean's $20 VPS, fine tuned to serve WordPress and with W3 Total Cache plugin. Blitz.io tests say it could handle 80 million pages served a day. I know that's not really true, but it handles 60.000-80.000 real visits (more than 100k pages) every month without problems.

Honestly, This.

If you're really interested in /writing/, then just go with one of the hosted solutions such as Wordpress.com, blogger, whatever. It's easy enough to use, requires virtually no set up time to get running, and lets you forget about any techy details.

I know that it's often more fun and more interesting as a hacker-type to think about the optimum way to blog, rather than actually doing it... This is my problem too.

But what you want to establish is the habit of writing. Once you've got that, you can easily port your posts over to another system (and clean up any on the way).

I've recently set up a few Wordpress sites for some people. And much as I despise the insanity underneath, if you're just wanting to write, then it's a very nice platform.

Octopress [1] is a nice static site generator that builds on top of Jekyll and has nice deployment instructions.

1. http://octopress.org/docs/

Focus on writing, not on platform. Sign up for a blogger (or whatever) account and just start writing. Once you've published a dozen posts or so and gotten into the habit or writing, then you can go back and consider what you want/need in a blogging platform going forwards. Focusing on setting up the perfect blogging platform before you've written anything is just procrastination.

I tried this many times, but could never get the enthusiasm up to finish anything. This time round I bought a domain name, paid for hosting, setup the server and customized the theme.

Now that I am much more heavily invested I am finding myself writing more and more.

Wordpress is a really good choice if you just want to blog.

Other alternatives than already mentioned:

1. Go oldschool, use serendipity: http://www.s9y.org/. Really easy to install, easy to use/configure, full support for everything blogging related. And there is a cache-plugin (which of course also exists for wordpress).

2. There are quite some new takes on the classical blogging system. Habari is an example: http://habariproject.org/en/, has an interesting backend interface. Ghost on the other hand would be too new for me.

If you want to have an internal comment system, static content blogs are the wrong way to go, afaik.

I'd love to write. Which pen should I use?

Short answer: it does not matter. Writing matters.

If some of the pens didn't let me keep possession of the words I wrote, or limited the number of people that could read my manuscripts, I'd choose a different pen.

Perhaps it's not terribly important, and I'm to the point where I'll capitulate, but I want something I can self-host, and I want something easy to run. You don't own what you don't host.

Write on Medium. I know it will not be on your own land (domain name) but Medium gives you readers and that's very motivational when you are starting out. My guess is that most blogs get abondened because there are no readers. https://medium.com/blogging-information-advice/fc6cceead8ef

Just use Jekyll, it's quite wonderful. If you use Github, Github Pages is a very straightforward way to host as well.

I wrote a similar article 3 years ago, it's impressive how many arguments we have in common. http://blog.vjeux.com/2011/analysis/start-a-technical-blog-i...

Haha I think hacker news just sent me to the worst page in the Internet. Over-earnest, self-congratulatory guff about "blogging" and "innovation".

I think my friend Kris Marciniak (Rallynotes.com) first got me interested in blogging. Valeria Maltoni inspired me with the potential in conversation beyond the automotive forums where I’d experienced real world connectivity as a result of sharing ideas online. Now here I am, discussing blogging as it pertains to innovation on a blog about as geographically far away from me in phoenix as you can get, as someone who sees publishing as his life’s work. And it all started with a blog.

Kinda makes me want to write more. Thanks, Tim.

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