6 ms·

20 Years of Blogging on my own website

165 points by jeena 2y ago

jseliger 2y ago
I've been blogging on wordpress.com since 2006 and think writing for the Internet still underrated (a point Patrick Collison and many others have also made). At some point I got a custom domain, which I then thought I'd renewed but hadn't (ambiguous emails from Wordpress) and switched to a different custom domain. I see a lot of complaints, often justified, about the dominance of the big social media companies, but not nearly as many people deciding to go their own, off those sites.
- acedTrex 2y ago
  The internet is still plenty open, people just prefer the path of least resistance
  - raytopia 2y ago
    I think the biggest issue today is it's hard to find blogs and other tiny websites via search engine. You almost have to be on social media for people to find your website.
    - z0r 2y ago
      Hacker news is how I find things worth reading these days. If this place didn't exist my internet consumption would be cut in half (at least).
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      I have to admit, I have never really understood this need to be found and this focus on discoverability. Unless you are monetizing your audience, why does it matter whether 10, 1000 or 100,000 people read your blog? If I write something on the Internet, or release some open source program, or post a video, I’m not making any money off of views: I’m doing it for myself. So I don’t really ultimately care how many people read it or view it. I firmly believe the best content on the Internet is not necessarily the stuff optimized for search engines and audience-building. We shouldn’t really care about that.
      - bombcar 2y ago
        When people were blogging because it was fun for them, the world was full of various content. Once a few got rich (or at least well-to-do and famous) from it, it all went to hell. If you're blogging and worrying about "how will readers find me" you're doing it wrong, and are basically doomed to fail. You blog because you like to write, and readers will slowly accumulate over time. Comments and/or a small forum can work wonders, too, as long as you're protected from spam.
    - deivid 2y ago
      You could try Marginalia's small web / blogosphere modes at https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/
    - rectang 2y ago
      It was hard to get your blog discovered 15 years ago, too. Recall "blogrolls", where blogs would link to other blogs — networking to securing such links would be the analogue to making yourself visible on social media today. I wonder — in absolute terms, is the number of people you can reach smaller today? It's surely proportionally smaller because the internet is much bigger.
- input_sh 2y ago
  Even if you do your own thing and make something super cool, nobody's gonna stumble upon it randomly. You either have to spam it on social media or aim for high ranking in search results (while that's still somewhat of a possibility). So, even with your own little website, you're still completely at the mercy of big tech. I still highly recommend it though. Your social media account comes and goes, but your own little website will be there however long you want it to be, display whatever info about you you want it to display, and it can look however you want it to look.
  - jmbwell 2y ago
    > Even if you do your own thing and make something super cool, nobody's gonna stumble upon it randomly. You either have to spam it on social media or aim for high ranking in search results (while that's still somewhat of a possibility). Seems like this might depend on the objective. Spamming social media and aiming for search rank might be necessary for ad revenue, self-promotion, or other conversions, whatever those might be. But it is not strictly necessary. Doing your own thing and making something cool can be 100% the end in itself. The issue I have leans the other way. I'm hesitant to self-publish anymore primarily because I don't want my work to get sucked up into the commercial machinery of the Big Tech Web. I have no interest and gain no benefit from feeding AI, scrapers, aggregators, or other "creators" who do surf around for other people's work they can mill into their own hash for their own purposes. I'd love it if I could somehow publish only for other end-user humans, but I don't see how I can do that without paradoxically engaging with some aspect of the commercial apparatus. It's like a Foucaultian nightmare. There's no way not to be part of the system. Rejecting it requires first embracing it. To wit: here I am on HN complaining about giving away my work for free
    - syoung666 2y ago
      Charge something like $.05 to get access. Will get rid of worries around feeding the AI, scrappers, and aggregators. Not sure how to limit the (human) plagiarism angle.
      - boromisp 2y ago
- jessekv 2y ago
  I've got a blog on my own domain, and I'd love to be able to write as well as you one day. So far I've mostly stuck to photos (⌒_⌒;).
  - atsaloli 2y ago
    Ooh! I want to start publishing photos online. What do you use? I looked at your website but it doesn't seem familiar.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      I'm very old school. I still have a Flickr Pro subscription.
    - dv35z 2y ago
      If you ever come across it - I'd love to find the "MkDocs-Material of Photo Gallery". Structured folders of photos - run one command - a slick, static-HTML site is built. A feature where you could put full-size photos in there, and the tool would automatically generate web-friendly sizes... Keep an eye out (or share here if you know a good one!)
      - jessekv 2y ago
        That is sort of what I have now, a script using pillow and osxphotos to export my albums.
    - jessekv 2y ago
      It's just hugo with a custom theme. I run my script to export photo albums from iPhoto, then I add some discussion in markdown.
  - jseliger 2y ago
    You can do it! https://writeofpassage.com/ https://writeofpassage.com/ In books about writing, I like: How Fiction Works Reading Like a Writer Writing With Style There are many others of course. Perhaps the most important part is finding an editor. (I wound up marrying one, which is not uncommon.) I've seen recs for Sasha Chapin: https://www.sashachapin.com/ https://www.sashachapin.com/
raytopia 2y ago
A couple random thoughts. 20 years is a long time makes me wonder what the next 20 years of blogging/websites will look like. As beginner in web development I'm jealous of the simplicity of web development described at the beginning of the post. Finally I've held off on putting comments/a guestbook on my website for the same reasons. I don't think I have even close to enough traffic for it to be a issue but if it ends up being one I don't want to deal with it.
- breck 2y ago
  > As beginner in web development I'm jealous of the simplicity of web development described at the beginning of the post. I've been blogging for 17 years, and gone through a number of iterations (started with Wordpress, then my own PHP blog, then Posterous, then Jekyll, and now Scroll). The language I use now, Scroll (https://scroll.pub/ https://scroll.pub/), is very simple, you might want to check it out. You can start small with something like this: header.scroll # My Blog firstPost.scroll import header.scroll Hello *world* <b>Its fine to use html too</b> index.scroll import header.scroll snippets
  - raytopia 2y ago
    That looks very interesting. Thanks for the link! I'll check it out.
- WorldMaker 2y ago
  I've been back and forth with comments over the years, including a couple posts that went viral enough to get a large volume of comments in a short time window. At the moment I've got some of those eras archived in a ZIP file but not currently visible. Moderation is definitely a responsibility. Spam Moderation is definitely a chore. Data ownership is definitely a trade-off: some of the comment hosting platforms that are better at spam auto-moderation want to own more things about your data or show more ads or trackers to your readers. It can be a lot to deal with. I added a comment widget again just recently because I missed some of the feelings of conversation, but I probably picked one that won't likely get as much conversation as some of my past tools did because higher barrier to entry on first comment (but that also makes the spam floor higher and gives me a trade-off in data ownership versus tracking JS). We'll see how long I leave it in place this time.
fjfaase 2y ago
Always nice to hear of people who have been blogging for a long time. I myself have been blogging (not always very seriously) for more than 29 years. First from a '~/home' directory of the University I was working at, later I moved to my own domain [1]. The first entry is from February 1995, but it also has contents from before that date. I am still writing HTML (with some JavaScript) using a modified version of Crystal Edit, which has the ability open local files by following HTML links [2]. (So, it act like a kind of HTML source browser.) I am using a C program to check HTML and links [3], which also places all updated files in an upload directory. [1] https://www.iwriteiam.nl/ https://www.iwriteiam.nl/ [2] https://www.iwriteiam.nl/MySample.html https://www.iwriteiam.nl/MySample.html [3] https://www.iwriteiam.nl/chkhtml_c.txt https://www.iwriteiam.nl/chkhtml_c.txt
- tracker1 2y ago
  Is that a fork of Crimson/Emerald Editor?
  - fjfaase 2y ago
    The editor is not a fork of this Emerald Editor [1] on SourceForce but based on Crystal Edit [2] from Code Project. It could be the Emerald Editor is based on Crystal Edit. I have not been able to work on it for many years because it is based on MFC and I have no access to Visual Studio. It does work under Wine on Linux (although some versions have problems with the mono-spaced fonts that it uses). [1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/emeraldeditor/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/emeraldeditor/ [2] https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/272/Crystal-Edit-syntax-coloring-text-editor https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/272/Crystal-Edit-syntax...
- WorldMaker 2y ago
  Yeah, long time blogging is always impressive. I've got archive remnants going back to 1999-ish [1] and I know I had websites prior to that, too. My start was in the personal web space of AOL back when a MB seemed like a lot. My personal domain itself goes back to 2002. For worse and sometimes for far better, I've got a bunch of archive holes from lost backups in the middle, too. It's still wild how much continuity I have managed to maintain across the decades, though, even with those bumps. (Over the years for blogging, I've bounced from handwritten HTML to custom PHP to Drupal to custom Python/Django to Jekyll.) [1] https://worldmaker.net/wmo99/ https://worldmaker.net/wmo99/ among other bits
jmclnx 2y ago
Very nice article and happy belated anniversary. I have my own personal WEB Site, but I have been moving it to Gemini since I find maintenance of it is far easier with Gemini that html. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) And good luck with the next 20 :)
saltysalt 2y ago
I'm at 23 years blogging now (I feel it).
jpe90 2y ago
I started blogging about stuff I've learned about that I am likely to forget down the road. It feels so good when you throw up a post, never share it, and still manage to get a thank you email for writing it years later. If you have a folder full of notes, I would recommend turning them into a blog on a rainy day.
susam 2y ago
My own blog/website is now 22 years old! It began in my university dorm room, though back then, it wasn't really a blog. Instead, it was just a loose collection of pages. I added a blog to it much later when blogging became fashionable. I still update my website occasionally [1]. Back in 2001, a chance encounter with Microsoft Personal Web Server (PWS) on a Windows 98 system introduced me to the client-server concepts essential for creating and hosting a website. I used PWS to serve my website for the first couple of years and then moved on to IIS. At first the web pages were just individual HTML pages loaded within an HTML frameset. The frameset presented common headers and sidebars for the website. Later I learnt to use ASP (the classic ASP) and add dynamic content such as quiz, guestbook, etc. By the final year of my university days, I had gained sufficient Unix/Linux knowledge to confidently replace Windows with Linux, IIS with Apache, and ASP with PHP. These days, I am serving my website using Nginx from a Linode VM running Debian stable. The website itself is generated statically using my own little Common Lisp program [2]. All of the content and layout is simple handwritten HTML. The Common Lisp program combines the content HTML with the layout HTML and writes the final HTML pages that are then served via Nginx. [1] https://susam.net/ https://susam.net/ [2] https://github.com/susam/susam.net https://github.com/susam/susam.net
raesene9 2y ago
I'm at 20 years blogging as well. I've managed to keep my archive of posts with the blog as it moved technologies (with an unfortunately ever growing number of dead links as external sites die off). These days Github pages, Jekyll, and writing in Markdown have proven a good way to get things done. Means I don't have to worry about server hosting and all the content is accessible if I ever want to move it. My blog's been very useful to me as a reference for things I've looked at in the past and has hopefully helped out some other people as well. These days I generally blog when it's taken me a little while and some digging to figure something out, hopefully saves other people a bit of time.
nimajneb 2y ago
Thanks for posting. It's fascinating you've kept up with it so long. Same with a couple other commenters in this post. I've had a website is some form for the same amount of time, but while I tinkered with blogs a few times it never made to my main site. Here's mine with it's unchanged design from like ~2005 (I'm not sure when) with just some simple additions of content over time. http://www.benjaminosborne.com http://www.benjaminosborne.com
- davely 2y ago
  21 years, here! This made me go back to find my first post[1] from August 2003. Oof. It’s interesting how things have evolved over time. Started it in college, and it was random posts about activities, feelings, etc. A lot of more personal stuff. Growing up, changing careers (and changing again and again), having kids… I find that my blog has gotten less personal and more just general knowledge sharing of things I find interesting. [1] https://daveschumaker.net/should-i-join-the-masses-of-bloggers/ https://daveschumaker.net/should-i-join-the-masses-of-blogge...
davepeck 2y ago
25 years last month. Hand-spun HTML on day one; cobbled-together scripts for the next many years; Jekyll once it hit 1.0; today, Astro. It feels like a real "moment" where people are reconsidering blogging and personal domain names; I'm excited to see what comes of it.
- ulrischa 2y ago
  Would like to hear about your experience with astro since I consider switching to it
  - davepeck 2y ago
    I think Astro is great for building small mostly (or entirely) static sites. It doesn't assume that you're building a blog, but it's plenty flexible enough to support it. This said, blogs feel like a nice sweet spot for Astro. The current version of my blog came together without much fuss. (I've studiously avoided using Astro DB, or using Astro to build an API backend, etc. and so can't comment on them.) Overall I've found Astro to be highly reliable. I identified one unexpected behavior (I think a bug, related to when CSS is rendered) while building my blog and was able to work around it but, other than that, Astro behaved exactly as documented. There were days I wished that astro components didn't exist and, instead, I could just use the client:* attributes in (say) my Preact components. That said, astro components are well thought out and the tooling in vscode is solid.
    - ulrischa 2y ago
      Thank you for your thoughts. Why is it suitable for only small sites?
      - davepeck 2y ago
        Mostly that I don't have enough experience working with Astro on things that are more sophisticated than "interesting CMS-backed blog or publication" to really comment. Secondarily that there are plenty of tools, some quite venerable at this point (Rails! Django!), that have the more complex terrain covered already.
TheRealDunkirk 2y ago
27 years for me. Started with FrontPage 1997, with extensions for Apache on Linux! Then I wrote a PHP site with Smarty. Then I wrote a Rails app. Then I moved to Wordpress. Given that I've done another 15 years writing Rails apps, I should rewrite it in the new Rails 7/8. Because I use a ton of 3rd-party JS libraries which don't work well with Turbo, I'm kind of stuck with Rails 6 with turbolinks disabled on my main project. I've been looking for some reason to get to grips with the new additions, and I think I just talked myself into it.
dyates 2y ago
Congratulations on the achievement. I recently hit my 10 year blogging milestone.[1] I've also written about some similar thoughts to those in your linked "Content is King" post.[2] Long may the individualist personal website live. [1]: https://davidyat.es/2024/04/07/ten-years/ https://davidyat.es/2024/04/07/ten-years/ [2]: https://davidyat.es/2020/03/14/reader-modes/ https://davidyat.es/2020/03/14/reader-modes/
loumf 2y ago
I passed 20 years in December and wrote this about it: https://loufranco.com/blog/it-was-20-years-ago-today https://loufranco.com/blog/it-was-20-years-ago-today I don't have a lot of readers, but the blog opened some doors for me (and continues to).
- vaylian 2y ago
  > but the blog opened some doors for me (and continues to). Is there any advice you have in that regard? How do most people contact you?
  - loumf 2y ago
    It’s really just increasing your surface area of luck. When I wrote about iOS dev in 2008, I got contacted by an editor at Manning and then wrote a book. I have had people reach out to ask follow-up questions on a tech post and then hire me for a contract. To be found randomly — write a lot of posts that answer questions people Google (those are the ones I have that get the most hits). But also, when I applied to my last job, I could show some samples from my blog where I referenced their products (that I had built add-ons to). That’s just writing stuff down about what you are doing. Finally, I mostly write my thoughts — those get no SEO and aren’t as useful, but are good to send to clients when they ask for my thoughts on some subject. I have a contact page and I point people to LinkedIn to connect.
k__ 2y ago
"Because I couldn't find any other blog software, I decided to write my own." Famous last words of a blogger. I didn't want to fall into that trap and started with a blogging service right away. 3 years after I started blogging as a new years resolution, it became my main source of income. Wouldn't have thought that I, the dude who almost dropped out of HS because of his bad English, would work as a writer one day.
- medo-bear 2y ago
  > Wouldn't have thought that I, the dude who almost dropped out of HS because of his bad English, would work as a writer one day. Well done mate! Love hearing underdog success stories. What was your secret to success in effective communication?
  - k__ 2y ago
    Thanks! I don't really have secret. But you should write for someone that really exists, or at least existed in the past. Like yourself (from a a few weeks ago).
    - medo-bear 2y ago
      > or at least existed in the past. Like yourself (from a a few weeks ago). That's actually a pretty interesting approach.
      - k__ 2y ago
        Yes. Last week I didn't know the exact steps of the TLS handshake. Now, I do. There are probably a bunch of people like me last week.
- resource_waste 2y ago
  >, it became my main source of income. >Wouldn't have thought that I, the dude who almost dropped out of HS because of his bad English Doesnt this just mean your income before was low? I have a website/blog that gets 1-2 million people per year, if I monetized I could get 5-20k/yr... But I make 150k+/yr at my day job. Really makes it hard to become a full time writer of technical stuff.
olooney 2y ago
I'm at 16 years. It's been through multiple iterations - a Django site, hosted on GitHub Pages, etc. Today it's a simple static site generated by blogdown/Hugo. MathJax is a godsend - I use a lot of LaTeX formatted equations. Biggest pain was search. I tried Algolia, but am currently doing a very simple client-side search. I'd be very interested in people's blog stacks or if they have recommendations similar to the above.
dep_b 2y ago
Blogging since last year on my own site. Didn’t want any obstructions and something that loaded really fast, just hacked something together with PHP and static files. PHP is a great template language. So far I think it already led to some interesting opportunities and good discussions. All of my articles got picked up by well-know newsletters so at least it’s good enough for other people. You only get a discussion if you claim something outrageous, you’re completely wrong or you share something that can be read in less than a minute.
NicoJuicy 2y ago
Tried to blog before, but never got into it until last year. https://blog.sapico.me/ https://blog.sapico.me/ Ofc I blogged about the setup ;) https://blog.sapico.me/posts/setting-up-a-blog-on-cloudflare-pages/ https://blog.sapico.me/posts/setting-up-a-blog-on-cloudflare... It's Hugo on Cloudflare pages fyi. Auto deployed after committing.
tomerbd 2y ago
I stopped blogging on my own website and completely moved to medium, result? comments + reactions > 0
spc476 2y ago
23 years so far, using my own blogging engine [1]. It's nice to see others have been doing this for over 20 years. [1] https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog
kamaraju 2y ago
I suggest to use a wiki instead of a blog. The idea here is that a blog might contain articles that are more "polished" and those that you want to share with others while a wiki is a place to store personal knowledge which is a constant work in progress. This way a 'blog' is simply a subset of wiki wherein you have a page called 'blog' that just links to various articles in the wiki. For example: https://kamaraju.xyz/dk/ https://kamaraju.xyz/dk/ is my wiki, https://www.kamaraju.xyz/dk/blog https://www.kamaraju.xyz/dk/blog is my blog.
abalcells 2y ago
Ha, very nice. My blog is 19 years old, although the website itself I started 25 years ago! It has been hard to keep up and keep posting in the most recent years. With kids life got real busy! You have inspired me to go back and keep posting as well. https://www.balcells.com/ https://www.balcells.com/
kstrauser 2y ago
26 in a month. Like everyone else here, I went through handcoded HTML (hosted on my Amiga!) to a self-written Perl CMS-like-thing to some PHP ball of mud, and then across a variety of wikis and blog engines and static sites and back to blog setups and back to static sites. Last month I migrated my Hugo setup to a hosted micro.blog account. It adds the missing bits I was too lazy or time-crunched to configure myself, like crossposting to other services, webmentions, and all the other indieweb goodness. A big shout out to Matomo analytics that lets me look at anonymized visitor records on my self-hosted server. It lacks the detail of Google Analytics (although you can pay Matomo for plugins that bring it close) but my visitors' information never leaves my possession. I don't care about what _a_ visitor does on my site, but I enjoy seeing the aggregate patterns, how people came to find me, and things like that.
tarkin2 2y ago
The bit about PHP made me yearn for those simple days. Now creating a website with all the trendy technologies creates such a barrier to creation and creativity. It seems large scale system good practice has trodden the small, quick and creative.
- squidbeak 2y ago
  Why not create one without those trendy technologies? Publishing to the web still only needs html, css and a simple server.
  - tarkin2 2y ago
    I mean it’s no longer commonplace, and rarely advice, and rarely taught, not that it’s impossible.
Brajeshwar 2y ago
> Getting a Perl website running has always been a challenge. What am I missing? Getting Movable Type working was to FTP and dropping it in "cgi-bin" > making them executable > connecting to the DB you created. Every web host that runs Apache has that, doesn't it? I've started and sold a few blogs - the Pagerank, Domain Authority, Domain Age, etc. I think I also sold an entire website with a pretty popular WordPress theme. The primary theme that started it all was acquired by Automattic, the WordPress company. I have been blogging on my personal blog since 2001, so it's been about 24 years now. I think mine started as a Flash website, with a `/blog` serving up the first few articles from PHP (or was it ASP?). The host was in a suburb of Bombay, and I remember seeing my neighboring websites, which were pretty popular brands. Yes, I could see the files, but I could not edit them. Very secure stuff. ;-) Here is a bit of the story I wrote on my website's 20th year https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/ https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/

165 points by jeena 2y ago

I've been blogging on wordpress.com since 2006 and think writing for the Internet still underrated (a point Patrick Collison and many others have also made). At some point I got a custom domain, which I then thought I'd renewed but hadn't (ambiguous emails from Wordpress) and switched to a different custom domain. I see a lot of complaints, often justified, about the dominance of the big social media companies, but not nearly as many people deciding to go their own, off those sites.

acedTrex 2y ago
The internet is still plenty open, people just prefer the path of least resistance
- raytopia 2y ago
  I think the biggest issue today is it's hard to find blogs and other tiny websites via search engine. You almost have to be on social media for people to find your website.
  - z0r 2y ago
    Hacker news is how I find things worth reading these days. If this place didn't exist my internet consumption would be cut in half (at least).
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    I have to admit, I have never really understood this need to be found and this focus on discoverability. Unless you are monetizing your audience, why does it matter whether 10, 1000 or 100,000 people read your blog? If I write something on the Internet, or release some open source program, or post a video, I’m not making any money off of views: I’m doing it for myself. So I don’t really ultimately care how many people read it or view it. I firmly believe the best content on the Internet is not necessarily the stuff optimized for search engines and audience-building. We shouldn’t really care about that.
    - bombcar 2y ago
      When people were blogging because it was fun for them, the world was full of various content. Once a few got rich (or at least well-to-do and famous) from it, it all went to hell. If you're blogging and worrying about "how will readers find me" you're doing it wrong, and are basically doomed to fail. You blog because you like to write, and readers will slowly accumulate over time. Comments and/or a small forum can work wonders, too, as long as you're protected from spam.
  - deivid 2y ago
    You could try Marginalia's small web / blogosphere modes at https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/
  - rectang 2y ago
    It was hard to get your blog discovered 15 years ago, too. Recall "blogrolls", where blogs would link to other blogs — networking to securing such links would be the analogue to making yourself visible on social media today. I wonder — in absolute terms, is the number of people you can reach smaller today? It's surely proportionally smaller because the internet is much bigger.
input_sh 2y ago
Even if you do your own thing and make something super cool, nobody's gonna stumble upon it randomly. You either have to spam it on social media or aim for high ranking in search results (while that's still somewhat of a possibility). So, even with your own little website, you're still completely at the mercy of big tech. I still highly recommend it though. Your social media account comes and goes, but your own little website will be there however long you want it to be, display whatever info about you you want it to display, and it can look however you want it to look.
- jmbwell 2y ago
  > Even if you do your own thing and make something super cool, nobody's gonna stumble upon it randomly. You either have to spam it on social media or aim for high ranking in search results (while that's still somewhat of a possibility). Seems like this might depend on the objective. Spamming social media and aiming for search rank might be necessary for ad revenue, self-promotion, or other conversions, whatever those might be. But it is not strictly necessary. Doing your own thing and making something cool can be 100% the end in itself. The issue I have leans the other way. I'm hesitant to self-publish anymore primarily because I don't want my work to get sucked up into the commercial machinery of the Big Tech Web. I have no interest and gain no benefit from feeding AI, scrapers, aggregators, or other "creators" who do surf around for other people's work they can mill into their own hash for their own purposes. I'd love it if I could somehow publish only for other end-user humans, but I don't see how I can do that without paradoxically engaging with some aspect of the commercial apparatus. It's like a Foucaultian nightmare. There's no way not to be part of the system. Rejecting it requires first embracing it. To wit: here I am on HN complaining about giving away my work for free
  - syoung666 2y ago
    Charge something like $.05 to get access. Will get rid of worries around feeding the AI, scrappers, and aggregators. Not sure how to limit the (human) plagiarism angle.
    - boromisp 2y ago
jessekv 2y ago
I've got a blog on my own domain, and I'd love to be able to write as well as you one day. So far I've mostly stuck to photos (⌒_⌒;).
- atsaloli 2y ago
  Ooh! I want to start publishing photos online. What do you use? I looked at your website but it doesn't seem familiar.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I'm very old school. I still have a Flickr Pro subscription.
  - dv35z 2y ago
    If you ever come across it - I'd love to find the "MkDocs-Material of Photo Gallery". Structured folders of photos - run one command - a slick, static-HTML site is built. A feature where you could put full-size photos in there, and the tool would automatically generate web-friendly sizes... Keep an eye out (or share here if you know a good one!)
    - jessekv 2y ago
      That is sort of what I have now, a script using pillow and osxphotos to export my albums.
  - jessekv 2y ago
    It's just hugo with a custom theme. I run my script to export photo albums from iPhoto, then I add some discussion in markdown.
- jseliger 2y ago
  You can do it! https://writeofpassage.com/ https://writeofpassage.com/ In books about writing, I like: How Fiction Works Reading Like a Writer Writing With Style There are many others of course. Perhaps the most important part is finding an editor. (I wound up marrying one, which is not uncommon.) I've seen recs for Sasha Chapin: https://www.sashachapin.com/ https://www.sashachapin.com/

raytopia 2y ago

A couple random thoughts. 20 years is a long time makes me wonder what the next 20 years of blogging/websites will look like. As beginner in web development I'm jealous of the simplicity of web development described at the beginning of the post. Finally I've held off on putting comments/a guestbook on my website for the same reasons. I don't think I have even close to enough traffic for it to be a issue but if it ends up being one I don't want to deal with it.

breck 2y ago
> As beginner in web development I'm jealous of the simplicity of web development described at the beginning of the post. I've been blogging for 17 years, and gone through a number of iterations (started with Wordpress, then my own PHP blog, then Posterous, then Jekyll, and now Scroll). The language I use now, Scroll (https://scroll.pub/ https://scroll.pub/), is very simple, you might want to check it out. You can start small with something like this: header.scroll # My Blog firstPost.scroll import header.scroll Hello *world* <b>Its fine to use html too</b> index.scroll import header.scroll snippets
- raytopia 2y ago
  That looks very interesting. Thanks for the link! I'll check it out.
WorldMaker 2y ago
I've been back and forth with comments over the years, including a couple posts that went viral enough to get a large volume of comments in a short time window. At the moment I've got some of those eras archived in a ZIP file but not currently visible. Moderation is definitely a responsibility. Spam Moderation is definitely a chore. Data ownership is definitely a trade-off: some of the comment hosting platforms that are better at spam auto-moderation want to own more things about your data or show more ads or trackers to your readers. It can be a lot to deal with. I added a comment widget again just recently because I missed some of the feelings of conversation, but I probably picked one that won't likely get as much conversation as some of my past tools did because higher barrier to entry on first comment (but that also makes the spam floor higher and gives me a trade-off in data ownership versus tracking JS). We'll see how long I leave it in place this time.

fjfaase 2y ago

Always nice to hear of people who have been blogging for a long time. I myself have been blogging (not always very seriously) for more than 29 years. First from a '~/home' directory of the University I was working at, later I moved to my own domain [1]. The first entry is from February 1995, but it also has contents from before that date. I am still writing HTML (with some JavaScript) using a modified version of Crystal Edit, which has the ability open local files by following HTML links [2]. (So, it act like a kind of HTML source browser.) I am using a C program to check HTML and links [3], which also places all updated files in an upload directory. [1] https://www.iwriteiam.nl/ https://www.iwriteiam.nl/ [2] https://www.iwriteiam.nl/MySample.html https://www.iwriteiam.nl/MySample.html [3] https://www.iwriteiam.nl/chkhtml_c.txt https://www.iwriteiam.nl/chkhtml_c.txt

tracker1 2y ago
Is that a fork of Crimson/Emerald Editor?
- fjfaase 2y ago
  The editor is not a fork of this Emerald Editor [1] on SourceForce but based on Crystal Edit [2] from Code Project. It could be the Emerald Editor is based on Crystal Edit. I have not been able to work on it for many years because it is based on MFC and I have no access to Visual Studio. It does work under Wine on Linux (although some versions have problems with the mono-spaced fonts that it uses). [1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/emeraldeditor/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/emeraldeditor/ [2] https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/272/Crystal-Edit-syntax-coloring-text-editor https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/272/Crystal-Edit-syntax...
WorldMaker 2y ago
Yeah, long time blogging is always impressive. I've got archive remnants going back to 1999-ish [1] and I know I had websites prior to that, too. My start was in the personal web space of AOL back when a MB seemed like a lot. My personal domain itself goes back to 2002. For worse and sometimes for far better, I've got a bunch of archive holes from lost backups in the middle, too. It's still wild how much continuity I have managed to maintain across the decades, though, even with those bumps. (Over the years for blogging, I've bounced from handwritten HTML to custom PHP to Drupal to custom Python/Django to Jekyll.) [1] https://worldmaker.net/wmo99/ https://worldmaker.net/wmo99/ among other bits

jmclnx 2y ago

Very nice article and happy belated anniversary. I have my own personal WEB Site, but I have been moving it to Gemini since I find maintenance of it is far easier with Gemini that html. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) And good luck with the next 20 :)

saltysalt 2y ago

I'm at 23 years blogging now (I feel it).

jpe90 2y ago

I started blogging about stuff I've learned about that I am likely to forget down the road. It feels so good when you throw up a post, never share it, and still manage to get a thank you email for writing it years later. If you have a folder full of notes, I would recommend turning them into a blog on a rainy day.

susam 2y ago

My own blog/website is now 22 years old! It began in my university dorm room, though back then, it wasn't really a blog. Instead, it was just a loose collection of pages. I added a blog to it much later when blogging became fashionable. I still update my website occasionally [1]. Back in 2001, a chance encounter with Microsoft Personal Web Server (PWS) on a Windows 98 system introduced me to the client-server concepts essential for creating and hosting a website. I used PWS to serve my website for the first couple of years and then moved on to IIS. At first the web pages were just individual HTML pages loaded within an HTML frameset. The frameset presented common headers and sidebars for the website. Later I learnt to use ASP (the classic ASP) and add dynamic content such as quiz, guestbook, etc. By the final year of my university days, I had gained sufficient Unix/Linux knowledge to confidently replace Windows with Linux, IIS with Apache, and ASP with PHP. These days, I am serving my website using Nginx from a Linode VM running Debian stable. The website itself is generated statically using my own little Common Lisp program [2]. All of the content and layout is simple handwritten HTML. The Common Lisp program combines the content HTML with the layout HTML and writes the final HTML pages that are then served via Nginx. [1] https://susam.net/ https://susam.net/ [2] https://github.com/susam/susam.net https://github.com/susam/susam.net

raesene9 2y ago

I'm at 20 years blogging as well. I've managed to keep my archive of posts with the blog as it moved technologies (with an unfortunately ever growing number of dead links as external sites die off). These days Github pages, Jekyll, and writing in Markdown have proven a good way to get things done. Means I don't have to worry about server hosting and all the content is accessible if I ever want to move it. My blog's been very useful to me as a reference for things I've looked at in the past and has hopefully helped out some other people as well. These days I generally blog when it's taken me a little while and some digging to figure something out, hopefully saves other people a bit of time.

nimajneb 2y ago

Thanks for posting. It's fascinating you've kept up with it so long. Same with a couple other commenters in this post. I've had a website is some form for the same amount of time, but while I tinkered with blogs a few times it never made to my main site. Here's mine with it's unchanged design from like ~2005 (I'm not sure when) with just some simple additions of content over time. http://www.benjaminosborne.com http://www.benjaminosborne.com

davely 2y ago
21 years, here! This made me go back to find my first post[1] from August 2003. Oof. It’s interesting how things have evolved over time. Started it in college, and it was random posts about activities, feelings, etc. A lot of more personal stuff. Growing up, changing careers (and changing again and again), having kids… I find that my blog has gotten less personal and more just general knowledge sharing of things I find interesting. [1] https://daveschumaker.net/should-i-join-the-masses-of-bloggers/ https://daveschumaker.net/should-i-join-the-masses-of-blogge...

davepeck 2y ago

25 years last month. Hand-spun HTML on day one; cobbled-together scripts for the next many years; Jekyll once it hit 1.0; today, Astro. It feels like a real "moment" where people are reconsidering blogging and personal domain names; I'm excited to see what comes of it.

ulrischa 2y ago
Would like to hear about your experience with astro since I consider switching to it
- davepeck 2y ago
  I think Astro is great for building small mostly (or entirely) static sites. It doesn't assume that you're building a blog, but it's plenty flexible enough to support it. This said, blogs feel like a nice sweet spot for Astro. The current version of my blog came together without much fuss. (I've studiously avoided using Astro DB, or using Astro to build an API backend, etc. and so can't comment on them.) Overall I've found Astro to be highly reliable. I identified one unexpected behavior (I think a bug, related to when CSS is rendered) while building my blog and was able to work around it but, other than that, Astro behaved exactly as documented. There were days I wished that astro components didn't exist and, instead, I could just use the client:* attributes in (say) my Preact components. That said, astro components are well thought out and the tooling in vscode is solid.
  - ulrischa 2y ago
    Thank you for your thoughts. Why is it suitable for only small sites?
    - davepeck 2y ago
      Mostly that I don't have enough experience working with Astro on things that are more sophisticated than "interesting CMS-backed blog or publication" to really comment. Secondarily that there are plenty of tools, some quite venerable at this point (Rails! Django!), that have the more complex terrain covered already.

TheRealDunkirk 2y ago

27 years for me. Started with FrontPage 1997, with extensions for Apache on Linux! Then I wrote a PHP site with Smarty. Then I wrote a Rails app. Then I moved to Wordpress. Given that I've done another 15 years writing Rails apps, I should rewrite it in the new Rails 7/8. Because I use a ton of 3rd-party JS libraries which don't work well with Turbo, I'm kind of stuck with Rails 6 with turbolinks disabled on my main project. I've been looking for some reason to get to grips with the new additions, and I think I just talked myself into it.

dyates 2y ago

Congratulations on the achievement. I recently hit my 10 year blogging milestone.[1] I've also written about some similar thoughts to those in your linked "Content is King" post.[2] Long may the individualist personal website live. [1]: https://davidyat.es/2024/04/07/ten-years/ https://davidyat.es/2024/04/07/ten-years/ [2]: https://davidyat.es/2020/03/14/reader-modes/ https://davidyat.es/2020/03/14/reader-modes/

loumf 2y ago

I passed 20 years in December and wrote this about it: https://loufranco.com/blog/it-was-20-years-ago-today https://loufranco.com/blog/it-was-20-years-ago-today I don't have a lot of readers, but the blog opened some doors for me (and continues to).

vaylian 2y ago
> but the blog opened some doors for me (and continues to). Is there any advice you have in that regard? How do most people contact you?
- loumf 2y ago
  It’s really just increasing your surface area of luck. When I wrote about iOS dev in 2008, I got contacted by an editor at Manning and then wrote a book. I have had people reach out to ask follow-up questions on a tech post and then hire me for a contract. To be found randomly — write a lot of posts that answer questions people Google (those are the ones I have that get the most hits). But also, when I applied to my last job, I could show some samples from my blog where I referenced their products (that I had built add-ons to). That’s just writing stuff down about what you are doing. Finally, I mostly write my thoughts — those get no SEO and aren’t as useful, but are good to send to clients when they ask for my thoughts on some subject. I have a contact page and I point people to LinkedIn to connect.

k__ 2y ago

"Because I couldn't find any other blog software, I decided to write my own." Famous last words of a blogger. I didn't want to fall into that trap and started with a blogging service right away. 3 years after I started blogging as a new years resolution, it became my main source of income. Wouldn't have thought that I, the dude who almost dropped out of HS because of his bad English, would work as a writer one day.

medo-bear 2y ago
> Wouldn't have thought that I, the dude who almost dropped out of HS because of his bad English, would work as a writer one day. Well done mate! Love hearing underdog success stories. What was your secret to success in effective communication?
- k__ 2y ago
  Thanks! I don't really have secret. But you should write for someone that really exists, or at least existed in the past. Like yourself (from a a few weeks ago).
  - medo-bear 2y ago
    > or at least existed in the past. Like yourself (from a a few weeks ago). That's actually a pretty interesting approach.
    - k__ 2y ago
      Yes. Last week I didn't know the exact steps of the TLS handshake. Now, I do. There are probably a bunch of people like me last week.
resource_waste 2y ago
>, it became my main source of income. >Wouldn't have thought that I, the dude who almost dropped out of HS because of his bad English Doesnt this just mean your income before was low? I have a website/blog that gets 1-2 million people per year, if I monetized I could get 5-20k/yr... But I make 150k+/yr at my day job. Really makes it hard to become a full time writer of technical stuff.

olooney 2y ago

I'm at 16 years. It's been through multiple iterations - a Django site, hosted on GitHub Pages, etc. Today it's a simple static site generated by blogdown/Hugo. MathJax is a godsend - I use a lot of LaTeX formatted equations. Biggest pain was search. I tried Algolia, but am currently doing a very simple client-side search. I'd be very interested in people's blog stacks or if they have recommendations similar to the above.

dep_b 2y ago

Blogging since last year on my own site. Didn’t want any obstructions and something that loaded really fast, just hacked something together with PHP and static files. PHP is a great template language. So far I think it already led to some interesting opportunities and good discussions. All of my articles got picked up by well-know newsletters so at least it’s good enough for other people. You only get a discussion if you claim something outrageous, you’re completely wrong or you share something that can be read in less than a minute.

NicoJuicy 2y ago

Tried to blog before, but never got into it until last year. https://blog.sapico.me/ https://blog.sapico.me/ Ofc I blogged about the setup ;) https://blog.sapico.me/posts/setting-up-a-blog-on-cloudflare-pages/ https://blog.sapico.me/posts/setting-up-a-blog-on-cloudflare... It's Hugo on Cloudflare pages fyi. Auto deployed after committing.

tomerbd 2y ago

I stopped blogging on my own website and completely moved to medium, result? comments + reactions > 0

spc476 2y ago

23 years so far, using my own blogging engine [1]. It's nice to see others have been doing this for over 20 years. [1] https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog

kamaraju 2y ago

I suggest to use a wiki instead of a blog. The idea here is that a blog might contain articles that are more "polished" and those that you want to share with others while a wiki is a place to store personal knowledge which is a constant work in progress. This way a 'blog' is simply a subset of wiki wherein you have a page called 'blog' that just links to various articles in the wiki. For example: https://kamaraju.xyz/dk/ https://kamaraju.xyz/dk/ is my wiki, https://www.kamaraju.xyz/dk/blog https://www.kamaraju.xyz/dk/blog is my blog.

abalcells 2y ago

Ha, very nice. My blog is 19 years old, although the website itself I started 25 years ago! It has been hard to keep up and keep posting in the most recent years. With kids life got real busy! You have inspired me to go back and keep posting as well. https://www.balcells.com/ https://www.balcells.com/

kstrauser 2y ago

26 in a month. Like everyone else here, I went through handcoded HTML (hosted on my Amiga!) to a self-written Perl CMS-like-thing to some PHP ball of mud, and then across a variety of wikis and blog engines and static sites and back to blog setups and back to static sites. Last month I migrated my Hugo setup to a hosted micro.blog account. It adds the missing bits I was too lazy or time-crunched to configure myself, like crossposting to other services, webmentions, and all the other indieweb goodness. A big shout out to Matomo analytics that lets me look at anonymized visitor records on my self-hosted server. It lacks the detail of Google Analytics (although you can pay Matomo for plugins that bring it close) but my visitors' information never leaves my possession. I don't care about what _a_ visitor does on my site, but I enjoy seeing the aggregate patterns, how people came to find me, and things like that.

tarkin2 2y ago

The bit about PHP made me yearn for those simple days. Now creating a website with all the trendy technologies creates such a barrier to creation and creativity. It seems large scale system good practice has trodden the small, quick and creative.

squidbeak 2y ago
Why not create one without those trendy technologies? Publishing to the web still only needs html, css and a simple server.
- tarkin2 2y ago
  I mean it’s no longer commonplace, and rarely advice, and rarely taught, not that it’s impossible.

Brajeshwar 2y ago

> Getting a Perl website running has always been a challenge. What am I missing? Getting Movable Type working was to FTP and dropping it in "cgi-bin" > making them executable > connecting to the DB you created. Every web host that runs Apache has that, doesn't it? I've started and sold a few blogs - the Pagerank, Domain Authority, Domain Age, etc. I think I also sold an entire website with a pretty popular WordPress theme. The primary theme that started it all was acquired by Automattic, the WordPress company. I have been blogging on my personal blog since 2001, so it's been about 24 years now. I think mine started as a Flash website, with a `/blog` serving up the first few articles from PHP (or was it ASP?). The host was in a suburb of Bombay, and I remember seeing my neighboring websites, which were pretty popular brands. Yes, I could see the files, but I could not edit them. Very secure stuff. ;-) Here is a bit of the story I wrote on my website's 20th year https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/ https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/