10 ms·

Re: Do people IRL know you have a blog?

199 points by 8organicbits 2y ago

KingOfCoders 2y ago
When I moved to Berlin, I had a blog mostly for my mother :-)
ehPReth 2y ago
I have exactly one IRL friend that cares about my technology stuff, but he lives far away and we don't see each other in person too often. My ex tolerates me talking about it a little bit before he tells me to shut up, but that's it. It kind of sucks. I've just re-internalized to that nothing I do really matters, and therefore neither do I.
- CoastalCoder 2y ago
  Sorry, existential dread sucks. Hope you find some more things that bring joy. (I know platitudes are grating, but I thought you might want to know someone is rooting for you.)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- malfist 2y ago
  I assume nobody reads my blog, at most a couple people check out the pretty pictures but that's about it. My opinion on blogging is do it for yourself, not to achieve something. That way it doesn't feel like wasted effort when nobody reads it and it can still be fun or cathartic to write.
- tempfile 2y ago
  oh man, this is sad to read. I'm sorry.
- criddell 2y ago
  > nothing I do really matters That’s not necessarily negative. I’ll sometimes say that to myself when I’m feeling down as a way of freeing myself from whatever thoughts are feeling too heavy. I’m not really into stoicism, but I think it’s what memento mori is getting at.
craigkerstiens 2y ago
I love when friends do this. It's hard to keep up with people and what they're up to. Publishing and letting people subscribe to me is a great way to share things. A few examples of some friends who are doing this: Justin Searls (fairly known in Ruby and Rails community) mostly quit a lot of various social channels though publishes on some of them one direction. He started a podcast that wasn't meant to be guests of some specific topic, it's just him updating you on things. What he's working on, what he's learning, random stories, etc. - https://justin.searls.co/casts/ https://justin.searls.co/casts/ Brandur who I've worked with at a couple of places (Heroku previously, and now Crunchy Data) who writes great technical pieces that often end up here also has more of a personal newsletter. While there are technical pieces in there at times he'll also talk about personal experiences my favorite one is some of the unique experiences hiking the Pacific Trail (https://brandur.org/nanoglyphs/039-trails https://brandur.org/nanoglyphs/039-trails).
- throwaway290 2y ago
  For many it was supplanted social media. IG, TG, even TikTok (shudder) channels. It monetizes the same motivation
- achileas 2y ago
  This gives me heart. I like writing about technical things, but I also like writing about personal things, concerts I went to, whatever. I'm a whole person, and I never liked the pressure (mostly from social media) to build your "brand" around one genre or style of writing. For me, my site is a personal one where I post about things I'm interested in. Ham radio, machine learning, my travels, pay phones, whatever. Maybe less useful for a reader or audience building but...I just like to write and share things.
whorleater 2y ago
Huh, kinda funny, I feel the exact same way. Few people IRL know about my website, 2-3 people occasionally write in a year about something, but weirdly it feels like the idea of a personal, non commoditized internet space has become so rare it's seen as odd.
xivzgrev 2y ago
Even many personal blogs these days are suspect, they’re building a brand. I like this guy is doing his own thing.
- worthless-trash 2y ago
  Can you tell me the difference between building a brand and this guy ? I struggle to understand what this means, as I dont know what "building a brand" means when a person does it.
  - hug 2y ago
    A good enough personal brand means you have a name (generally) disconnected from your individual job and you are known as an entity in your own right, often not entirely pinned to a single discipline. The most cynical example here is probably Kylie Kardashian, ostensibly a billionaire entrepreneur, but you could just as easily sub in a lot of modern content creators like Mr. Beast. These can come about naturally through some amount of fame, naturally through having a natural talent for something that generates interest in you and your opinions, or you can grind for it in a kind of numbers game. If you are working towards getting your name "out there" and having some of that sense of recognition, if you're hustling for subscribers or follows, if you are following trends to post about in order to try to get more readers, you're behaving in brand-building exercises. If you're just writing for the sake of writing, or to keep a journal for your future self, or just so your close friends can keep up with you, you're not.
    - worthless-trash 2y ago
      Thank you for taking the time to expand that, you've said it more clearly than what I have been able to find elsewhere.
  - vasco 2y ago
    Wanting attention and for other people to remember you with the purpose of getting ahead later on, by getting favors from the audience, selling things to the audience, etc. Commonly done back in the day to later send traffic to whatever SaaS you'd try to start.
Eiriksmal 2y ago
Ah, Lars-Christian! No one wants to talk to you in real life about your blog because you're in Norway. If you lived here in the United States, you'd have a perpetual string of very interesting conversations about your personal website because Americans are all about technology and hearing how any of us peons are fighting the power, man. At least, I think that's what my wife's reaction is before she leaves the room to find a book to read. And my friends who think a blog is just part of my weird, personal brand, like using a phone with a keyboard.
- globalnode 2y ago
  HN voting system is stupid.
- rurban 2y ago
  You apparently have no idea about Norway. Norway was the very first internet country, because of its vast coastline and enormous distances. Schoolkids had internet remote classrooms since the 90ies. Everybody there is online, and blogs are widely read. Much more than in the US.
HermanMartinus 2y ago
I haven't been on traditional social media for about 6 years and so the way people keep up with me is via my blog. This way they get an update maybe once a month about what it is I've been doing/thinking about, then they reach out to me via email. Even the IRL people know I have a blog, but I guess it kinda comes up since I also run a blogging platform.
firefoxd 2y ago
Earlier in my career, every single person in my team had a website. At lunch we would talk about how we built it, servers, fail2ban, zipbomb, etc. Many years later, one coworker has a website under construction, and others say they have nothing to say online. When i bring up a blog post I wrote years ago, relevant to a conversation, I feel like a charlatan trying to sell a product. But hey, I'm happy to write in the dark. Especially after some of my posts have literally landed me on TV. I felt like everything I Wrote after was scrutinized. But the world has forgotten about me so I'm free again.
- lifestyleguru 2y ago
  > When i bring up a blog post I wrote years ago, relevant to a conversation, I feel like a charlatan trying to sell a product. Influencing killed it. Nowadays people bring up their online presence when they want views, impressions, and subscriptions, when they are trying to bump follower count.
langsoul-com 2y ago
The thing about irl blogs is how, if it's tech related, then it kinda follows you. So there's a pressure to keep things corporate to not scare away job opportunities. There's a reason why LinkedIn reads like garbage, and even if it's obvious, people neither point it out or stop.
- pflenker 2y ago
  Agreed. The minute I learned one of my directs was reading my small blog posting to it became much, much harder.
- bdw5204 2y ago
  I'm personally less averse to calling that stuff out these days because I found that I wasn't exactly getting job opportunities in the current market by playing it safe. Since being quiet and uncontroversial doesn't even work, what's the point? I think people are making a mistake by not saying what they actually think. The only reason I don't have a blog yet is inertia/laziness. It'll happen eventually.
  - manuelmoreale 2y ago
    Do it! You’ll have a bunch of people happy to read it: https://manuelmoreale.com/i-ll-read-it https://manuelmoreale.com/i-ll-read-it
- manuelmoreale 2y ago
  It’s funny how different lives can be. I’ve never been part of the corporate world, been self employed basically my whole working life and my blog is not even a thought when it comes to work. I’d honestly be super happy if someone I interact with for work asked me about something I wrote because I write about things I care about and I’m always happy to chat with people.
  - aadhavans 2y ago
    > I’d honestly be super happy if someone I interact with for work asked me about something I wrote As a student (who also has no corporate experience), I share this feeling. The few times I've been asked by other students about my blog, I've always been excited (perhaps a little too much) to share my thoughts and opinions in a conservation.
sien 2y ago
I have a blog that has all my book reviews that I've written over the past ~17 years. It's got over 1000 reviews on it. I post them all to Goodreads as well. Hardly anyone read them on my own blog. It's convenient for me to have them all in one spot so I can export them and whatnot. I've had one review that a successful blogger (now substacker) linked to and that probably resulted in more than half the hits the blog ever got coming in about two weeks. Posting to Goodreads people seem to appreciate more. My reviews get some reaction a few times a week there. A few people IRL know about my blog and reviews on Goodreads. I don't generally tell people about it but if people really read and it comes up I tell people. I keep it largely separate from my Twitter account and Linked In profile.
- WA 2y ago
  > Posting to Goodreads people seem to appreciate more. Yeah because reviews there are put into context of other reviews. I never google for book reviews, because I expect mostly spam. I always go directly to goodreads or amazon.
brynet 2y ago
I showed my Mom my personal website a few years ago, and her only comment was it needed more pictures, so I added a picture of a window plant to exactly one page. I haven't showed it to anyone else IRL. https://brynet.ca/article-x395.html https://brynet.ca/article-x395.html
- blitzar 2y ago
  The subject in the picture is the bottle of wine, not the plant.
  - brynet 2y ago
    Non-alcoholic. I don't drink. :-)
    - blitzar 2y ago
      Bottle of grape juice
_the_inflator 2y ago
Dude is right, no one except for the audience cares. I was a successful blogger in the 00th years and with a side business around Made for Adsense because once you understood SEO it was inevitable, if this rings a bell. Reading a blog seems magical. Just imagine “Do ppl IRL my print magazine?” to use another metaphor. Nope and yes. Same goes for artists, say singer and songwriters: “Do you listen to my stuff?” Why should they? Understanding your readers and fans is not easy. Statistically speaking, if all your close friends read your blog, you either are on to something or you get lied to. So if all around read your blog you might be some truly impressive author with a huge fan base - and 99,9999% won’t fit in here. As a side note, I still know quite a fraction of successful YouTubers. They are publishers, content creators. It is work for them, maybe evolved from something they did for fun. These dudes always prioritize money now - because they know their niche a bit better now and want to appeal to it.
- Brajeshwar 2y ago
  I had removed Analytics from my website/blog quite a while back and I don't know who read, or what happens to my website anymore. It is a pleasure not knowing. Cloudflare does do the basic Analytics that comes built-in and I rarely see them.
  - vstollen 2y ago
    Along the lines of Julia Evans’ “Optimize for conversions” [1], can you gauge the popularity of your post by the replies you get? [1]: https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/02/20/measuring-blog-success/ https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/02/20/measuring-blog-success/
Brajeshwar 2y ago
During the early days of Blogging (I meant the early 2000s), when we met up in person during conferences, we talked a lot about blog posts, etc. I once let one of my cousins tag along as I spoke at a conference organized by Macromedia. I did the usual thing with others there, talking about blogs. When we returned home, my cousin said, “You are kind of a deal. People know you by your blog - brajeshwar.com.” I’ve been lucky to have been recognized by a few people in the wild (IRL) who walked up to me and asked, “You are brajeshwar.com?” These days, I just write for myself. Fast forward 15+ years, my daughter somehow decided to search the Internet for me, and she said, “You are like a ChatGPT-powered Discord bot, answering questions on an antique Reddit forum.” https://x.com/brajeshwar/status/1630852614303924224 https://x.com/brajeshwar/status/1630852614303924224
- sudohackthenews 2y ago
  I don’t know whether to be impressed or scared that the first thing that came to her mind was a llm powered bot haha
- blitzar 2y ago
  > when we met up in person during conferences, we talked a lot about blog posts Now people talk about high engagement twitter threads, linked-in posts or just film each other filming each other for their "content".
- knorker 2y ago
  Actually producing value is so last millennium. Ok boomer, you add value. We don't do that here. Unless you make TikToks endlessly aspiring to be a societal net loss kardashian, why are you even breathing? Writing text? Can't the computer just do that, somehow?
  - FartinMowler 2y ago
    (having a flashback to the bile blog)
- Carrok 2y ago
  > Macromedia Reading this term hit my brain with such a sudden wave of nostalgia. It really was a different time.
impure 2y ago
It occasionally comes up in conversations. But I don't think people are that interested. Although I will say my programming hot takes occasionally do get popular.
KenHV 2y ago
My blog is mostly just me sharing things to my friends; some of them IRL. Short tutorials, highlights from books, etc. https://kenhv.com/blog https://kenhv.com/blog
- _thisdot 2y ago
  Love the design! What did you use to build this?
  - KenHV 2y ago
    Thank you! I'm using Jekyll, here's the source: https://github.com/kenhv/kenhv.com https://github.com/kenhv/kenhv.com
- 0xmutt 2y ago
  Thanks for sharing! Throughly enjoyed reading through these posts. Learned about some interesting Firefox settings to try out.
ggm 2y ago
The point of the article is one I align with: You're writing it for yourself, 99% of the time. The other 1% is the future you. I blog for work. I don't discuss it with family. I think I'd find it very stressful answering the "why did you say that" questions. The corollary of this, is that I write notes by hand in almost every meeting I attend, and never ever read them again -But for things like IETF I do a mixture of .org and meetecho (markdown) because there is at least some possibility others may get value from the shared log in meetecho, and I know I will use the .org to .. write the blog.
- matrix87 2y ago
  > You're writing it for yourself, 99% of the time. The other 1% is the future you. Or alternatively it could be a place for educational stuff like the more detailed answers on stackoverflow. Except the middleman gets removed
  - crngefest 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - fullspectrumdev 2y ago
    In the past I’ve used a blog literally to make small notes on very simple things that I always ended up having to look up, or for notes on the “right way” to do something. For example: for years I was using Pythons requests library incorrectly. The way I was doing it worked - but it wasn’t correct. Once I published a short blog on the correct way - the correct way seemed to stick better in my mind!
    - matrix87 2y ago
      > For example: for years I was using Pythons requests library incorrectly. The way I was doing it worked - but it wasn’t correct. Usually I prefer a git repo for this kind of thing
      - ggm 2y ago
manuelmoreale 2y ago
The thing I find most interesting, every time something like this gets posted here on HN is that in the comments, depending on the day, dozen or hundreds or even thousand of people post some permutation of "hey, I feel the same" And that makes me smile because on the one hand people keep repeating that blogs are dead, but on the other you're all proof that it's clearly not the case.
kaiwenwang 2y ago
A website is a Presentation of Self extended to artwork and 2D media. What is a Presentation of Self? It comes the book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman. The two primary senses of humans are sight and vision. If you take the time to write down and enumerate the ways by which people understand the internal state of others, you realize that a computer simply communicates impressions of people over long distances, some of which have limited correspondence with who a person really is. Photos could be fake. Videos could be scripted and a certain impression. You don't really see someone for who they are except in real life, talking to them for a duration. Most people talk to or avoid certain people internally based on how they act and what they say. But once you realize the structure of communication, you feel like a robot talking to others. What was implicit becomes explicit. So yes, a website matters, if the increasing trends for humans and human ability are greater knowledge consumption, production, network communication over locality, and so on. It reveals your internal perception, taste, intelligence, and processing of information, by which people use to judge you and ask how relation to you improves the group fitness. Having a website selects for intellectualism. Social media is also a presentation. The question could be rephrased: Do people know you have a TikTok or Instagram? People such as his wife and digital people have increasingly different lifestyles and diverge. Had the author made his way to a metropole or more major place, it's likely having a personal brand would've mattered more.
- outofpaper 2y ago
  What do you meany by ouw two primary senses are, "sight and vision"
  - kaiwenwang 2y ago
    sight and hearing*
porphyra 2y ago
I kinda get it, but the opening paragraphs betray the author's problematic, arrogant attitude --- passive-aggressively complaining about his wife for not appreciating the grand genius of his blog. My wife, my parents, my friends etc are all aware of my website. My wife enthusiastically shows my website to our friends. I have a blog post about food recommendations that is very popular with my friends.
- DHPersonal 2y ago
  An alternative interpretation (and the way in which I read it) was that the author is incredibly passionate about something mundane and his wife is very obviously not interested anywhere near as much or at all, just like everyone else who likely stumbles across his blog. I don't think it was attempting to show disdain but acceptance, admitting that he builds a blog because he cares about it alone; even his wife doesn't read it.
croniev 2y ago
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke... I've been wanting to read that too! Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell has been one of my favorite and most immersive books, absolutely brilliant! Too bad Susanna Clarke got CFS, a very ill researched illness :/
komali2 2y ago
Yes, because my blog is basically a collection of things people have asked me more than once. * How do I rent a motorcycle in Taiwan? * What's a coding bootcamp like? * What's your emacs config? * Got any book recommendations? * You got into Raw? How was it? * Didn't you parents come to Taiwan? Mine are coming next month, what did you do with them? etc. I'm constantly dropping links to people at networking events or when they come into my restaurant. I also just forget things constantly and so my blog is basically my external brain.
markwrobel 2y ago
Lars-Christian, your site got a little attention today :-) No post I’ve written has ever gone viral. I also have a personal website. If anyone notice what I've written it's a very nice added bonus. For me it's also about personal ownership of my content, and perhaps also a reminder to myself of the old internet - which I miss.
vstollen 2y ago
While I don‘t write much, my website is directly associated with my real name. As a result, friends regularly stumble upon it. Most of them don’t care for the topics I write about. However, they usually get a little excited, as if they found a real-life Easter egg.
brontosaurusrex 2y ago
Some do, mostly when the problem they are trying to solve is somewhere in my blog past. I've learned over the years not to advertise the blog/page, due to weird questions I get, for example: Q: How costly is this? (A: it's free, minus my time), Q: Why is it so ugly? (A: When you write your perfect jekyll skin, I will use it, you know it's about my future self searching for the info, not about beauty), Q: Why? (A: I always find something interesting to read in my blog, unlike your corporate page). p.s. The long-tail effect has been predicted at least 20 years ago, so I understand that views will be low or none: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail My blog: https://brontosaurusrex.github.io/ https://brontosaurusrex.github.io/
- wannabebarista 2y ago
  I find the "Why?" question amusing. It's usually coupled with a disapproving tone.
blitzar 2y ago
Yes, There are 2 posts from 2007.
RajT88 2y ago
The people in your real life don't give a shit about your blog. But random strangers do! At least, if you're contributing something to the world which is wonderful and useful. In my experience, the posts which get the most traffic are simply not going to be the ones you think they will be. I am thinking of both my public and internal blog posts at my company - the most read articles are dumb basic shit that nobody thought to write down (but should have), and my greatest masterpieces languor in obscurity.
- froh 2y ago
  TIL to languor https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/languor#Verb https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/languor#Verb
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    me too, I've heard it before but never seen it written, which is the opposite of how I learn most words.
winternewt 2y ago
In the vein of the discussion here, I think it's relevant to highlight Kagi's Small web [1] initiative, which is intended to give more discoverability to sites like this. I find it to be admirable and it gives me some small hope for the future of the web. [1] https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
Pyrodogg 2y ago
I had personal site on shared hosting with blog, microblog, "lifestream", photo gallery in the late 00s. It's been a 'placeholder' status for redevelopment since I think about 2011-12. I got a job and started (over)working. Bugs/exploits in the PHP framework I was using took the site down a few times. Maintenance lagged, and I eventually zipped everything and shut it down. I've found a better work life balance over the years, but just haven't connected the dots to ever doing something new with it. I think the last attempt foundered on picking a static site generator. Most of my IRL friends and family barely use Facebook so I'm pretty sure few were ever very aware of what was on there.
- thomashabets2 2y ago
  This is why I use a static site generator. No security fix is ever urgent. No risk of needing to make a bunch of changes in case I need to move host, and they have a slightly different version of PHP. The thing never "fails to start" after a reboot. No database that can cause problems. It's just files. Anything can host just files. My first site actually started as what we'd now call a static site generator back in the 1990s. Then PHP a few years later, then Python built on webpy.org (including an admin interface), and now back to a static site generator. Most of my friends are computer people, and know and occasionally read my blog. My non computer friends could not care less.
  - guappa 2y ago
    In the end it turns out that the way of doing websites by creating .html files directly was the more future proof :D
FLpxpyJ 2y ago
I think, a little ironically ofc, opening yourself up like that ends up capping how personal you can (are willing to) get. Not always a bad thing, but I believe the modern internet is missing a lot of soul that comes from being vulnerable. Lord knows social media personalities and corporate brands will never do it. https://foreverliketh.is/ https://foreverliketh.is/
dewey 2y ago
I felt very seen by this blog post. I sent it to my partner and she replied with “Sounds like you. What is IRL” which perfectly sums up the disconnect on some topics that the author also mentioned. I just spend the past month rebuilding my blog, even though there’s nobody reading it and it really only is my “online home” to play around with and be creative. My main source of traffic is random Google visits for some “I’ll write this down for myself in case I run into it again” type posts.
nicbou 2y ago
My blog has some of my recipes, and some of my friends appreciate that. Otherwise my blog is a beacon to other nerds on the internet, extra material for people who are curious about me. People do check it and reach out, so it works.
janalsncm 2y ago
I think you can either have a “corporate” blog attached to your name (whose purpose is to bolster your professional reputation, among other things) and an opinion-based blog with a pseudonym. The two can never touch. My philosophy on this is that anything worth saying, that isn’t some tepid opinion about pizza or your pet, will probably irritate some people. And while the internet isn’t forever, it’s got a fairly long memory.
voidUpdate 2y ago
I've attempted to show my website to my family a couple of times, but I'm a techy in a generally non-techy family, so they're not particularly interested. I mostly use it to talk about things I've done and I have referred back to it on a couple of occasions when I know I've solved a problem before and want to see how I did it at the time. I attach it to my CV so I keep it professional enough for someone else to look at that I would want to impress, but still pretty casual because I try to write like I'm explaining it to a friend, someone who knows basic programming stuff but is a novice to the actual topic of the article
INTPenis 2y ago
They're pretty much the only people who know it. Because I get no visits, it's mostly cathartic.
underdeserver 2y ago
People who read blogs, especially in the software industry, are still a tiny minority. There are maybe tens of millions of software engineers, designers, product managers, entrepreneurs and other tech-adjacent workers in the world. HN is one of the most popular tech sites among hardcore techies, at least in my circles. And yet the top posts of all time get thousands of upvotes. Add 10x lurkers and you get tens of thousands of users. That's still 0.1% of the total above.
hellweaver666 2y ago
I remember back in the early 00's someone at work found out about my blog and news got around the office (it was a personal blog, more like a diary and I was in my late teens so it was kinda "edgy"). Anyways... within a few days I started getting a bunch of troll comments and it took all the fun out of it knowing everything I wrote was being read by my colleagues.
yantzr3j 2y ago
My late brother once sent me a link to an article in his blog. After he passed, I was far more grateful that he'd sent it to me.
- v3ss0n 2y ago
  Scheduled email?
laurentlb 2y ago
Yes. I've (re)started my blog a few months ago. Some articles went viral. Some people mentioned my blog IRL (and I didn't know they were following it). Some of my blog posts led to nice discussions online or offline. Some people have asked me to write about specific things. So right now, I'm quite happy with how it's going and I have a list of articles to write. But writing a post takes multiple hours, so I don't know what the frequency will be on the long run.
jowdones 2y ago
Yeah, well, in today's shallow and blood thirsty culture, one mistake and you're fucked. And doesn't have to be today, it will follow you all your life, when you're more comfortable, bam! Someone finds something you said 15 years ago that no longer fits the increasingly edgy sensitivities of today and you're canceled. Doxxing you, trashing you, death threats, you name it. Unless you walk on eggs more carefully than in Stalin's Russia and only talk of weather and puppies, you are liable for being torn apart by an angry mob of mediocres who finds fulfilment in destroying a defenseless guy's life.
calini 2y ago
I have a 3D printed shopping trolley coin with my blog written on it, and even offered a couple of them to friends. That being said the blog's been inactive for a couple of years now :D.
tempfile 2y ago
I have a blog that I consider permanently unfinished. Being (still) too embarrassed to share it is a pretty good motivator for adding things, and it's nice to have something you can be a perfectionist about without feeling guilty. Formally, it's an exercise in learning the W3C Accessibility standards, but the content is very much "write for yourself".
cafard 2y ago
Interesting question. A sometime co-worker does, and a sometime neighbor. On the whole, I figure that my family gets enough of my opinions in conversation.
wannabebarista 2y ago
I have a blog that's connected to my academic website. While my homepage gets some traffic from people googling papers, my blog gets much less. I post a few times each year, mostly about stuff I've been reading. I did have one post go viral-ish a few years ago (https://bcmullins.github.io/foreign-affairs-100/ https://bcmullins.github.io/foreign-affairs-100/). I was surprised to find that some workplace acquaintances and even students read my blog. A colleague out-of-the-blue messaged me about some python function I'd written (https://bcmullins.github.io/parsing-json-python/ https://bcmullins.github.io/parsing-json-python/). A student asked about reading recommendations and how I choose books. So people you know IRL may be reading your stuff (or some of it) but just not mentioning it. As another post mentioned, I feel much more pressure about my writing after learning that IRL people read it.
- tcgv 2y ago
  > A colleague out-of-the-blue messaged me about some python function I'd written Just the other day a colleague at work was searching the web and eventually ended up in a blog post of mine. He was enthusiastic that he had "discovered" my blog. It was fun.
prmoustache 2y ago
I love personal websites but I don't really like blogs. I prefer when people can rework/refine some of their pages instead of publishing new blog posts related to previous ones when revisiting a topic. And as a writer it allows me to write whenever I feel like to. With a blog you kind of feel guilty if you don't publish on a regular basis, and end up abandoning it altogether too easily if you cannot sustain a rhythm. A web page doesn't force you into a rhythm. A blog might be useful for historians in the future, when chronology might be useful but as a publisher and casual reader I find it lazy and unwelcoming for the reader. I do like however personnal pages that have a small log mentionning the updates to which I can subscribe to.
- rrishi 2y ago
  you might be interested in the concept of digital gardens: https://maggieappleton.com/garden https://maggieappleton.com/garden
- alpinisme 2y ago
  Agreed completely. From a reader perspective, blogs are also often not friendly to new visitors. How do I find the best entry point? Which entries are fluff and which are deep dives? The best you can usually hope for is some tagging mechanism, but blogs generally expend little to no effort thinking about architecture, discovery, browsability, or the reader’s progression through the site. Don’t get me wrong - that’s a lot to ask of a casual effort. But I do wish we had a genre/format for sharing one’s thoughts online that did encourage reflection and iteration on that level.
  - wannabebarista 2y ago
    One thing I've tried to combat the chaos of blog structures is to include links to other posts in series as a header (when it makes sense). The biggest hurdle of moving away from a blog to a static format is that blog posts are timestamped and there's no real expectation that they're maintained. With static pages, however, I try to keep them up-to-date.
  - Suppafly 2y ago
incomingpain 2y ago
Nope. Nobody wants to read what I have to say. I'd say I'm banned, shadow banned/flagged, or otherwise censured on social media all the time.
jtwoodhouse 2y ago
The key is to write stuff worth talking about IRL.
ericyd 2y ago
I've recently had the morbid thought that perhaps my loved ones could appreciate my blog if I died prematurely. I don't maintain my blog much and I certainly don't think anyone reads it. It is much more for intrinsic benefits of working through thoughts in a structured way.
rietta 2y ago
Yes, and I have been surprised by at least one who told me that I needed to blog more often. We have very little interaction since graduate school. I have been running the same website, which has undergone several redesigns, for 25 years and counting. It is also interesting about having a personal domain name. People pause when you give the email. No, I really did mean first@lastname.com. Yes, I've had this for decades. My sister tells a different variant, she at least once had someone comment on it and then stand up straight - which she interpreted as being a little impressed as if my sister was a celebrity or something. Very interesting in a world where most people do not have a domain with their family name. The challenge for me has been that over time it morphed from a personal site, to a professional site, to a corporate site. Now that I have employees and this work supports my family I have less freedom to do just anything I want with it. It has to be on topic. That constraint does also bring freedom in its own way. I do not have a good place for personal interests that are not related to my cybersecurity work any longer though.
lelanthran 2y ago
Please. People who know me online don't remember about my blog, nevermind IRL people.
elric 2y ago
I have multiple blogs (the link to one of which is in my HN profile). The tech stuff is pretty safe, and so some tech people in my life know about it. The other blogs are reserved for people who are involved in other aspects of my life. In general, I find I compartmentalize a lot, and there are very few people in my life who are part of multiple compartments.
karaterobot 2y ago
I've had a blog at the same URL since 2000. Search engines are disallowed, comments are closed, I'm not on social media to announce it. I don't talk about it. Twice a week I publish something, but it's meant as a record for me rather than other people. The only reason it's on the web is so I can access it easily from different computers. Once I checked in Feedly, and it said that there were two people subscribed to it. To the best of my knowledge that's the readership.
copywrong2 2y ago
All the important ones
runamuck 2y ago
Since 2016 I publish a new blog post once a month. A long lost friend (20 years no contact) found it, read a handful of my deep dives and then offered me what I consider a dream job based on my content and perceived writing ability. I got to jump from an IC track to an executive role. My then company of 15 years did not offer that opportunity. I recommend a blog just to show the world your chops. You don't know who might read it.

199 points by 8organicbits 2y ago

When I moved to Berlin, I had a blog mostly for my mother :-)

I have exactly one IRL friend that cares about my technology stuff, but he lives far away and we don't see each other in person too often. My ex tolerates me talking about it a little bit before he tells me to shut up, but that's it. It kind of sucks. I've just re-internalized to that nothing I do really matters, and therefore neither do I.

CoastalCoder 2y ago
Sorry, existential dread sucks. Hope you find some more things that bring joy. (I know platitudes are grating, but I thought you might want to know someone is rooting for you.)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
malfist 2y ago
I assume nobody reads my blog, at most a couple people check out the pretty pictures but that's about it. My opinion on blogging is do it for yourself, not to achieve something. That way it doesn't feel like wasted effort when nobody reads it and it can still be fun or cathartic to write.
tempfile 2y ago
oh man, this is sad to read. I'm sorry.
criddell 2y ago
> nothing I do really matters That’s not necessarily negative. I’ll sometimes say that to myself when I’m feeling down as a way of freeing myself from whatever thoughts are feeling too heavy. I’m not really into stoicism, but I think it’s what memento mori is getting at.

craigkerstiens 2y ago

I love when friends do this. It's hard to keep up with people and what they're up to. Publishing and letting people subscribe to me is a great way to share things. A few examples of some friends who are doing this: Justin Searls (fairly known in Ruby and Rails community) mostly quit a lot of various social channels though publishes on some of them one direction. He started a podcast that wasn't meant to be guests of some specific topic, it's just him updating you on things. What he's working on, what he's learning, random stories, etc. - https://justin.searls.co/casts/ https://justin.searls.co/casts/ Brandur who I've worked with at a couple of places (Heroku previously, and now Crunchy Data) who writes great technical pieces that often end up here also has more of a personal newsletter. While there are technical pieces in there at times he'll also talk about personal experiences my favorite one is some of the unique experiences hiking the Pacific Trail (https://brandur.org/nanoglyphs/039-trails https://brandur.org/nanoglyphs/039-trails).

throwaway290 2y ago
For many it was supplanted social media. IG, TG, even TikTok (shudder) channels. It monetizes the same motivation
achileas 2y ago
This gives me heart. I like writing about technical things, but I also like writing about personal things, concerts I went to, whatever. I'm a whole person, and I never liked the pressure (mostly from social media) to build your "brand" around one genre or style of writing. For me, my site is a personal one where I post about things I'm interested in. Ham radio, machine learning, my travels, pay phones, whatever. Maybe less useful for a reader or audience building but...I just like to write and share things.

whorleater 2y ago

Huh, kinda funny, I feel the exact same way. Few people IRL know about my website, 2-3 people occasionally write in a year about something, but weirdly it feels like the idea of a personal, non commoditized internet space has become so rare it's seen as odd.

xivzgrev 2y ago

Even many personal blogs these days are suspect, they’re building a brand. I like this guy is doing his own thing.

worthless-trash 2y ago
Can you tell me the difference between building a brand and this guy ? I struggle to understand what this means, as I dont know what "building a brand" means when a person does it.
- hug 2y ago
  A good enough personal brand means you have a name (generally) disconnected from your individual job and you are known as an entity in your own right, often not entirely pinned to a single discipline. The most cynical example here is probably Kylie Kardashian, ostensibly a billionaire entrepreneur, but you could just as easily sub in a lot of modern content creators like Mr. Beast. These can come about naturally through some amount of fame, naturally through having a natural talent for something that generates interest in you and your opinions, or you can grind for it in a kind of numbers game. If you are working towards getting your name "out there" and having some of that sense of recognition, if you're hustling for subscribers or follows, if you are following trends to post about in order to try to get more readers, you're behaving in brand-building exercises. If you're just writing for the sake of writing, or to keep a journal for your future self, or just so your close friends can keep up with you, you're not.
  - worthless-trash 2y ago
    Thank you for taking the time to expand that, you've said it more clearly than what I have been able to find elsewhere.
- vasco 2y ago
  Wanting attention and for other people to remember you with the purpose of getting ahead later on, by getting favors from the audience, selling things to the audience, etc. Commonly done back in the day to later send traffic to whatever SaaS you'd try to start.

Eiriksmal 2y ago

Ah, Lars-Christian! No one wants to talk to you in real life about your blog because you're in Norway. If you lived here in the United States, you'd have a perpetual string of very interesting conversations about your personal website because Americans are all about technology and hearing how any of us peons are fighting the power, man. At least, I think that's what my wife's reaction is before she leaves the room to find a book to read. And my friends who think a blog is just part of my weird, personal brand, like using a phone with a keyboard.

globalnode 2y ago
HN voting system is stupid.
rurban 2y ago
You apparently have no idea about Norway. Norway was the very first internet country, because of its vast coastline and enormous distances. Schoolkids had internet remote classrooms since the 90ies. Everybody there is online, and blogs are widely read. Much more than in the US.

HermanMartinus 2y ago

I haven't been on traditional social media for about 6 years and so the way people keep up with me is via my blog. This way they get an update maybe once a month about what it is I've been doing/thinking about, then they reach out to me via email. Even the IRL people know I have a blog, but I guess it kinda comes up since I also run a blogging platform.

firefoxd 2y ago

Earlier in my career, every single person in my team had a website. At lunch we would talk about how we built it, servers, fail2ban, zipbomb, etc. Many years later, one coworker has a website under construction, and others say they have nothing to say online. When i bring up a blog post I wrote years ago, relevant to a conversation, I feel like a charlatan trying to sell a product. But hey, I'm happy to write in the dark. Especially after some of my posts have literally landed me on TV. I felt like everything I Wrote after was scrutinized. But the world has forgotten about me so I'm free again.

lifestyleguru 2y ago
> When i bring up a blog post I wrote years ago, relevant to a conversation, I feel like a charlatan trying to sell a product. Influencing killed it. Nowadays people bring up their online presence when they want views, impressions, and subscriptions, when they are trying to bump follower count.

langsoul-com 2y ago

The thing about irl blogs is how, if it's tech related, then it kinda follows you. So there's a pressure to keep things corporate to not scare away job opportunities. There's a reason why LinkedIn reads like garbage, and even if it's obvious, people neither point it out or stop.

pflenker 2y ago
Agreed. The minute I learned one of my directs was reading my small blog posting to it became much, much harder.
bdw5204 2y ago
I'm personally less averse to calling that stuff out these days because I found that I wasn't exactly getting job opportunities in the current market by playing it safe. Since being quiet and uncontroversial doesn't even work, what's the point? I think people are making a mistake by not saying what they actually think. The only reason I don't have a blog yet is inertia/laziness. It'll happen eventually.
- manuelmoreale 2y ago
  Do it! You’ll have a bunch of people happy to read it: https://manuelmoreale.com/i-ll-read-it https://manuelmoreale.com/i-ll-read-it
manuelmoreale 2y ago
It’s funny how different lives can be. I’ve never been part of the corporate world, been self employed basically my whole working life and my blog is not even a thought when it comes to work. I’d honestly be super happy if someone I interact with for work asked me about something I wrote because I write about things I care about and I’m always happy to chat with people.
- aadhavans 2y ago
  > I’d honestly be super happy if someone I interact with for work asked me about something I wrote As a student (who also has no corporate experience), I share this feeling. The few times I've been asked by other students about my blog, I've always been excited (perhaps a little too much) to share my thoughts and opinions in a conservation.

sien 2y ago

I have a blog that has all my book reviews that I've written over the past ~17 years. It's got over 1000 reviews on it. I post them all to Goodreads as well. Hardly anyone read them on my own blog. It's convenient for me to have them all in one spot so I can export them and whatnot. I've had one review that a successful blogger (now substacker) linked to and that probably resulted in more than half the hits the blog ever got coming in about two weeks. Posting to Goodreads people seem to appreciate more. My reviews get some reaction a few times a week there. A few people IRL know about my blog and reviews on Goodreads. I don't generally tell people about it but if people really read and it comes up I tell people. I keep it largely separate from my Twitter account and Linked In profile.

WA 2y ago
> Posting to Goodreads people seem to appreciate more. Yeah because reviews there are put into context of other reviews. I never google for book reviews, because I expect mostly spam. I always go directly to goodreads or amazon.

brynet 2y ago

I showed my Mom my personal website a few years ago, and her only comment was it needed more pictures, so I added a picture of a window plant to exactly one page. I haven't showed it to anyone else IRL. https://brynet.ca/article-x395.html https://brynet.ca/article-x395.html

blitzar 2y ago
The subject in the picture is the bottle of wine, not the plant.
- brynet 2y ago
  Non-alcoholic. I don't drink. :-)
  - blitzar 2y ago
    Bottle of grape juice

_the_inflator 2y ago

Dude is right, no one except for the audience cares. I was a successful blogger in the 00th years and with a side business around Made for Adsense because once you understood SEO it was inevitable, if this rings a bell. Reading a blog seems magical. Just imagine “Do ppl IRL my print magazine?” to use another metaphor. Nope and yes. Same goes for artists, say singer and songwriters: “Do you listen to my stuff?” Why should they? Understanding your readers and fans is not easy. Statistically speaking, if all your close friends read your blog, you either are on to something or you get lied to. So if all around read your blog you might be some truly impressive author with a huge fan base - and 99,9999% won’t fit in here. As a side note, I still know quite a fraction of successful YouTubers. They are publishers, content creators. It is work for them, maybe evolved from something they did for fun. These dudes always prioritize money now - because they know their niche a bit better now and want to appeal to it.

Brajeshwar 2y ago
I had removed Analytics from my website/blog quite a while back and I don't know who read, or what happens to my website anymore. It is a pleasure not knowing. Cloudflare does do the basic Analytics that comes built-in and I rarely see them.
- vstollen 2y ago
  Along the lines of Julia Evans’ “Optimize for conversions” [1], can you gauge the popularity of your post by the replies you get? [1]: https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/02/20/measuring-blog-success/ https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/02/20/measuring-blog-success/

Brajeshwar 2y ago

During the early days of Blogging (I meant the early 2000s), when we met up in person during conferences, we talked a lot about blog posts, etc. I once let one of my cousins tag along as I spoke at a conference organized by Macromedia. I did the usual thing with others there, talking about blogs. When we returned home, my cousin said, “You are kind of a deal. People know you by your blog - brajeshwar.com.” I’ve been lucky to have been recognized by a few people in the wild (IRL) who walked up to me and asked, “You are brajeshwar.com?” These days, I just write for myself. Fast forward 15+ years, my daughter somehow decided to search the Internet for me, and she said, “You are like a ChatGPT-powered Discord bot, answering questions on an antique Reddit forum.” https://x.com/brajeshwar/status/1630852614303924224 https://x.com/brajeshwar/status/1630852614303924224

sudohackthenews 2y ago
I don’t know whether to be impressed or scared that the first thing that came to her mind was a llm powered bot haha
blitzar 2y ago
> when we met up in person during conferences, we talked a lot about blog posts Now people talk about high engagement twitter threads, linked-in posts or just film each other filming each other for their "content".
knorker 2y ago
Actually producing value is so last millennium. Ok boomer, you add value. We don't do that here. Unless you make TikToks endlessly aspiring to be a societal net loss kardashian, why are you even breathing? Writing text? Can't the computer just do that, somehow?
- FartinMowler 2y ago
  (having a flashback to the bile blog)
Carrok 2y ago
> Macromedia Reading this term hit my brain with such a sudden wave of nostalgia. It really was a different time.

impure 2y ago

It occasionally comes up in conversations. But I don't think people are that interested. Although I will say my programming hot takes occasionally do get popular.

KenHV 2y ago

My blog is mostly just me sharing things to my friends; some of them IRL. Short tutorials, highlights from books, etc. https://kenhv.com/blog https://kenhv.com/blog

_thisdot 2y ago
Love the design! What did you use to build this?
- KenHV 2y ago
  Thank you! I'm using Jekyll, here's the source: https://github.com/kenhv/kenhv.com https://github.com/kenhv/kenhv.com
0xmutt 2y ago
Thanks for sharing! Throughly enjoyed reading through these posts. Learned about some interesting Firefox settings to try out.

ggm 2y ago

The point of the article is one I align with: You're writing it for yourself, 99% of the time. The other 1% is the future you. I blog for work. I don't discuss it with family. I think I'd find it very stressful answering the "why did you say that" questions. The corollary of this, is that I write notes by hand in almost every meeting I attend, and never ever read them again -But for things like IETF I do a mixture of .org and meetecho (markdown) because there is at least some possibility others may get value from the shared log in meetecho, and I know I will use the .org to .. write the blog.

matrix87 2y ago
> You're writing it for yourself, 99% of the time. The other 1% is the future you. Or alternatively it could be a place for educational stuff like the more detailed answers on stackoverflow. Except the middleman gets removed
- crngefest 2y ago
  [flagged]
- fullspectrumdev 2y ago
  In the past I’ve used a blog literally to make small notes on very simple things that I always ended up having to look up, or for notes on the “right way” to do something. For example: for years I was using Pythons requests library incorrectly. The way I was doing it worked - but it wasn’t correct. Once I published a short blog on the correct way - the correct way seemed to stick better in my mind!
  - matrix87 2y ago
    > For example: for years I was using Pythons requests library incorrectly. The way I was doing it worked - but it wasn’t correct. Usually I prefer a git repo for this kind of thing
    - ggm 2y ago

manuelmoreale 2y ago

The thing I find most interesting, every time something like this gets posted here on HN is that in the comments, depending on the day, dozen or hundreds or even thousand of people post some permutation of "hey, I feel the same" And that makes me smile because on the one hand people keep repeating that blogs are dead, but on the other you're all proof that it's clearly not the case.

kaiwenwang 2y ago

A website is a Presentation of Self extended to artwork and 2D media. What is a Presentation of Self? It comes the book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman. The two primary senses of humans are sight and vision. If you take the time to write down and enumerate the ways by which people understand the internal state of others, you realize that a computer simply communicates impressions of people over long distances, some of which have limited correspondence with who a person really is. Photos could be fake. Videos could be scripted and a certain impression. You don't really see someone for who they are except in real life, talking to them for a duration. Most people talk to or avoid certain people internally based on how they act and what they say. But once you realize the structure of communication, you feel like a robot talking to others. What was implicit becomes explicit. So yes, a website matters, if the increasing trends for humans and human ability are greater knowledge consumption, production, network communication over locality, and so on. It reveals your internal perception, taste, intelligence, and processing of information, by which people use to judge you and ask how relation to you improves the group fitness. Having a website selects for intellectualism. Social media is also a presentation. The question could be rephrased: Do people know you have a TikTok or Instagram? People such as his wife and digital people have increasingly different lifestyles and diverge. Had the author made his way to a metropole or more major place, it's likely having a personal brand would've mattered more.

outofpaper 2y ago
What do you meany by ouw two primary senses are, "sight and vision"
- kaiwenwang 2y ago
  sight and hearing*

porphyra 2y ago

I kinda get it, but the opening paragraphs betray the author's problematic, arrogant attitude --- passive-aggressively complaining about his wife for not appreciating the grand genius of his blog. My wife, my parents, my friends etc are all aware of my website. My wife enthusiastically shows my website to our friends. I have a blog post about food recommendations that is very popular with my friends.

DHPersonal 2y ago
An alternative interpretation (and the way in which I read it) was that the author is incredibly passionate about something mundane and his wife is very obviously not interested anywhere near as much or at all, just like everyone else who likely stumbles across his blog. I don't think it was attempting to show disdain but acceptance, admitting that he builds a blog because he cares about it alone; even his wife doesn't read it.

croniev 2y ago

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke... I've been wanting to read that too! Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell has been one of my favorite and most immersive books, absolutely brilliant! Too bad Susanna Clarke got CFS, a very ill researched illness :/

komali2 2y ago

Yes, because my blog is basically a collection of things people have asked me more than once. * How do I rent a motorcycle in Taiwan? * What's a coding bootcamp like? * What's your emacs config? * Got any book recommendations? * You got into Raw? How was it? * Didn't you parents come to Taiwan? Mine are coming next month, what did you do with them? etc. I'm constantly dropping links to people at networking events or when they come into my restaurant. I also just forget things constantly and so my blog is basically my external brain.

markwrobel 2y ago

Lars-Christian, your site got a little attention today :-) No post I’ve written has ever gone viral. I also have a personal website. If anyone notice what I've written it's a very nice added bonus. For me it's also about personal ownership of my content, and perhaps also a reminder to myself of the old internet - which I miss.

vstollen 2y ago

While I don‘t write much, my website is directly associated with my real name. As a result, friends regularly stumble upon it. Most of them don’t care for the topics I write about. However, they usually get a little excited, as if they found a real-life Easter egg.

brontosaurusrex 2y ago

Some do, mostly when the problem they are trying to solve is somewhere in my blog past. I've learned over the years not to advertise the blog/page, due to weird questions I get, for example: Q: How costly is this? (A: it's free, minus my time), Q: Why is it so ugly? (A: When you write your perfect jekyll skin, I will use it, you know it's about my future self searching for the info, not about beauty), Q: Why? (A: I always find something interesting to read in my blog, unlike your corporate page). p.s. The long-tail effect has been predicted at least 20 years ago, so I understand that views will be low or none: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail My blog: https://brontosaurusrex.github.io/ https://brontosaurusrex.github.io/

wannabebarista 2y ago
I find the "Why?" question amusing. It's usually coupled with a disapproving tone.

blitzar 2y ago

Yes, There are 2 posts from 2007.

RajT88 2y ago

The people in your real life don't give a shit about your blog. But random strangers do! At least, if you're contributing something to the world which is wonderful and useful. In my experience, the posts which get the most traffic are simply not going to be the ones you think they will be. I am thinking of both my public and internal blog posts at my company - the most read articles are dumb basic shit that nobody thought to write down (but should have), and my greatest masterpieces languor in obscurity.

froh 2y ago
TIL to languor https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/languor#Verb https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/languor#Verb
- Suppafly 2y ago
  me too, I've heard it before but never seen it written, which is the opposite of how I learn most words.

winternewt 2y ago

In the vein of the discussion here, I think it's relevant to highlight Kagi's Small web [1] initiative, which is intended to give more discoverability to sites like this. I find it to be admirable and it gives me some small hope for the future of the web. [1] https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

Pyrodogg 2y ago

I had personal site on shared hosting with blog, microblog, "lifestream", photo gallery in the late 00s. It's been a 'placeholder' status for redevelopment since I think about 2011-12. I got a job and started (over)working. Bugs/exploits in the PHP framework I was using took the site down a few times. Maintenance lagged, and I eventually zipped everything and shut it down. I've found a better work life balance over the years, but just haven't connected the dots to ever doing something new with it. I think the last attempt foundered on picking a static site generator. Most of my IRL friends and family barely use Facebook so I'm pretty sure few were ever very aware of what was on there.

thomashabets2 2y ago
This is why I use a static site generator. No security fix is ever urgent. No risk of needing to make a bunch of changes in case I need to move host, and they have a slightly different version of PHP. The thing never "fails to start" after a reboot. No database that can cause problems. It's just files. Anything can host just files. My first site actually started as what we'd now call a static site generator back in the 1990s. Then PHP a few years later, then Python built on webpy.org (including an admin interface), and now back to a static site generator. Most of my friends are computer people, and know and occasionally read my blog. My non computer friends could not care less.
- guappa 2y ago
  In the end it turns out that the way of doing websites by creating .html files directly was the more future proof :D

FLpxpyJ 2y ago

I think, a little ironically ofc, opening yourself up like that ends up capping how personal you can (are willing to) get. Not always a bad thing, but I believe the modern internet is missing a lot of soul that comes from being vulnerable. Lord knows social media personalities and corporate brands will never do it. https://foreverliketh.is/ https://foreverliketh.is/

dewey 2y ago

I felt very seen by this blog post. I sent it to my partner and she replied with “Sounds like you. What is IRL” which perfectly sums up the disconnect on some topics that the author also mentioned. I just spend the past month rebuilding my blog, even though there’s nobody reading it and it really only is my “online home” to play around with and be creative. My main source of traffic is random Google visits for some “I’ll write this down for myself in case I run into it again” type posts.

nicbou 2y ago

My blog has some of my recipes, and some of my friends appreciate that. Otherwise my blog is a beacon to other nerds on the internet, extra material for people who are curious about me. People do check it and reach out, so it works.

janalsncm 2y ago

I think you can either have a “corporate” blog attached to your name (whose purpose is to bolster your professional reputation, among other things) and an opinion-based blog with a pseudonym. The two can never touch. My philosophy on this is that anything worth saying, that isn’t some tepid opinion about pizza or your pet, will probably irritate some people. And while the internet isn’t forever, it’s got a fairly long memory.

voidUpdate 2y ago

I've attempted to show my website to my family a couple of times, but I'm a techy in a generally non-techy family, so they're not particularly interested. I mostly use it to talk about things I've done and I have referred back to it on a couple of occasions when I know I've solved a problem before and want to see how I did it at the time. I attach it to my CV so I keep it professional enough for someone else to look at that I would want to impress, but still pretty casual because I try to write like I'm explaining it to a friend, someone who knows basic programming stuff but is a novice to the actual topic of the article

INTPenis 2y ago

They're pretty much the only people who know it. Because I get no visits, it's mostly cathartic.

underdeserver 2y ago

People who read blogs, especially in the software industry, are still a tiny minority. There are maybe tens of millions of software engineers, designers, product managers, entrepreneurs and other tech-adjacent workers in the world. HN is one of the most popular tech sites among hardcore techies, at least in my circles. And yet the top posts of all time get thousands of upvotes. Add 10x lurkers and you get tens of thousands of users. That's still 0.1% of the total above.

hellweaver666 2y ago

I remember back in the early 00's someone at work found out about my blog and news got around the office (it was a personal blog, more like a diary and I was in my late teens so it was kinda "edgy"). Anyways... within a few days I started getting a bunch of troll comments and it took all the fun out of it knowing everything I wrote was being read by my colleagues.

yantzr3j 2y ago

My late brother once sent me a link to an article in his blog. After he passed, I was far more grateful that he'd sent it to me.

v3ss0n 2y ago
Scheduled email?

laurentlb 2y ago

Yes. I've (re)started my blog a few months ago. Some articles went viral. Some people mentioned my blog IRL (and I didn't know they were following it). Some of my blog posts led to nice discussions online or offline. Some people have asked me to write about specific things. So right now, I'm quite happy with how it's going and I have a list of articles to write. But writing a post takes multiple hours, so I don't know what the frequency will be on the long run.

jowdones 2y ago

Yeah, well, in today's shallow and blood thirsty culture, one mistake and you're fucked. And doesn't have to be today, it will follow you all your life, when you're more comfortable, bam! Someone finds something you said 15 years ago that no longer fits the increasingly edgy sensitivities of today and you're canceled. Doxxing you, trashing you, death threats, you name it. Unless you walk on eggs more carefully than in Stalin's Russia and only talk of weather and puppies, you are liable for being torn apart by an angry mob of mediocres who finds fulfilment in destroying a defenseless guy's life.

calini 2y ago

I have a 3D printed shopping trolley coin with my blog written on it, and even offered a couple of them to friends. That being said the blog's been inactive for a couple of years now :D.

tempfile 2y ago

I have a blog that I consider permanently unfinished. Being (still) too embarrassed to share it is a pretty good motivator for adding things, and it's nice to have something you can be a perfectionist about without feeling guilty. Formally, it's an exercise in learning the W3C Accessibility standards, but the content is very much "write for yourself".

cafard 2y ago

Interesting question. A sometime co-worker does, and a sometime neighbor. On the whole, I figure that my family gets enough of my opinions in conversation.

wannabebarista 2y ago

I have a blog that's connected to my academic website. While my homepage gets some traffic from people googling papers, my blog gets much less. I post a few times each year, mostly about stuff I've been reading. I did have one post go viral-ish a few years ago (https://bcmullins.github.io/foreign-affairs-100/ https://bcmullins.github.io/foreign-affairs-100/). I was surprised to find that some workplace acquaintances and even students read my blog. A colleague out-of-the-blue messaged me about some python function I'd written (https://bcmullins.github.io/parsing-json-python/ https://bcmullins.github.io/parsing-json-python/). A student asked about reading recommendations and how I choose books. So people you know IRL may be reading your stuff (or some of it) but just not mentioning it. As another post mentioned, I feel much more pressure about my writing after learning that IRL people read it.

tcgv 2y ago
> A colleague out-of-the-blue messaged me about some python function I'd written Just the other day a colleague at work was searching the web and eventually ended up in a blog post of mine. He was enthusiastic that he had "discovered" my blog. It was fun.

prmoustache 2y ago

I love personal websites but I don't really like blogs. I prefer when people can rework/refine some of their pages instead of publishing new blog posts related to previous ones when revisiting a topic. And as a writer it allows me to write whenever I feel like to. With a blog you kind of feel guilty if you don't publish on a regular basis, and end up abandoning it altogether too easily if you cannot sustain a rhythm. A web page doesn't force you into a rhythm. A blog might be useful for historians in the future, when chronology might be useful but as a publisher and casual reader I find it lazy and unwelcoming for the reader. I do like however personnal pages that have a small log mentionning the updates to which I can subscribe to.

rrishi 2y ago
you might be interested in the concept of digital gardens: https://maggieappleton.com/garden https://maggieappleton.com/garden
alpinisme 2y ago
Agreed completely. From a reader perspective, blogs are also often not friendly to new visitors. How do I find the best entry point? Which entries are fluff and which are deep dives? The best you can usually hope for is some tagging mechanism, but blogs generally expend little to no effort thinking about architecture, discovery, browsability, or the reader’s progression through the site. Don’t get me wrong - that’s a lot to ask of a casual effort. But I do wish we had a genre/format for sharing one’s thoughts online that did encourage reflection and iteration on that level.
- wannabebarista 2y ago
  One thing I've tried to combat the chaos of blog structures is to include links to other posts in series as a header (when it makes sense). The biggest hurdle of moving away from a blog to a static format is that blog posts are timestamped and there's no real expectation that they're maintained. With static pages, however, I try to keep them up-to-date.
- Suppafly 2y ago

incomingpain 2y ago

Nope. Nobody wants to read what I have to say. I'd say I'm banned, shadow banned/flagged, or otherwise censured on social media all the time.

jtwoodhouse 2y ago

The key is to write stuff worth talking about IRL.

ericyd 2y ago

I've recently had the morbid thought that perhaps my loved ones could appreciate my blog if I died prematurely. I don't maintain my blog much and I certainly don't think anyone reads it. It is much more for intrinsic benefits of working through thoughts in a structured way.

rietta 2y ago

Yes, and I have been surprised by at least one who told me that I needed to blog more often. We have very little interaction since graduate school. I have been running the same website, which has undergone several redesigns, for 25 years and counting. It is also interesting about having a personal domain name. People pause when you give the email. No, I really did mean first@lastname.com. Yes, I've had this for decades. My sister tells a different variant, she at least once had someone comment on it and then stand up straight - which she interpreted as being a little impressed as if my sister was a celebrity or something. Very interesting in a world where most people do not have a domain with their family name. The challenge for me has been that over time it morphed from a personal site, to a professional site, to a corporate site. Now that I have employees and this work supports my family I have less freedom to do just anything I want with it. It has to be on topic. That constraint does also bring freedom in its own way. I do not have a good place for personal interests that are not related to my cybersecurity work any longer though.

lelanthran 2y ago

Please. People who know me online don't remember about my blog, nevermind IRL people.

elric 2y ago

I have multiple blogs (the link to one of which is in my HN profile). The tech stuff is pretty safe, and so some tech people in my life know about it. The other blogs are reserved for people who are involved in other aspects of my life. In general, I find I compartmentalize a lot, and there are very few people in my life who are part of multiple compartments.

karaterobot 2y ago

I've had a blog at the same URL since 2000. Search engines are disallowed, comments are closed, I'm not on social media to announce it. I don't talk about it. Twice a week I publish something, but it's meant as a record for me rather than other people. The only reason it's on the web is so I can access it easily from different computers. Once I checked in Feedly, and it said that there were two people subscribed to it. To the best of my knowledge that's the readership.

copywrong2 2y ago

All the important ones

runamuck 2y ago

Since 2016 I publish a new blog post once a month. A long lost friend (20 years no contact) found it, read a handful of my deep dives and then offered me what I consider a dream job based on my content and perceived writing ability. I got to jump from an IC track to an executive role. My then company of 15 years did not offer that opportunity. I recommend a blog just to show the world your chops. You don't know who might read it.