i'm glad you've found it useful! makes me super happy to hear :)
361 karma · joined October 12, 2012
as you suggested though, i didn't know the ML space enough to know that Machine Learning Mastery publishes daily and has an army of people who like and retweet ANYTHING they publish.
so it makes me wonder if i need to have some kind of dampening effect or how i can adapt the algorithm to handle that.
not sure about the sites linked, but i reject sites that are low quality and filled with aggressive ads!
Glad you enjoy it, and yes, the goal is to make it easier to find blogs from individuals. I don't reject sites hosted on 3rd party platforms, but I do encourage people to post their own domain name when possible.
Cheers!
I found it similarly irritating while sourcing the data that all the top 10 google results recycled the same, outdated recommendations.
Do you mean you'd like a central place to discover individual's curated list of blogs they read? Like blogrolls?
Gives people more control over their personal "algorithm" and what they value most when reading personal blogs.
Hadn't thought about frequency but that could definitely be something you could automate based on RSS. Thanks for the idea!
Yeah it's kinda meant to be like its own mini site. But if you click the logo at the top, it does take you to the root homepage :)
Adding a light mode is on the backlog, thanks for the suggestion! I need to remove a few hard-coded CSS values first ;)
what I didn't expect about that site is that it gets shared A LOT on twitter. still trying to refine the algorithm :)
thanks a ton for checking it out and sharing your feedback!
Yes, that's exactly my point -- that in fact reaching this point has been a six-month effort.
I didn't post on HN myself, and therefore did not choose the title either.
Anyways, thanks for pointing that out and I'm glad you got something out of the article!
So I never intended it to be here, just trying to answer some questions as I get that people from HN have way less context about me or the community than people who've been following the community and newsletter for 6 months on Twitter!
So yeah, it's not meant as self-promotion. It's part of my effort to "build in public", as I mentioned in another comment.
My main takeaway in the article is actually that a lot of people skip the step of "providing value first" and jump to something paid.
Whereas I've been writing a free newsletter for 6+ months, which many people have actually offered to pay for and told me are "better than most paid courses". I've done weeks worth of free consulting over email for subscribers and they have had really cool successes.
Anyway, we do have a public events page if you want to see the kind of stuff going on: https://bloggingfordevs.com/events/
As I mentioned at the end of the blog post, I'm personally preparing an SEO Workshop which'll be given in less than two weeks. The membership is literally $12/mo and refundable, and a workshop like that alone would cost 10-20x that if given in a conference setting.
Not sure if this is "enough" for people here, but as long as members who are there are happy and feel like their investment is compounding, that's gonna have to be my metric for success.
Hope that contributes to the discussion.
If it's helpful or somehow relevant since you brought up Twitter followers, I started with about 9K when I launched the newsletter.
Wrote about that process here, though maybe you've seen it already? https://bloggingfordevs.com/launch-a-newsletter/
I also don't see it as competition. People will join if they think it's valuable, they'll leave if they don't. You can also be part of multiple communities if you think it's worth it.
I'm glad you got some ideas from the post about making your community more sustainable. Wishing you the best with that!
No worries if you're not into it, just curious what felt "infomercially" to you. Is it that the email form is kind of immediate? I changed that recently before launching on product hunt -- it used to just be a paragraph and two input fields.
Thanks for checking it out in any case :)
Yeah, I know what you mean. I'm trying this "build in public" thing which is more transparent than feels natural to most people.
Who knows where it'll go, but I think it's cool and useful to see people's "early work", not only a final polished result.
So, trying to contribute some of that stuff myself!
That said, I'm not sure where I wrote I want to reach 20K? I don't foresee reaching that in terms of either revenue or subscribers in the near future.
Thanks for reading, even if you aren't sure about it. Was there a part you think was redundant or it was just a bit long-winded?
The results so far are pretty cool and, in my opinion, should be a signal that it is TOTALLY possible for individuals writing great technical content to stand out for a specific technology.
If you're wondering, the community is a private forum where you can get advice from experienced bloggers, feedback on your articles, and attend workshops and meetups.
No one in there is selling stuff to each other. Actually you may end up getting access to other people's stuff for free exchange for thoughtful feedback :)
Thanks for taking a look and reading, I appreciate it!
As I shared in the breakdown, what your impression is could be why most people who join have done my newsletter first.
Maybe that's something for me to think about, how to frame it for people who haven't read my newsletter or haven't been following me on Twitter for a while.
You can sign up for a 7-day challenge to publish one excellent, SEO-optimized blog post:
(Oh, and if I need to qualify myself, I grew traffic on one of my side projects (a content website) to over 100k per month primarily via SEO)
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In terms of sources for SEO information and just getting started, I'd check out Brian Dean's guide (I haven't read through it thoroughly myself, but he's very known in the SEO world):
https://backlinko.com/seo-this-year
Another useful way of looking at this is to see the factors Google actually use to rank your content:
https://backlinko.com/hub/seo/ranking-factors
The Ahrefs blog (a tool for doing keyword research and competitor analysis) is also chock full of resources:
SEO changes all the time, I'd also recommend plugging into some communities or following SEO professionals on Twitter. Barry Schwartz is a great example of this:
https://twitter.com/rustybrick
These are just a few things off the top of my head.
My point was more about nitpicking line by line for perfection. What you're talking about sounds like a legitimate performance issue.
I think we're on the same page, but maybe my point wasn't clear enough. I tried to make it clear in my last point that "code is quality is important" but it's important not to confuse code quality with things that are more minor like idiosyncratic coding style.
Thanks for reading!