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> 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 bl

> 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.
  - detaro 6y ago
    But that's a total non-sequitur? You don't need to write your own blog system, so why assume that's what people would have to do? (Also, a basic blog system is really not that much work if you decide to go for it)
    - Alex3917 6y ago
      > You don't need to write your own blog system, so why assume that's what people would have to do? Fair enough, I just assumed it was running software the author had written himself, didn't see that it was actually Hugo.
munificent 6y ago
That applies equally well to many other activities. Think how many potential consulting hours squandered when you were instead wasting time traveling the world, falling in love, tending a garden, raising children, cooking meals for friends, writing your memoir, dying after a long, satisfying life.

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.
- detaro 6y ago
  But that's a total non-sequitur? You don't need to write your own blog system, so why assume that's what people would have to do? (Also, a basic blog system is really not that much work if you decide to go for it)
  - Alex3917 6y ago
    > You don't need to write your own blog system, so why assume that's what people would have to do? Fair enough, I just assumed it was running software the author had written himself, didn't see that it was actually Hugo.

munificent 6y ago

That applies equally well to many other activities. Think how many potential consulting hours squandered when you were instead wasting time traveling the world, falling in love, tending a garden, raising children, cooking meals for friends, writing your memoir, dying after a long, satisfying life.