If you aren't blogging, you're doing yourself a disservice. | Hacker News Reader

If you aren't blogging, you're doing yourself a disservice.

twintechs.com

14 pointsatiffany15 comments

On the other hand, if you start a blog and all it contains are silly articles like "What I learned by writing 'Hello World' in Go, and why you should do it too", then you're probably doing yourself a disservice. If your writing has poor grammar and is full of typos, that won't reflect well on you either. If you want your blog to enhance your reputation, you're going to have to put some real effort into it.

If I blogged about my job and my boss read it, I'd get fired. He once said that the solution for alternative energy is cars with huge springs in them. When you wanted to go somewhere you'd just wind them up.

There's no way to put a positive spin on that.

And yet here you are posting on the internet about it.

He's not going to find this, but someone would eventually tell him about what would be my internet-famous blog with all the dumb boss stories.

That reminds me of the book The Windup Girl - it's set in the 23rd century, and all of the natural resources we use today have been depleted, so energy storage is done by having genetically modified elephants manually wind up springs. Who knows, maybe your boss is just way ahead of his time. :D

@greenyoda,

Good point. First draft of this post actually talked about constantly curating your forward facing blog, github, or whatever. I ended up taking it out because this blog post was originally just for internal consumption within Twin Technologies. I often encourage people to try to highlight the things on their blog, github, or etc that advances their goals the most effectively. That might be your latest project, your most popular project, or the thing you are most passionate about. Having your Hello World code and the like in your GitHub along with code that no one cares about from 10 years ago is probably not a very good idea. In those cases either get rid of that stuff or make a spate personal blog or repo where you archive that old stuff. That being said though I often find people still searching out articles, code snippets, and content I wrote 8 or even 10 years ago (my personal record is a blog post from 2000 that people still look for). So it’s not a bad idea to curate your content and reorganize it but then again you never know what might be important 10 years from now.

I couldn't agree more. A single blog post my company's founder spent just an hour crafting got us over 30,000 views and almost over night we went from a couple hackers to a company that people trusted and wanted to work with.

@trosen42,

Thats awesome. Would you please share that post?

Are there any recommendations on low overhead blogging platforms? I've been looking for something that I can turn on and start writing without a lot of setup. In addition, something that has an easy interface that I can just focus on the writing.

I've looked at Medium and it looks pretty good. Any other recommendations?

Tumblr. While a good majority of Tumblr blogs are teens or pre-teens, the simple setup and vast array of customization makes it worthwhile.

Take a look at the Ghost blogging platform. It has a few quirks, but it's very simple and fast. I've enjoyed using it for the last few months. https://ghost.org/

I think it's valuable to own your own domain vs. being at the mercy of Medium / Tumblr etc.

Blogger has free hosting, and it's easy to use.

Another good option is Wordpress. You can get an account set up (it's basically turnkey) on a full-service hosting provider such as Mediatemple.

I like using Jekyll on my own domain ../blog

I use a makefile with targets for running Jekyll, for rsync'ing everything to one of my servers, and a default target that does everything.

My workflow consists of cd'ing to .../blog/_posts, copying the last blog entry, changing the file name to be relevant to the new post, editing the file, and cd ../..; make

That might sound like a small hassle, but I like this better than other alternatives I have used like blogger and wordpress.

How long are people usually spending to write a blog post? Is 1-2hrs reasonable, because i get an hour in creating some story that people probably won't read and just go 'to hell with it'. Whats an average time investment, for those who are out there doing it?

@feralmoan, I think this is one of those cases were its sort of hard to compare aggregates since your return on investment is personal to you. In some cases my blog posts have literally taking man weeks to create because they are based on efforts for customers. The code, data, and experience end up getting written down then at some point I might spend 10 minutes to a few hours writing a blog post. Some of those very same blog posts, that have consumed massive amounts of time, have been more or less ignored. Some have ended up being very popular. So what I would say is ignore your average investment time and focus on your goals. What are you goals for blogging? Is it just expressing yourself, communicating to others, sharing your hard won experience, driving a brand (maybe brand you), or just storing information for latter retrieval. Depending on what your goal you will find that you time investments will be very different. For example if you’re really want to show the world how deep your understanding of certain technologies are you might need to spend significant time writing rich and deep content. If your just sharing news articles of interest with a brief bit of insight maybe just 10 minutes a day.

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