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I've blogged (https://sheep.horse/ https://sheep.horse/) for about 10 years now in a minor way and monitor my logs pretty carefully. This is what I have learnt:

• qznc 10y ago
  Nearly the same insights here (http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/ http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/). My conclusions: If you want to get a big audience you have to hustle. Post every blog on every social channel and so on. This is not the game I want to play. My motivation to blog is to clarify and archive my thoughts. Sometimes it is useful to point someone to an old blog post instead writing a log comment. Going for a blog with a big audience only makes sense if it is a funnel for selling something. Books, courses, app, etc. Having your core followers for some interaction is nice to develop new stuff. Blog about a topic, get the feedback, work it into another book/course/app. Blog about different topics and test which of them evokes the most reactions.
  • throw159 10y ago
    dude, you're gorgeous
• cookiecaper 10y ago
  Yes. The days of people typing in a URL directly to go to the place they want are history, and Facebook/Twitter have entirely supplanted the feed readers of the aughts. Normal people will only visit a small handful of web sites and follow outlinks from there, before immediately retreating back into their context: wherever a Google query takes them, an aggregator like HN/reddit/Facebook, and social media like Instagram/YouTube. It's nearly impossible to get people to regularly go to a domain to which they are unaccustomed.
• andreygrehov 10y ago
  What was the previous domain name? Why did you decide to change it to sheep.horse?
  • AndrewStephens 10y ago
    No big mystery - I used to own WordPress blog at sandfly.net.nz but when I moved countries I gave up blogging for so long that my domain lapsed. Once I finally decided to start up again using my own platform I needed a catchy name that would be sure to draw traffic. Naturally I couldn't think of anything so ended up with sheep.horse because I think .horse domains are hilariously stupid.
    • mod 10y ago
      Maybe .horse is brilliant because everyone owning one thinks they're in on some kind of joke. It's kind of like those giant sunglasses. Not a terrible business plan.
      • AndrewStephens 10y ago
        It worked on me :)
• savanaly 10y ago
  >The best way to capture traffic from Reddit or Hackernews is to catch the eye of a star poster on these sites and have them post the link. Otherwise nobody will care. (Any star posters here? Feel free to post my stuff) Eh? I have been reading HN for years and never once have I looked at the username of the person who posted a link, unless someone in the comments makes a reference to them. Do other people do that? What is the mechanism by which someone's star quality affects the number of people who click the links they post?
  • AndrewStephens 10y ago
    You don't notice the poster and neither do I. But some posters carry enough cred (or have enough friends) that anything they post immediately get a bump out of the incoming links slush pile. That's not counting the people who use multiple accounts and bots to push up their content (probably not a problem on hacker news but rife on reddit).
    • gist 10y ago
      > But some posters carry enough cred (or have enough friends) Is that really true? Look at tptacek's submissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=tptacek https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=tptacek
      • angelbob 10y ago
        That's a very solid list of submissions. Every fourth-or-so submission has hundreds or thousands of points. If you feel that's not great... Dunno. You're using a different yardstick than I am. That looks a lot like people consider his name to add credibility.
  • blowski 10y ago
    You can use hnapp.com (or various other tools) to build an RSS feed of someone's submissions - e.g. http://hnapp.com/rss?q=author%3ADiabloD3%20%20type%3Astory http://hnapp.com/rss?q=author%3ADiabloD3%20%20type%3Astory.
  • 10y ago
• kutkloon7 10y ago
  About your blog, IMHO a little re-styling would help a lot. I do like minimal layouts, but the serif font doesn't quite work for me. Also, maybe add some structure? Your blogs seem to cover a broad range of topics. I am mostly interested in technical articles, but I have to actively filter out the stuff that I'm interested in (by reading the titles and guessing the topic; this takes quite some mental energy and might hold back readers from subscribing).
  • AndrewStephens 10y ago
    Thanks for your comments. The styling is based on Tufte CSS, which I like quite a lot for longer works. I agree it looks out of place amongst modern sites but I am sticking with it for the moment. I totally agree on the scattershot subject matter. Some days I like writing about C++ and Boost, and some days I just like ragging on a terrible film. Perhaps I should split the blog into different subject areas but judging from my logs it would make very little difference to the way people use my site.
  • user5994461 10y ago
    Allow me to be mean for a minute: Agreed, the font on the homepage nearly killed my eyes. Then "Here you will find various projects and musings. No information about sheep or horses though - sorry about that." Why is it called sheep.horse then? I am not even getting into how that seems like a spam domain to sell viagra or whatever. Then there are publications about anything and everything. There is no topic. And when I am reading an article. There isn't ANY link to other articles. You should have "most viewed" or "related" articles. People can only close your blog, there is nothing else to do on that page. No wonder they bounce. To conclude, the headers on top are barely readable.
    • AndrewStephens 10y ago
      Thanks for your comments, I understand what you are saying about the font - I am experimenting with Tufte-style layouts and that is the font they recommend. I've noticed that it looks much better on MacOSX than on Windows based browsers. I also know what you are talking about with the related articles. I have not yet implemented such a feature in the software that builds the pages but it is on the to-do list. However, on my old blog I did have such a feature and it was rarely used. Part of the ethos of my site is to make the article text king and minimize everything else. That is why the header is so small and I haven't prioritized a bunch of internal links on each page. I have no ads and have nothing to sell so there is no monetary incentive to capture readers. I have noticed that the header is stupidly small on mobile - I'll get around to reworking this one day. I do get a kick out of knowing people read my stuff, but I am usually irritated by the stupid tricks other sites use to squeeze one more page-view out of you so I refuse to follow the same dark path.
• ComodoHacker 10y ago
  >Blogging (and running a website in general) is not popular these days because so much of the oxygen is taken up by social media or sites like Reddit Do you think blogging on Reddit/Facebook/Medium/Whatever is not true "blogging"? Much of your audience is already there. HN is a different story.
• dorianm 10y ago
  BTW, the font looks huge on smaller desktop browser windows: http://i.imgur.com/08ntU0K.png http://i.imgur.com/08ntU0K.png (Most of the time, I use half my screen for the browser and half for my terminal)
  • AndrewStephens 10y ago
    Yeah, the style is a little weird on smaller screen sizes - this is not intentional. Another thing to fix.
• codazoda 10y ago
  I don't see the same result on my own blog (actually a wiki). I've posted hundreds of how-to type topics over the years. I started simply recording instructions for myself that I didn't want to forget. Most of those posts get single digit traffic, some of them get an early boost on Reddit, but a few of them gain popularity via search and those ones stay popular (a couple of them has been popular for a decade). I can never predict which will gain popularity and I often don't know why they stay popular. I hear odd stories on some of them such as an associate at a store sharing it with a customer. I often look at my site stats and try to monetize the pages that are getting a lot of organic traffic. I've had mild success with that. Most of those pages get their traffic from Google but a recent article (which got a bump from Reddit) is getting 16% direct traffic. It's hard to tell why. I highly doubt people are typing in my very long URL. I've never figured it out so I write to help people and some of that becomes popular.
• personlurking 10y ago
  Thanks. Rentention is the big one. It's the problem - the lack of it - I notice the most. But I tend to agree with your assessment as a whole. Of all my blogs, past and present, and the thousands of posts on them, one single post got real traction. The reason? It got reblogged a dozen times, always with a link back to my blog as the source. Obviously none of that was in my control. But I'm not after traction like that (although it'd be nice). I just want to reach an audience that cares.
• throwayedidqo 10y ago
  If most pages get single digit views you should look into your SEO. I wrote blog posts regularly for my last employer. We didn't promote them at all, but they got 30-500 views a month just from Google search. A lot more when someone linked them.
  • jgimenez 10y ago
    Maybe it depends on the topic? I'm not seeing the same numbers for other types of posts.
• leovonl 10y ago
  You article about hiring a C++ developer made me chuckle on the interviewees' answers; apart from the "virus" one I've also heard all the others - and had the same thoughts. You'd think that one would prepare a bit more before being interviewed, but I guess that's more common that I expected. By the way, I really liked your interview questions; very straightfoward and to the point. Something I usually ask when interviewing is the difference from C and C++ - specially if the résumé lists "C/C++" instead of separating both - as many people view C++ as a "C with classes".. which is not a fifth of what modern C++ really is.