4 ms·

I'm the author of the post. Sincerely appreciate all the words here, this legit made my morning. I wonder if part of this has to do with fewer people writing i

I'm the author of the post. Sincerely appreciate all the words here, this legit made my morning. I wonder if part of this has to do with fewer people writing in their own space anymore. Most people post in sanitised UIs of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. So seeing a personal page is confronting, unless it's a vanilla theme. Not sure. Either way, I'd love to see more people maintain personal blogs again. And with RSS! Maybe we need to resurrect something like Technorati. Cheers :)

detaro 6y ago
"Sanitized" Twitter certainly has that conflict too - and its relatively accepted there that no, people don't just post about one thing if they don't want to, while at the same time some people do complain about it.
- rubenerd 6y ago
  I was thinking more in terms of the UI/decorations, but this is a fair point. It's curious people don't complain that I talk about trains/coffee/anime among my FreeBSD and OpenZFS tweets. Maybe it is about expectations.
stanislavb 6y ago
Hey mate, great post! I think that there's a slight renaissance in regards to blogging and personal websites. Of course, I could be biased as I "resurrected" mine two weeks ago :). I will be building a new RSS reader/platform soonish. I will definitely think on the topic of resurrecting Technorati.
ant6n 6y ago
Maybe people don’t read much content on blogs with rss these days.
- rubenerd 6y ago
  That's unfortunately true. Remember when Twitter et.al. used to support RSS? Social networks had a vested interest in removing it, because it means you don't need to go to their pages. It's up to all of us to bring it back.
ratww 6y ago
You have a very nice website. some_furry's is great too. This is the kind of thing I miss from the web of the 90s and early 2000s. A vocal minority might complain that it doesn't look like Medium with the useless hero image of a laptop in a desk, the 45 trackers and analytics and paywall, but I silently enjoy both the content and the personality, so thank you both. Might be the culture I live in or I'm getting old and stopping to care, but I frankly wouldn't have a problem putting this as a reference link in some internal documentation or in Slack. We have a Manga Guide to Databases in our work library since forever, so maybe the mascot is fitting. A furry-themed blog would fit too, of course, as we have a few O'Reilly books (but none with a wolf unfortunately). Jokes aside, I find the mascots of both sites tasteful and nicely drawn, btw.
- rubenerd 6y ago
  Thanks, that really means a lot :). I agree, we definitely lost something special after the early 2000s. We got standards compliance and rid ourselves of IE which is awesome, but I think we lost a part of the web's soul in the process. I've been preoccupied lately with how we can encourage more people to blog again. I think everyone has something interesting to say, and shouldn't be constrained by what a specific social network permits (technically, or with content).
megameter 6y ago
I think it's precipitated by the shift of the Web from an early-adopters world that is mostly exploring the idea of being online, to one where the property-ownership ladder has taken precedence. The idea of being a "serious professional" is entangled in that of "the personal brand" and thus in your identity being your property. But it's not just that: it's also that this property has some assumed virtuous pattern of development(in the sense of Aristotle), and something that is not that pattern is incorrect, and possibly threatening because it disrupts their preconceptions of what is right - and it's always a preconceived thing, young kids aren't afflicted by this. They'd like to take the content - because it's valuable - while protecting those beliefs, so an urge rises to lash out, dismiss everything, give "helpful hints" about what to do better, or call it degenerate, because changing a belief is hard within oneself.
- 1MachineElf 6y ago
  What you're saying here makes sense to me, except the part about kids. It's typically kids I see going back and fourth with "No, mine's better... No no no, mine's better-er! Yours is dumb..." The ability to accept differences is something I observe more often in the mature & wise.
xupybd 6y ago
Why not run ads? Not trying to say you should just interested in your motivation :)
- rubenerd 6y ago
  It's a reasonable question. I'm not against advertising per se, but thesedays it comes with a lot of tracking and JavaScript baggage that I don't want. My blog also isn't there to make money, it pays for itself by being something relaxing and useful (for me) to write.
teraku 6y ago
Defs +1 for personal blogs and RSS feeds. That way you can add them to personalised webrings as well using something like openring.
Alex3917 6y ago
> Either way, I'd love to see more people maintain personal blogs again. The basic problem is that in terms of foregone consulting hours, writing a personal blog and hosting it using custom software is roughly the equivalent of purchasing and then purposely totaling several Teslas per year.
- dhagz 6y ago
  I'm not sure that's entirely true. Things you need to run a blog: 1. Server, preferably secure. This can be set up in an afternoon, maybe on a Saturday or Sunday. You can also probably find Ansible or Chef scripts to automate the provisioning. 2. A directory on the server to hold website content - time to set up is dependent on latency to your server, but is essentially instant. 3. A web server set up to serve content in said directory - probably an hour or two to get a reasonably simple setup. 4. Probably an SSL cert - can be automated with Let's Encrypt, including making your server aware of the cert. Initial setup, maybe another hour. 5. Something to make the content. I like Hugo, but there's lots of other static site generators. Choose a pre-made theme that is the least objectionable to you. It might take another afternoon to get this all set up between browsing themes and writing some seed content. 6. Something to get the content to your server (or you can just keep the whole setup on the server!). I use rsync to deploy a build whenever I commit to the Git repo holding my blog. Nice to haves: 1. A domain name. It makes your website easier to find, and people are more likely to remember that over an IP address. This will be about a half hour to an hour to set up depending on how shitty your registrar is. All in all, I spend $5 a month running the server that hosts my blog. I maintain it and built it during hours when I wouldn't have been paid or worked anyways. So I'm out $60. Everything else is free (mostly as in beer, but some is also as in the other kind of free).
  - coffeefirst 6y ago
    And if you really don't want to think about the server, Jekyll/Hugo/Next.js should all work pretty well with Github pages.
  - Alex3917 6y ago
    To clarify, what I meant was more that if you're using something like Hugo then (for you) that's off-the-shelf software, not custom software. Think about how millions of dollars of consulting revenue the people who actually wrote that framework probably turned down in order to create that instead. Not to mention that once you've created software like that, each individual blog post might well take literally hundreds of hours to write.
munificent 6y ago
> I wonder if part of this has to do with fewer people writing in their own space anymore. It's not just the blogosphere. This trend is everywhere. People don't just post vacation photos for friends, they try to become influencers. They don't throw parties, they try to be come DJs, they don't hack on little open source projects, they try to start passive income lifestyle businesses. Everything's a hustle, everything's for money. I don't know if this is born out of economic necessity because the middle class is hollowing out, or more just culture shifting to equate "success" with "rich". But it seems like fewer and fewer things are just... fun... anymore. It's always gotta be for something.

detaro 6y ago

"Sanitized" Twitter certainly has that conflict too - and its relatively accepted there that no, people don't just post about one thing if they don't want to, while at the same time some people do complain about it.

rubenerd 6y ago
I was thinking more in terms of the UI/decorations, but this is a fair point. It's curious people don't complain that I talk about trains/coffee/anime among my FreeBSD and OpenZFS tweets. Maybe it is about expectations.

stanislavb 6y ago

Hey mate, great post! I think that there's a slight renaissance in regards to blogging and personal websites. Of course, I could be biased as I "resurrected" mine two weeks ago :). I will be building a new RSS reader/platform soonish. I will definitely think on the topic of resurrecting Technorati.

ant6n 6y ago

Maybe people don’t read much content on blogs with rss these days.

rubenerd 6y ago
That's unfortunately true. Remember when Twitter et.al. used to support RSS? Social networks had a vested interest in removing it, because it means you don't need to go to their pages. It's up to all of us to bring it back.

ratww 6y ago

You have a very nice website. some_furry's is great too. This is the kind of thing I miss from the web of the 90s and early 2000s. A vocal minority might complain that it doesn't look like Medium with the useless hero image of a laptop in a desk, the 45 trackers and analytics and paywall, but I silently enjoy both the content and the personality, so thank you both. Might be the culture I live in or I'm getting old and stopping to care, but I frankly wouldn't have a problem putting this as a reference link in some internal documentation or in Slack. We have a Manga Guide to Databases in our work library since forever, so maybe the mascot is fitting. A furry-themed blog would fit too, of course, as we have a few O'Reilly books (but none with a wolf unfortunately). Jokes aside, I find the mascots of both sites tasteful and nicely drawn, btw.

rubenerd 6y ago
Thanks, that really means a lot :). I agree, we definitely lost something special after the early 2000s. We got standards compliance and rid ourselves of IE which is awesome, but I think we lost a part of the web's soul in the process. I've been preoccupied lately with how we can encourage more people to blog again. I think everyone has something interesting to say, and shouldn't be constrained by what a specific social network permits (technically, or with content).

megameter 6y ago

I think it's precipitated by the shift of the Web from an early-adopters world that is mostly exploring the idea of being online, to one where the property-ownership ladder has taken precedence. The idea of being a "serious professional" is entangled in that of "the personal brand" and thus in your identity being your property. But it's not just that: it's also that this property has some assumed virtuous pattern of development(in the sense of Aristotle), and something that is not that pattern is incorrect, and possibly threatening because it disrupts their preconceptions of what is right - and it's always a preconceived thing, young kids aren't afflicted by this. They'd like to take the content - because it's valuable - while protecting those beliefs, so an urge rises to lash out, dismiss everything, give "helpful hints" about what to do better, or call it degenerate, because changing a belief is hard within oneself.

1MachineElf 6y ago
What you're saying here makes sense to me, except the part about kids. It's typically kids I see going back and fourth with "No, mine's better... No no no, mine's better-er! Yours is dumb..." The ability to accept differences is something I observe more often in the mature & wise.

xupybd 6y ago

Why not run ads? Not trying to say you should just interested in your motivation :)

rubenerd 6y ago
It's a reasonable question. I'm not against advertising per se, but thesedays it comes with a lot of tracking and JavaScript baggage that I don't want. My blog also isn't there to make money, it pays for itself by being something relaxing and useful (for me) to write.

teraku 6y ago

Defs +1 for personal blogs and RSS feeds. That way you can add them to personalised webrings as well using something like openring.

Alex3917 6y ago

> Either way, I'd love to see more people maintain personal blogs again. The basic problem is that in terms of foregone consulting hours, writing a personal blog and hosting it using custom software is roughly the equivalent of purchasing and then purposely totaling several Teslas per year.

dhagz 6y ago
I'm not sure that's entirely true. Things you need to run a blog: 1. Server, preferably secure. This can be set up in an afternoon, maybe on a Saturday or Sunday. You can also probably find Ansible or Chef scripts to automate the provisioning. 2. A directory on the server to hold website content - time to set up is dependent on latency to your server, but is essentially instant. 3. A web server set up to serve content in said directory - probably an hour or two to get a reasonably simple setup. 4. Probably an SSL cert - can be automated with Let's Encrypt, including making your server aware of the cert. Initial setup, maybe another hour. 5. Something to make the content. I like Hugo, but there's lots of other static site generators. Choose a pre-made theme that is the least objectionable to you. It might take another afternoon to get this all set up between browsing themes and writing some seed content. 6. Something to get the content to your server (or you can just keep the whole setup on the server!). I use rsync to deploy a build whenever I commit to the Git repo holding my blog. Nice to haves: 1. A domain name. It makes your website easier to find, and people are more likely to remember that over an IP address. This will be about a half hour to an hour to set up depending on how shitty your registrar is. All in all, I spend $5 a month running the server that hosts my blog. I maintain it and built it during hours when I wouldn't have been paid or worked anyways. So I'm out $60. Everything else is free (mostly as in beer, but some is also as in the other kind of free).
- coffeefirst 6y ago
  And if you really don't want to think about the server, Jekyll/Hugo/Next.js should all work pretty well with Github pages.
- Alex3917 6y ago
  To clarify, what I meant was more that if you're using something like Hugo then (for you) that's off-the-shelf software, not custom software. Think about how millions of dollars of consulting revenue the people who actually wrote that framework probably turned down in order to create that instead. Not to mention that once you've created software like that, each individual blog post might well take literally hundreds of hours to write.

munificent 6y ago

> I wonder if part of this has to do with fewer people writing in their own space anymore. It's not just the blogosphere. This trend is everywhere. People don't just post vacation photos for friends, they try to become influencers. They don't throw parties, they try to be come DJs, they don't hack on little open source projects, they try to start passive income lifestyle businesses. Everything's a hustle, everything's for money. I don't know if this is born out of economic necessity because the middle class is hollowing out, or more just culture shifting to equate "success" with "rich". But it seems like fewer and fewer things are just... fun... anymore. It's always gotta be for something.