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I started blogging more once I stopped trying to make something fancy. Instead of trying to create my own markup and create a new site every time I feel like bl

I started blogging more once I stopped trying to make something fancy. Instead of trying to create my own markup and create a new site every time I feel like blogging again, I just create github gists now. It's portable in that I could download all my markdown gists and just put them on a simple nginx server with a gfm renderer. And it has a built-in comments section.

neontomo 3y ago
> create a new site every time I feel like blogging again Relatable haha, I've rebuilt mine so many times. Some times barebones minimalist with just text documents in a list, other times with pagination and nice styling and a database, it's fun but probably no body cares about the differences.
epiccoleman 3y ago
I'm not so much in the "constantly rebuilding my site" territory, but as a general rule the stuff on my blog is pretty high-effort (and, I like to think, pretty high quality). I need to get in the habit of writing short quick updates every now and then. As much as stuff like X / Twitter is annoying / harmful / bad for society / $negative_words , one thing about blogging is that the return on effort has been somewhat low for me, whereas Twitter can really increase your reach. I recently did a pretty huge post as an extension of a comment I wrote on the /r/guitarlessons subreddit, and also made a video demo of the concept. My analytics suggest that about 10% of the people who watched the video clicked the link to my site. That netted out to about 10-15 views of the article. I don't care necessarily, in the sense that there's not really an incentive for me to "get views" - I'm not advertising or expecting to make any money or anything - but I do, you know, want people to read my stuff after putting so much effort to make it. That said, though, there has been a benefit to me, at least, in that I frequently reference at least one of the articles I wrote when I need a refresher in SVG. So I guess in some sense, that effort was well spent to create a high quality reference resource for myself.

neontomo 3y ago

> create a new site every time I feel like blogging again Relatable haha, I've rebuilt mine so many times. Some times barebones minimalist with just text documents in a list, other times with pagination and nice styling and a database, it's fun but probably no body cares about the differences.

epiccoleman 3y ago

I'm not so much in the "constantly rebuilding my site" territory, but as a general rule the stuff on my blog is pretty high-effort (and, I like to think, pretty high quality). I need to get in the habit of writing short quick updates every now and then. As much as stuff like X / Twitter is annoying / harmful / bad for society / $negative_words , one thing about blogging is that the return on effort has been somewhat low for me, whereas Twitter can really increase your reach. I recently did a pretty huge post as an extension of a comment I wrote on the /r/guitarlessons subreddit, and also made a video demo of the concept. My analytics suggest that about 10% of the people who watched the video clicked the link to my site. That netted out to about 10-15 views of the article. I don't care necessarily, in the sense that there's not really an incentive for me to "get views" - I'm not advertising or expecting to make any money or anything - but I do, you know, want people to read my stuff after putting so much effort to make it. That said, though, there has been a benefit to me, at least, in that I frequently reference at least one of the articles I wrote when I need a refresher in SVG. So I guess in some sense, that effort was well spent to create a high quality reference resource for myself.