Ask HN: Why did you begin writing a personal blog? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why did you begin writing a personal blog?

9 pointstejbirwason10 comments

I recently made my first feeble attempt at writing a personal blog. I am interested to learn from people who have already published blogs with ~15+ posts, what expectations did you have from your blog and how have these expectations change over time?

View on HN

I started my blog as a personal journal more than anything else... so I didn't expect anything in terms of hits, comments or trackbacks. It was literally my own small space to record my life events, ramblings on technology and so on.

Over time I realized I might have some useful content in terms of technology commentary, so I make those public, and personal posts are still hidden. It remains mostly private/hidden and my extremely close friends know how to access it.

I suppose that it could make some hits/miniscule amount of ad revenue, but I don't update it more than a few times per year.

I started my blog about a year ago. Traffic has grown steadily over the course of the year.

I've found it useful for: 1. Connecting with other folks in startup / tech 2. Documenting how to solve a particular tech problem, which I often end up referencing later 3. Clarifying my own understanding of a topic I'm learning -- I've found that the exercise of writing it down helps solidify my understanding.

I post on average probably once a week.

Link: http://www.lauradhamilton.com/

I've been planning to start a blog for the same reasons you listed. I'll probably use a static site generator like Pelican [1]. A lot of people use Disqus for comments on static blogs, but I'd rather not rely on external services when I don't need to. Do you find linking to Twitter to be an adequate replacement for comments?

[1] http://blog.getpelican.com/

I think my objectives are aligned very close to your three stated reasons, so I want to know about some of the challenges (time constraints, analysis paralysis etc.) you face when you try to publish at least one post per week. I'd love to get some pointers to avoid facing such problems from the onset.

Just got started on my blog: http://tejbirwason.com

I started a blog today to keep track of my upcoming honours project. My plan is to post things for non-technical people (aka all of my friends) to try and give them some more insight into what a computer science degree is all about.

I'm hosting my blog using github pages, and using octopress, which makes it more fun to work on imo.

I just kind of write what I want - personal anecdotes or programming problems. My only expectations from my personal blog is that if I apply for a job or a freelance contract, the employer can look at my blog and say 'okay this person sounds reasonably smart.'

I had problems getting shouted down or censored by trolls in forums. I wanted a place to write and collect my ideas without worrying about getting drowned out by others.

Sometimes, you learn just by writing about something.

I asked the original question. Here is my first blog post describing some of my expectations: http://tejbirwason.com/hello-world.html

I blog because I'm forever being killed in killed in unfortunate ways: http://matulevicz.net

I wrote nearly 600 posts over a period of about 3 years for a blog that I recently dismantled. One of my goals was just to try to post something daily. I sometimes had streaks of writing daily and sometimes had long gaps, but I did get more consistent over time. I wrote about whatever the heck I felt like and there was no real consistency. When I dismantled it, I saved a the posts in draft form to seed a few other websites which may or may not ever get really developed. That original blog never had significant traffic. Occasional spurts of a few hundred page views was as good as it got and some days there were zero page views.

I found that writing out what I thought was personally useful to me for thinking through things. My current personal blog now has a bit of a traffic and I sometimes get comments and sometimes get discussion of it elsewhere. That is a new development stage for me and I am trying to use it to improve on what I am doing so the writing is more aimed at an audience and less just me talking to myself. All that writing also taught me a lot about creating stubs, adding links and supporting stuff over time and developing the writing instead of simply writing off the cuff so much. Prior to that, I had websites that had grown out of "popular" emails on a small email list and I spent years baffled as to how one figures out what to write if it isn't part of an email discussion. So that personal blog helped me get past that, at least for some topics. There are still topics that I still don't know how to talk about publicly in a way that is really effective.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com