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Some of the most interesting things online are people writing about things they are passionate about, for the sake of writing about them. At least in my opinion
by jaabe 7y ago
Some of the most interesting things online are people writing about things they are passionate about, for the sake of writing about them. At least in my opinion, so it’s fair to say that I agree with the author.
I think it’s an equally delightful experience to journal about things though. I do it from time to time, when some subject just needs to get written down, almost as though the journaling is me thinking out loud on something. I could certainly do this in an old fashioned journal, or keep things to myself, but in my experience, I’ve learned a lot about something by having to write about it in a way that anyone could read. Which includes explaining things that are obvious to me, but not to you.
I know it’s not for everyone, and I respect that, but if you do think out loud, then do us all a favour and share the things that are most important to you. I think it’ll help keep the internet much more interesting in the age of social media.
If we can find it anyway, with google down-prioritising personal blogs.
- loosetypes 7y agoAgreed. I'm a bit jealous of his (Mostly) food truck name ideas, https://writing.markchristian.org/name-ideas/ https://writing.markchristian.org/name-ideas/. Once, in the functional programming rabbit-hole, a coworker advocated for a hypothetical Indian food truck named Haskell's Curry. And when I was studying propositional logic I certainly wouldn't have said no to a side of De Morgan's ColesLaw.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoI don't know if a Coleslaw food truck service scales.
- paxys 7y agoThat is an impressive list
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- andrepd 7y ago>25. Buenos Nachos Hmm, where have I possibley seen this before? :)
- chrisweekly 7y agoAgreed, that list of food truck names is punny.
- dejawu 7y agoHe forgot the best two: Gyros and Villains Spaghett-about-it
- spudlyo 7y agoI had an idea for a Vietnamese Italian fusion joint called Pho gettaboutit. Rice noodles, rare beef, and tripe with Bolognese sauce and garlic bread? Mmmmmm.
- markchristian 7y agoA+ name ideas.
- dansnerd 7y agoHow about: Beauty and the yeast The walking bread
- gen220 7y agoThe best one we've come up with is a Russian-American fusion truck named "Collusion", serving (alcohol-free) cocktails named after all the major players / plot points in the "Russia investigation". It's an endless source of entertaining ideas. "Moscow Mueller", "Manafort on the Rocks", "Cohen Kvass". Or you can go for drinks that are flavored after their namesakes: dry, sweet, bitter, sour. Park it in front of Trump Tower on central park, and Instagram fame would be instantaneous! Feel free to steal my idea.
- DrScump 7y agoOr "Otto's Collusion Repair"
- DrScump 7y agoI have a similar concept: collections of fake band names, domain names, stand-up comedy pieces, and rap-suitable lyrics. The trick is extracting coherent routines that tell a story well. Ages ago, in the age of Usenet, I had a huge collection of such bits (plus quotes of others) for use in .signature files.
- DrScump 7y agoAnother variation on this is the opening titles to "Bob's Burgers". A series of disasters hits the restaurant before its ultimately opening (fire, pests, etc) and the respondents (exterminator,etc.) has a new, funny name each time. Also, the neighboring stores' names vary in funny ways.
- tigerlily 7y ago> If we can find it anyway, with google down-prioritising personal blogs. Hmm, I wonder if there's a search engine tailored to this sort of thing? As in search all the blogs for human knowledge and experience.
- messo 7y agoI would use this.
- Kirth 7y agoThis has been stuck in my mind for a while. The past months, whenever I searched for something I would get covered in pages upon pages of SEO-friendly copywriter bullshit without real content; it's driving me mad. How possible would it be, to build something like this?
- wongarsu 7y agoYou could start a search engine with data from commoncrawl, maybe you can even get other projects like archive.is to ship you some hard drives. Then you just need to build an index and serve search queries; plenty of open source search engines have been attempted, giving good Templates or even directly usable implementations. The hard thing is distinguishing personal blogs from blogspam and other worthless content. Performance is a huge issue since you want to spend at most double digit milliseconds per page, but maybe it's getting viable with ML becoming commoditized. But getting this perfect would make or break the project.
- qnsi 7y agoI am also thinking about this problem constantly. SEO destroyed internet for me. I keep searching on HN using https://hn.algolia.com https://hn.algolia.com but obviously you can use it only for specific topics. I think there is a market in this problem
- z92 7y agoThat engine will be equally spammed by SEO posters. Look how hard google is trying and still failing.
- jcadam 7y agoIf you're passionate about a subject, you're going to have strong opinions about said subject. If you voice/publish those opinions, some people are going to hate you. Perhaps a potential employer was set to hire you until they read your blog post in which you were eloquently critical about offshoring, for example. Or worse, you expressed an off-hand opinion about some social issue back in 2006 in an otherwise technical blog post that the wrong person stumbled upon and now the world is going to cave in on you. I would love to write more, but censoring myself for the sake of future employers, psychos, etc. tends to make anything I do produce come off as bland and uninteresting.
- wolco 7y agoI would suggest doing under a generic domain. You want to maintain a certain image for employers and that restricts your freedom to rant.
- JohnFen 7y agoThere's that. I don't point potential employers to my personal website (which I also don't associate with my real name). It's just none of their business. When I want to share work that I've done, I put it into a standalone presentation that I provide on a memory stick.
- username223 7y ago> I would love to write more, but censoring myself for the sake of future employers, psychos, etc. tends to make anything I do produce come off as bland and uninteresting. Just write about your favorite hobby. When I started my personal blog a decade ago (yikes...), I chose a topic and made a rule that I would stick to it. No politics, no tech, no personal drama. I still enjoy writing about it, and have almost always stuck to the rule, so I don't think an employer could take offense at any of the several hundred thousand words I wrote.
- jaabe 7y agoI understand your concern, but I think you can avoid a lot of the negative sides by only writing about things you like. It’s really hard to piss people off if you’re sharing experiences about things you love, especially if you stick to just your experiences and never try to tell people what the “right” way to do things is. Political views have never been much of a problem for me. I’m strongly opinionated, but I also work in the public sector, which means I leave my personal political views completely out of my professional life. That is certainly a form of self-censorship, but even though it it’s forced upon public servants, I can’t think of a single time I regret keeping my political opinions to myself. There are certainly political movements I wouldn’t work for, but over all it rarely seem like a good idea to get into politics unless you actually want to make a career out of it.
- gf263 7y agoJournalling is extremely fulfilling to me and writing about things that bother me quiets my mind.