9 ms·

Some blogging myths

245 points by GavinAnderegg 3y ago

GavinAnderegg 3y ago
Julia Evans is a better blogger than I'll ever be, but I've been trying to get back into blogging. These tips are great, and all things I need to keep in mind. "You need to be original" and "writing boring posts is bad" are two thoughts that often keep me from writing on a subject.
- mattrighetti 3y ago
  > writing boring posts is bad This is highly subjective, what you think is boring might be super interesting to another person.
  - didgetmaster 3y ago
    The mistake that too many people have, is thinking that your blog has to appeal to the masses. Unless it goes 'viral' and attracts millions of views they think it is a failure. Instead, focus on topics that might only be 'not boring' to a small subset of the population. HN tends to attract people with very particular interests. I often browse through a hundred or more posts before finding one that truly interests me. My own blog is dedicated to those who are passionate about data management. This is a small group indeed, but who cares if less than 1000 people read my posts. All it takes is a few to learn something meaningful from it to make it worthwhile.
- pncnmnp 3y ago
  I am facing a similar dilemma. Lately, I have been writing about data structures and the "original" aspect has really taken over my writing. Breaking down the content into a readable format and complementing it with intuitive figures can become a challenge. I have two almost-ready drafts sitting on my computer, but I cannot gather the courage to post them as I feel like they might be missing more analysis. I am not sure if this is necessarily good or bad. I have been trying to treat my blog as something I enjoy, with content that will still be relevant in a decade or so. Perhaps, I need to take Julia's advice and write more boring posts, like some of my favorite things in my bashrc.
  - Minor49er 3y ago
    Maybe you ought to adjust the approach. Rather than have a complete and finished reference now, post what you have so far to show what you have been trying. Someone may reach out with additional insight. Though whether or not you get any feedback at this stage, it can lead up to a post that covers everything that you want once it's ready You can always edit old posts or just create follow-ups and link them together. Or just keep it as an open topic that you periodically post smaller updates on
  - wpietri 3y ago
    You might check out what Steve Randy Waldman is doing with his "drafts" blog. He has found it freeing: https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9807.html https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9807.html
SeenNotHeard 3y ago
> I still don’t know if all of those statements are true (is it true that PHP programs can’t have long-lived persistent TCP connections? maybe not!) They can, depending on how the PHP program is coded. PHP even supports non-blocking I/O.
gavinhoward 3y ago
I'm a blogger too, not as famous as Julia, but I'm too famous for my tastes. [1] [2] [3] [4] I agree with Julia's points perfectly! In fact, some of those four posts were "boring" (I thought), but got a lot of traffic. I just want to add two more myths that are unfortunately pushed in today's clickbait culture. Myth: You need to make your posts clickbait. One of the posts linked about used clickbait-ish titles ("Considered Harmful"), but they weren't very clickbait-ish in general. Yes, my thesis may have been opposite of mainstream, but I don't think the titles were clickbait. Myth: You need to make your posts appeal to people's emotions, i.e., make them ragebait or similar. Those four posts are my highest traffic posts on HN, and they were all level-headed posts. I had an earlier version of my "Considered Harmful" post, and it was ragebait, but it didn't get much traffic (thank goodness!). Be constructive. I think if there's a theme to Julia's points, it's that: be constructive and useful. Sometimes, that means being boring. Sometimes it means having a short post, sometimes a long one. Sometimes, it means repeating something. Sometimes, it means skipping concepts. My $0.02. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34662666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34662666 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30965805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30965805 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28736238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28736238 [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29671325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29671325
- rgoulter 3y ago
  > > Myth: You need to make your posts appeal to people's emotions, i.e., make them ragebait or similar. > Those four posts are my highest traffic posts on HN, and they were all level-headed posts. I think the examples you've linked, it's the topic rather than the reasoning that's going to incite emotions; especially if your take is contrarian, not mainstream, or discussing unresolved problems.
  - gavinhoward 3y ago
    Perhaps, but I argue that they didn't raise emotions much because people were awesomely calm in the comments on HN.
snewman 3y ago
Great post. I'll propose one more "myth": writing a blog doesn't benefit you personally, except by drawing attention. I've found that writing about a topic can also be a great way to solidify your own thinking on that topic. There ideas that I've understood much better after blogging about them. Basically, you're using the entire Internet as your "rubber duck".
- wpietri 3y ago
  “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” -- E. M. Forster
  - kgwgk 3y ago
    “How do I know what I think until I see what I wrote?” -- ChatGPT
    - pavo-etc 3y ago
      Apt for ChatGPT which literally has no capacity to think outside of the process of writing.
- lpolovets 3y ago
  Hey Steve! One more thing re: drawing attention: you're drawing the attention of people interested in the same topic, and often thinking along similar lines as you. And that's a fun community to connect with, even if you're not saying anything new or benefitting from your writing in other ways.
- qumpis 3y ago
  Arguably the main reason of writing a blog is to collect and organize thoughts in one's mind. Especially when writing about technical topics/reviewing scientific literature.
- bovem 3y ago
  True, I've added blog writing to my learning process. I'll sit down to write about a topic and find out that I don't really understand it. It helps me to put stuff in a structured manner for myself and other to review later. Often I'll ask questions to myself that I didn't during the learning process. Like "Do you really understand what a controller manager is? What is the difference between a controller manager and custom controller in Operators?"
z3t4 3y ago
About the "posts need to be 100% correct", I sometimes read through my old blog posts and find a bunch of errors. If it was a post on HN you can no longer edit it, but if it's your own blog you can just edit and make corrections! Sometimes I add a note like "Me from the future..." it feels like time travel.
zabzonk 3y ago
i wrote blogs simply becauase i enjoy writing and having fun, and i would have thought that is the primary motivator for most bloggers. and i really enjoyed writing training courses. given up now because of health and other problems. a couple of mine: https://latedev.wordpress.com/ https://latedev.wordpress.com/ https://punchlet.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/hello-world/ https://punchlet.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/hello-world/
- Hamuko 3y ago
  My primary motivators for starting a blog are trying to improve my writing and having an outlet for all of my thoughts and opinions that I don't want to yell at strangers on the street.
simonw 3y ago
My three tips for blogging more: 1. Write TILs. The only justification needed to publish one is "did I just learn something that was new to me?" - having such a low bar makes it much easier to publish frequently. 2. Write about projects you have shipped, no matter how small. I like to think of this as the price I pay for distracting myself with yet another little side-project. 3. Learn to hit "publish" when you still aren't completely happy with what you have written. The alternative is never publishing anything at all!
- awesome_dude 3y ago
  > 1. Write TILs. The only justification needed to publish one is "did I just learn something that was new to me?" - having such a low bar makes it much easier to publish frequently. I would add "today I just explained" (whether an internet forum question, a new colleague, or my nana ;) > 3. Learn to hit "publish" when you still aren't completely happy with what you have written. The alternative is never publishing anything at all! Perfection is the enemy of progress! (And there's always an edit button ;)
  - Sai_ 3y ago
    My blogging flow doesn’t have an edit button. I email a blog post which gets published for the world to see. So, there is not always an edit button.
    - awesome_dude 3y ago
      The limit to the way to edit a blog post is your imagination 1. Delete it and write a new one 2. Close your account and send DMCA takedown notices to the server, then replace with a clone of your old posts plus an updated one. There's /always/ an edit button, just, it might be shaped a bit differently than you have previously imagined ;)
- sodapopcan 3y ago
  Somewhat in the spirit of this article, your #3 point: > 3. Learn to hit "publish" when you still aren't completely happy with what you have written. The alternative is never publishing anything at all! ...reminds me of the very well known quote that most will know but maybe some won't: "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late." - The LinkedIn Dude
retrobox 3y ago
This is nice advice. I ended up with choice paralysis even deciding how to set up and publish blog posts. Static site generators with deployment pipelines? Something more traditional like Wordpress? Other?
- hejcloud 3y ago
  Gosh this is a horrible spiral I've been going through as well. My personal experience is: 1) WP: You start with promising yourself to never touch any PHP and will still end up in this mess. I always regretted setting up WP few days/weeks after. 2) Gatsby/Next: I'm saying this as one of those frontend hipsters: For a personal blog, just don't. The npm ecosystem imho got so messy that it always added more pain to actually start writing. 3) Hugo: just do it. It's small, fast, nice and once you wrapped your head around their taxonomy and theme model, it's really nice and easy to extend and fun to actually blog. My 2 cents. Your mileage may vary.
  - twelve40 3y ago
    jeez why not just use one of the million services.. php... npm... do you also start your own fire, like with a tinder box, to cook some food?
- guu 3y ago
  I recommend https://bearblog.dev https://bearblog.dev (free) or https://ghost.org https://ghost.org (paid). Both let you use your own domain. It's fun to set up static site generators but I think it's better to pick something you can start writing in immediately instead of spending time thinking about what to use. If you end up enjoying blogging you can switch to different software later if you like. But don't let that stop you from starting to write now.
  - ElFitz 3y ago
    Being fluent in another language than English, I’ve always wanted to take my blog multilingual. It’s been years now. And Ghost’s internationalisation support is still a joke.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
UltimateEdge 3y ago
The idea of editing already-published blog posts is unappealing to me, in case someone bookmarks or saves a link to my article before it was edited. Unless I make it clear what content was edited and when (more work!), the reader might be coming back to something different the second time they visit my page. It's this fact of the web that forces me to go to The Internet Archive's "Save Page Now" whenever I come across something remotely interesting, and I don't want to be part of the problem! Before someone mentions that most likely nobody will care about my edited page - it's a matter of principle! For example, I'm sure many of us here take the time to license our toy projects, even though the vast majority of them are effectively unknown to the rest of the world.
fungiblecog 3y ago
i disagree with a lot of this. there's enough incorrect and duplicate rubbish on the internet without encouraging more of it. In the old days - before narcissism became an acceptable personality trait - people were encouraged to think, learn, research and be original before subjecting the world to their writings. I'm not that old but i miss that
- cole-k 3y ago
  I imagine that my generation is far from the one you're talking about. Could you elaborate more on what it was like "in the old days," what has changed, and what you miss? Or is it hard to put your finger on?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- twic 3y ago
  Agreed. And i'll say something even more downvotable - i don't think Julia Evans's blog is very good.
  - mackatsol 3y ago
    I’m curious.. what is it about her blog that makes you feel that way?
- swah 3y ago
  Meh - its all contained under the jvns.ca domain though - you can skip that easily.
- jodrellblank 3y ago
  To paraphrase Rich Hickey, The only people entitled to say how blogs 'ought' to work are people who run blogs, and the scope of their entitlement extends only to their own projects. Just because someone blogs something does not imply they owe the world accuracy, originality, interest or education. As a reader of a blog you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to depth. You are not entitled to be the intended audience. You are not entitled to gain value from the blog. ---- And your complaint can be easily dismissed by noting that the article author blogs about things she's learned, and that reading all existing content to see what is original is impossible.
Swizec 3y ago
My biggest problem after blogging regularly for 15 years is that I continue to have more ideas and interesting things to write about than I have time to write. And the more I write the more ideas I get. edit: This has especially been a problem for the past year because I’m also under a book contract. Most days writing the book takes priority, but then my mind is exploding with blog ideas that don’t fit in book. But I don’t have energy to do both.
arp242 3y ago
I think the deeper issue is that there is no "one right way". I subscribe to the "you need to be original myth" for example. If I don't feel I can contribute anything to the existing corpus of text then I won't write about it. This does not mean that there can't be pre-existing content; I did an explainer on bitmasks for example – hardly a new concept – but I felt I could add something to the existing corpus, so it was "original" in that sense. I also tend to only write on things I'm fairly knowledgable on (with one or two exceptions) and while no one is ever "100% correct" I spend quite a bit of effort ensuring it's as close as I can be. All of this is what works well for me, so that's fine. Fundamentally: it's your site, and you can do whatever the hell you want with it. Purple text on a pink background? It's your site! Lost of swearing? It's your site! Furry drawings? It's your site! Gay leather kink pictures in the sidebar? It's your site!
hardwaregeek 3y ago
Also, if you can write a really long reddit/HN comment about it, you can probably write a blog post about it. A lot of my blog posts come from either that or ranting to a friend.
- adityaathalye 3y ago
  Hello, friend. I'm in the very same boat :) My thus-far latest post is exactly that, a cross-post of a long-ass wall of text I ended up making in one of the Slacks I frequent. https://www.evalapply.org/posts/cold-restart-total-outage/ https://www.evalapply.org/posts/cold-restart-total-outage/
maguay 3y ago
Another myth that dovetails with the author's mention that pageviews don't matter: The only way to get traffic is to write about something a lot of people search for, thus the entire industry around Ahrefs and similar Google Search tools. And yet. The blog posts that have been my breakout successes, when measured by pageviews or cold outreach or opportunities, are always about incredibly niche things. How to fix one specific thing on an obscure printer. My rambling ideas about a broader topic. If anything, the more niche, eccentric stuff that only matters to you helps you find your people, and that's where the magical connections happen. And the traffic, weirdly, as no one else is catering to your people as well as you can.
denvaar 3y ago
These are all great tips, and I need to keep them in mind. I have a blog post I've been trying to finish for months, and pretty much all of these things have been holding me back. Not really a "myth", but I'd also say: Don't box yourself into writing about one specific topic. I find blogging to be a really rewarding thing to do - but I gotta remember that I do it for myself and not others. When I start to drift away from this then I start to suffer. It's an interesting thing to balance, since you're publishing things online. One strategy that works well for me is to first do all my writing and note-taking in an actual notebook. This lets me write freely and explore ideas. Then I can make a decision about whether or not to polish and publish.
brabel 3y ago
I blog regularly, and given many other bloggers are commenting, let me ask: how do you do analytics? I am currently using Google Analytics, but they're changing it and a nagging me to change the configuration, but I wanted to move away from them for a long time for something more privacy-oriented (I just want to know how many people are reading my posts, maybe from which countries, and that's all - no ads). Would appreciate honest suggestions (no ads).
- bayindirh 3y ago
  I'm using Mataroa[0] as my blogging platform and it comes with its own analytics. It's very simple, and gives me the following: - Read counts per post, for the last 25 days. - How many RSS pulls, for the last 25 days. - How many site visits, for the last 25 days. Nothing more, nothing less. I'm pretty happy with them, and have no intention to change it. [0]: https://mataroa.blog https://mataroa.blog
- adityaathalye 3y ago
  For the longest time, I did not want analytics. I don't write for traffic or eyeballs, and I abhor being profiled for ads. My purpose is to think via writing, and as a side-benefit feed conversations about the stuff I am interested in. Recently though, I added Cloudflare analytics (no cookies, no deep profiling) out of sheer curiosity, in the spirit of the innocent surprise and joy of seeing "hits" from across the world on my very first website in the mid 2000-s. Sooner or later I'll get rid of it. As Julia writes in her post, page views aren't important to me. The occasional email conversations that fall out of my posts are! (edit: better words)
  - dogon14473 3y ago
    [dead]
- blackbear_ 3y ago
  I use GoatCounter (https://www.goatcounter.com/ https://www.goatcounter.com/). It's very simple to set-up and privacy-oriented (no cookies).
mbwgh 3y ago
One thing that comes to mind about comments. I think writing blog posts may be hard, but writing a constructive comment is hard also. People are not good at it, and I often find myself writing something and then just give up in the middle and deleting it again. Not just because finding the right words is hard (especially if you're not a native speaker), but some of the same questions go through my head as well (Who is the intended reader? Hasn't someone commented on this before? ...). Thus I would suggest assuming the commenter has spent more time thinking about what to write than you might expect. And even if not, someone else may get some value out of their comment, so even if it isn't you, give them the benefit of the doubt. The point about assuming they're confused, not angry, is spot on I think. There is probably a connection to the point about writing becoming harder with more experience. Each sentence you write will trigger more warnings in your head, or it might become harder to put yourself in someone else's shoes. To keep going, you probably have to learn to just accept and expect imperfection and just keep going, cut the editorial phase short at some point and just publish or you'll never get done. The next presumably angry/ignorant/dumb commenter you encounter may have just done that, and by necessity. You never know.

245 points by GavinAnderegg 3y ago

Julia Evans is a better blogger than I'll ever be, but I've been trying to get back into blogging. These tips are great, and all things I need to keep in mind. "You need to be original" and "writing boring posts is bad" are two thoughts that often keep me from writing on a subject.

mattrighetti 3y ago
> writing boring posts is bad This is highly subjective, what you think is boring might be super interesting to another person.
- didgetmaster 3y ago
  The mistake that too many people have, is thinking that your blog has to appeal to the masses. Unless it goes 'viral' and attracts millions of views they think it is a failure. Instead, focus on topics that might only be 'not boring' to a small subset of the population. HN tends to attract people with very particular interests. I often browse through a hundred or more posts before finding one that truly interests me. My own blog is dedicated to those who are passionate about data management. This is a small group indeed, but who cares if less than 1000 people read my posts. All it takes is a few to learn something meaningful from it to make it worthwhile.
pncnmnp 3y ago
I am facing a similar dilemma. Lately, I have been writing about data structures and the "original" aspect has really taken over my writing. Breaking down the content into a readable format and complementing it with intuitive figures can become a challenge. I have two almost-ready drafts sitting on my computer, but I cannot gather the courage to post them as I feel like they might be missing more analysis. I am not sure if this is necessarily good or bad. I have been trying to treat my blog as something I enjoy, with content that will still be relevant in a decade or so. Perhaps, I need to take Julia's advice and write more boring posts, like some of my favorite things in my bashrc.
- Minor49er 3y ago
  Maybe you ought to adjust the approach. Rather than have a complete and finished reference now, post what you have so far to show what you have been trying. Someone may reach out with additional insight. Though whether or not you get any feedback at this stage, it can lead up to a post that covers everything that you want once it's ready You can always edit old posts or just create follow-ups and link them together. Or just keep it as an open topic that you periodically post smaller updates on
- wpietri 3y ago
  You might check out what Steve Randy Waldman is doing with his "drafts" blog. He has found it freeing: https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9807.html https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9807.html

SeenNotHeard 3y ago

> I still don’t know if all of those statements are true (is it true that PHP programs can’t have long-lived persistent TCP connections? maybe not!) They can, depending on how the PHP program is coded. PHP even supports non-blocking I/O.

gavinhoward 3y ago

I'm a blogger too, not as famous as Julia, but I'm too famous for my tastes. [1] [2] [3] [4] I agree with Julia's points perfectly! In fact, some of those four posts were "boring" (I thought), but got a lot of traffic. I just want to add two more myths that are unfortunately pushed in today's clickbait culture. Myth: You need to make your posts clickbait. One of the posts linked about used clickbait-ish titles ("Considered Harmful"), but they weren't very clickbait-ish in general. Yes, my thesis may have been opposite of mainstream, but I don't think the titles were clickbait. Myth: You need to make your posts appeal to people's emotions, i.e., make them ragebait or similar. Those four posts are my highest traffic posts on HN, and they were all level-headed posts. I had an earlier version of my "Considered Harmful" post, and it was ragebait, but it didn't get much traffic (thank goodness!). Be constructive. I think if there's a theme to Julia's points, it's that: be constructive and useful. Sometimes, that means being boring. Sometimes it means having a short post, sometimes a long one. Sometimes, it means repeating something. Sometimes, it means skipping concepts. My $0.02. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34662666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34662666 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30965805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30965805 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28736238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28736238 [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29671325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29671325

rgoulter 3y ago
> > Myth: You need to make your posts appeal to people's emotions, i.e., make them ragebait or similar. > Those four posts are my highest traffic posts on HN, and they were all level-headed posts. I think the examples you've linked, it's the topic rather than the reasoning that's going to incite emotions; especially if your take is contrarian, not mainstream, or discussing unresolved problems.
- gavinhoward 3y ago
  Perhaps, but I argue that they didn't raise emotions much because people were awesomely calm in the comments on HN.

snewman 3y ago

Great post. I'll propose one more "myth": writing a blog doesn't benefit you personally, except by drawing attention. I've found that writing about a topic can also be a great way to solidify your own thinking on that topic. There ideas that I've understood much better after blogging about them. Basically, you're using the entire Internet as your "rubber duck".

wpietri 3y ago
“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” -- E. M. Forster
- kgwgk 3y ago
  “How do I know what I think until I see what I wrote?” -- ChatGPT
  - pavo-etc 3y ago
    Apt for ChatGPT which literally has no capacity to think outside of the process of writing.
lpolovets 3y ago
Hey Steve! One more thing re: drawing attention: you're drawing the attention of people interested in the same topic, and often thinking along similar lines as you. And that's a fun community to connect with, even if you're not saying anything new or benefitting from your writing in other ways.
qumpis 3y ago
Arguably the main reason of writing a blog is to collect and organize thoughts in one's mind. Especially when writing about technical topics/reviewing scientific literature.
bovem 3y ago
True, I've added blog writing to my learning process. I'll sit down to write about a topic and find out that I don't really understand it. It helps me to put stuff in a structured manner for myself and other to review later. Often I'll ask questions to myself that I didn't during the learning process. Like "Do you really understand what a controller manager is? What is the difference between a controller manager and custom controller in Operators?"

z3t4 3y ago

About the "posts need to be 100% correct", I sometimes read through my old blog posts and find a bunch of errors. If it was a post on HN you can no longer edit it, but if it's your own blog you can just edit and make corrections! Sometimes I add a note like "Me from the future..." it feels like time travel.

zabzonk 3y ago

i wrote blogs simply becauase i enjoy writing and having fun, and i would have thought that is the primary motivator for most bloggers. and i really enjoyed writing training courses. given up now because of health and other problems. a couple of mine: https://latedev.wordpress.com/ https://latedev.wordpress.com/ https://punchlet.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/hello-world/ https://punchlet.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/hello-world/

Hamuko 3y ago
My primary motivators for starting a blog are trying to improve my writing and having an outlet for all of my thoughts and opinions that I don't want to yell at strangers on the street.

simonw 3y ago

My three tips for blogging more: 1. Write TILs. The only justification needed to publish one is "did I just learn something that was new to me?" - having such a low bar makes it much easier to publish frequently. 2. Write about projects you have shipped, no matter how small. I like to think of this as the price I pay for distracting myself with yet another little side-project. 3. Learn to hit "publish" when you still aren't completely happy with what you have written. The alternative is never publishing anything at all!

awesome_dude 3y ago
> 1. Write TILs. The only justification needed to publish one is "did I just learn something that was new to me?" - having such a low bar makes it much easier to publish frequently. I would add "today I just explained" (whether an internet forum question, a new colleague, or my nana ;) > 3. Learn to hit "publish" when you still aren't completely happy with what you have written. The alternative is never publishing anything at all! Perfection is the enemy of progress! (And there's always an edit button ;)
- Sai_ 3y ago
  My blogging flow doesn’t have an edit button. I email a blog post which gets published for the world to see. So, there is not always an edit button.
  - awesome_dude 3y ago
    The limit to the way to edit a blog post is your imagination 1. Delete it and write a new one 2. Close your account and send DMCA takedown notices to the server, then replace with a clone of your old posts plus an updated one. There's /always/ an edit button, just, it might be shaped a bit differently than you have previously imagined ;)
sodapopcan 3y ago
Somewhat in the spirit of this article, your #3 point: > 3. Learn to hit "publish" when you still aren't completely happy with what you have written. The alternative is never publishing anything at all! ...reminds me of the very well known quote that most will know but maybe some won't: "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late." - The LinkedIn Dude

retrobox 3y ago

This is nice advice. I ended up with choice paralysis even deciding how to set up and publish blog posts. Static site generators with deployment pipelines? Something more traditional like Wordpress? Other?

hejcloud 3y ago
Gosh this is a horrible spiral I've been going through as well. My personal experience is: 1) WP: You start with promising yourself to never touch any PHP and will still end up in this mess. I always regretted setting up WP few days/weeks after. 2) Gatsby/Next: I'm saying this as one of those frontend hipsters: For a personal blog, just don't. The npm ecosystem imho got so messy that it always added more pain to actually start writing. 3) Hugo: just do it. It's small, fast, nice and once you wrapped your head around their taxonomy and theme model, it's really nice and easy to extend and fun to actually blog. My 2 cents. Your mileage may vary.
- twelve40 3y ago
  jeez why not just use one of the million services.. php... npm... do you also start your own fire, like with a tinder box, to cook some food?
guu 3y ago
I recommend https://bearblog.dev https://bearblog.dev (free) or https://ghost.org https://ghost.org (paid). Both let you use your own domain. It's fun to set up static site generators but I think it's better to pick something you can start writing in immediately instead of spending time thinking about what to use. If you end up enjoying blogging you can switch to different software later if you like. But don't let that stop you from starting to write now.
- ElFitz 3y ago
  Being fluent in another language than English, I’ve always wanted to take my blog multilingual. It’s been years now. And Ghost’s internationalisation support is still a joke.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

UltimateEdge 3y ago

The idea of editing already-published blog posts is unappealing to me, in case someone bookmarks or saves a link to my article before it was edited. Unless I make it clear what content was edited and when (more work!), the reader might be coming back to something different the second time they visit my page. It's this fact of the web that forces me to go to The Internet Archive's "Save Page Now" whenever I come across something remotely interesting, and I don't want to be part of the problem! Before someone mentions that most likely nobody will care about my edited page - it's a matter of principle! For example, I'm sure many of us here take the time to license our toy projects, even though the vast majority of them are effectively unknown to the rest of the world.

fungiblecog 3y ago

i disagree with a lot of this. there's enough incorrect and duplicate rubbish on the internet without encouraging more of it. In the old days - before narcissism became an acceptable personality trait - people were encouraged to think, learn, research and be original before subjecting the world to their writings. I'm not that old but i miss that

cole-k 3y ago
I imagine that my generation is far from the one you're talking about. Could you elaborate more on what it was like "in the old days," what has changed, and what you miss? Or is it hard to put your finger on?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
twic 3y ago
Agreed. And i'll say something even more downvotable - i don't think Julia Evans's blog is very good.
- mackatsol 3y ago
  I’m curious.. what is it about her blog that makes you feel that way?
swah 3y ago
Meh - its all contained under the jvns.ca domain though - you can skip that easily.
jodrellblank 3y ago
To paraphrase Rich Hickey, The only people entitled to say how blogs 'ought' to work are people who run blogs, and the scope of their entitlement extends only to their own projects. Just because someone blogs something does not imply they owe the world accuracy, originality, interest or education. As a reader of a blog you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to depth. You are not entitled to be the intended audience. You are not entitled to gain value from the blog. ---- And your complaint can be easily dismissed by noting that the article author blogs about things she's learned, and that reading all existing content to see what is original is impossible.

Swizec 3y ago

My biggest problem after blogging regularly for 15 years is that I continue to have more ideas and interesting things to write about than I have time to write. And the more I write the more ideas I get. edit: This has especially been a problem for the past year because I’m also under a book contract. Most days writing the book takes priority, but then my mind is exploding with blog ideas that don’t fit in book. But I don’t have energy to do both.

arp242 3y ago

I think the deeper issue is that there is no "one right way". I subscribe to the "you need to be original myth" for example. If I don't feel I can contribute anything to the existing corpus of text then I won't write about it. This does not mean that there can't be pre-existing content; I did an explainer on bitmasks for example – hardly a new concept – but I felt I could add something to the existing corpus, so it was "original" in that sense. I also tend to only write on things I'm fairly knowledgable on (with one or two exceptions) and while no one is ever "100% correct" I spend quite a bit of effort ensuring it's as close as I can be. All of this is what works well for me, so that's fine. Fundamentally: it's your site, and you can do whatever the hell you want with it. Purple text on a pink background? It's your site! Lost of swearing? It's your site! Furry drawings? It's your site! Gay leather kink pictures in the sidebar? It's your site!

hardwaregeek 3y ago

Also, if you can write a really long reddit/HN comment about it, you can probably write a blog post about it. A lot of my blog posts come from either that or ranting to a friend.

adityaathalye 3y ago
Hello, friend. I'm in the very same boat :) My thus-far latest post is exactly that, a cross-post of a long-ass wall of text I ended up making in one of the Slacks I frequent. https://www.evalapply.org/posts/cold-restart-total-outage/ https://www.evalapply.org/posts/cold-restart-total-outage/

maguay 3y ago

Another myth that dovetails with the author's mention that pageviews don't matter: The only way to get traffic is to write about something a lot of people search for, thus the entire industry around Ahrefs and similar Google Search tools. And yet. The blog posts that have been my breakout successes, when measured by pageviews or cold outreach or opportunities, are always about incredibly niche things. How to fix one specific thing on an obscure printer. My rambling ideas about a broader topic. If anything, the more niche, eccentric stuff that only matters to you helps you find your people, and that's where the magical connections happen. And the traffic, weirdly, as no one else is catering to your people as well as you can.

denvaar 3y ago

These are all great tips, and I need to keep them in mind. I have a blog post I've been trying to finish for months, and pretty much all of these things have been holding me back. Not really a "myth", but I'd also say: Don't box yourself into writing about one specific topic. I find blogging to be a really rewarding thing to do - but I gotta remember that I do it for myself and not others. When I start to drift away from this then I start to suffer. It's an interesting thing to balance, since you're publishing things online. One strategy that works well for me is to first do all my writing and note-taking in an actual notebook. This lets me write freely and explore ideas. Then I can make a decision about whether or not to polish and publish.

brabel 3y ago

I blog regularly, and given many other bloggers are commenting, let me ask: how do you do analytics? I am currently using Google Analytics, but they're changing it and a nagging me to change the configuration, but I wanted to move away from them for a long time for something more privacy-oriented (I just want to know how many people are reading my posts, maybe from which countries, and that's all - no ads). Would appreciate honest suggestions (no ads).

bayindirh 3y ago
I'm using Mataroa[0] as my blogging platform and it comes with its own analytics. It's very simple, and gives me the following: - Read counts per post, for the last 25 days. - How many RSS pulls, for the last 25 days. - How many site visits, for the last 25 days. Nothing more, nothing less. I'm pretty happy with them, and have no intention to change it. [0]: https://mataroa.blog https://mataroa.blog
adityaathalye 3y ago
For the longest time, I did not want analytics. I don't write for traffic or eyeballs, and I abhor being profiled for ads. My purpose is to think via writing, and as a side-benefit feed conversations about the stuff I am interested in. Recently though, I added Cloudflare analytics (no cookies, no deep profiling) out of sheer curiosity, in the spirit of the innocent surprise and joy of seeing "hits" from across the world on my very first website in the mid 2000-s. Sooner or later I'll get rid of it. As Julia writes in her post, page views aren't important to me. The occasional email conversations that fall out of my posts are! (edit: better words)
- dogon14473 3y ago
  [dead]
blackbear_ 3y ago
I use GoatCounter (https://www.goatcounter.com/ https://www.goatcounter.com/). It's very simple to set-up and privacy-oriented (no cookies).

mbwgh 3y ago

One thing that comes to mind about comments. I think writing blog posts may be hard, but writing a constructive comment is hard also. People are not good at it, and I often find myself writing something and then just give up in the middle and deleting it again. Not just because finding the right words is hard (especially if you're not a native speaker), but some of the same questions go through my head as well (Who is the intended reader? Hasn't someone commented on this before? ...). Thus I would suggest assuming the commenter has spent more time thinking about what to write than you might expect. And even if not, someone else may get some value out of their comment, so even if it isn't you, give them the benefit of the doubt. The point about assuming they're confused, not angry, is spot on I think. There is probably a connection to the point about writing becoming harder with more experience. Each sentence you write will trigger more warnings in your head, or it might become harder to put yourself in someone else's shoes. To keep going, you probably have to learn to just accept and expect imperfection and just keep going, cut the editorial phase short at some point and just publish or you'll never get done. The next presumably angry/ignorant/dumb commenter you encounter may have just done that, and by necessity. You never know.