13 ms·
Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
- Animats 2y agoDo they have something to say, or is this like "I want to be in a band" of a previous generation?
- drewcoo 2y ago> is this like "I want to be in a band" of a previous generation? People started blogs for that? I thought that was more the realm of supermarket bulletin boards next to the firewood flyer. Maybe I'm just from a previous previous generation. How can "a friend" post something on a supermarket bulletin board now that they don't seem to exist?
- zem 2y agowhat the gp is getting at is that back in the day there were people who wanted to be in a band not out of any particular musical talent or even inclination but because a lot of their friends were doing it and it looked like a cool thing to do.
- billdueber 2y ago“Do you want to be a Writer, or do you want to write?” I think that almost any question of the form “Do you want to be an Xer, or do you want to X” is useful these days.
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago100%. As a kid growing up near a golf course I knew lots of kids who wanted to be a pro golfer (me too). Did they want to spend 10 hrs a day at the range hitting ball after ball? Not so much. Lots of people want to be Warren Buffett - do they want to read 10-ks for 10 hrs a day? Not so much.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bookofjoe 2y agoYour question got me thinking about supermarket bulletin boards. I recall them from way back as busy places with lots of notes attached, but last year or thereabouts I remember seeing a small bulletin board with one note attached and thinking how unusual it was.
- LtWorf 2y agoI mostly write for future me.
- al_borland 2y agoThis is a question more people need to ask. Be it a blog, YouTube channel, podcast, or whatever else, they all need to be rooted in having something worth to sharing to some small piece of the world. Many people get caught up in thinking the blog, YouTube, or podcast is the thing, when it’s just the thing that lets you share the real thing. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to really integrate this lesson.
- 1dom 2y agoThat sounds like a chicken/egg scenario: how are you supposed to know if you have something worth sharing without producing that something first to make that assessment? I think putting more questions and uncertainty in the way of actually just writing/podcasting/youtubing is what stops a lot of people really building the habit in the first place.
- al_borland 2y agoThat’s just it, a lot of people want to write, podcast, or be a YouTuber, but they struggle with ideas. They want to use the medium, but they don’t have content ideas. The “real thing” I was talking about is the overarching theme or topic. What are you into, what are you going to write, podcast, or make videos about? I think understanding what you want to share helps solve the major stumbling block that leads to thousands of blogs with one entry that is effectively hello-world. If told to draw anything, most people will sit with a blank page. However, if they are told to draw a castle, those bounds give them the freedom to start and create, and it can evolve from there. What are you into to? What hobbies do you have? What do you know, or have opinions about, that others might be interested in? This is your theme, the “real thing”. Writing, podcasting, or video production, without this usually falls flat after 1 or 2 attempts, and it makes it impossible for a habit to form. If you’re already into something and doing it on a regular basis, then you’re just writing about, talking about it, or recording what you’re already doing or thinking about all the time anyway. The content and ideas can flow more easily, especially at the beginning. Not to mention, being more motivated to make the content, since it’s already a passion. So many people are trying to make content about nothing, because they aren’t really doing anything else… and this is where friction is born. Do something you find interesting, then share that thing and your perspective on it. Start with the doing, not the sharing (writing, podcasting, and YouTubing is the sharing). Hopefully this clarifies what I was getting at and resolves the chicken/egg thoughts.
- watwut 2y agoNo, that would be a youtube channel.
- theshrike79 2y agoOr being a "streamer".
- Turboblack 2y agothere are two types of blogs - sincere ones, where the author pours out his soul and talks about what he can't keep to himself, possibly raising some important issues, trying to convey them to the masses, and SEO blogs - where there are excrements of hashtags, advertising slogans, constant repetitions, and requests to throw a bone (support the project, you haven't supported the project yet? you can do it here, well, or here! did I forget to tell you that you can support the project? by the way, one more thing - support the project!). Such ones are immediately banned. I am also very annoyed by those who are already looking for a place for a banner from the first minutes of the site's existence. you will not survive in this world without this cent? 10 bucks a month - payment for personal shame? all this conversion and optimization of texts for search engines turns bloggers into robots, and it is simply impossible to read the texts, they are not human, they are as if created by neural networks. who needs this hypocrisy?
- tkjef 2y agoi think you're exactly right. but to blog with zero SEO in mind sounds foolish as well. you should blog, and by a blog definition that is going on the internet. to get more people to read it (often the goal) the easiest thing to do is utilize the tool people use to find things on the internet (search engines). if there are issues with spam, keyword stuffing, forever run-on paragraphs of nothingness, well that is the search engine algorithm's job to fix. And they have a lot of money to fix it. and if they don't fix it we should use a new search engine. it'll take time. but those seem like the dynamics at play in this scenario.
- Animats 2y agosincere ones, where the author pours out his soul and talks about what he can't keep to himself... Talking head with big microphone, with no editing. Relevant Black Mirror episode: [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
- bhasi 2y agoGreat advice!
- ghaff 2y agoI pretty much agree with all that. I'd add, is this something you want to do or are you looking to make money? If the latter, don't bother. You MAY want to separate a business blog and personal stuff but I'm not yet sold on that being a good idea unless you're really serious about a separate business identity. (Still muddling that one. I may re-merge.)
- codpiece 2y agoI am getting started writing a blog, and this article is some of the most helpful I've read. Makes me feel OK to be quirky and unpolished when the rest of the world is making reaction faces and pointing at text to feed an algo.
- xanderlewis 2y agoThank you for not doing that.
- BeetleB 2y agoBe OK if 95-99% of your content gets zero engagement. That's fine, if you're writing for yourself first and foremost. Accept that you will work on a cool personal project for a long time (months, at least), and will then write a blog post showcasing that work - and no one will care. Over. And. Over. Again. Very humbling, but a good exercise in evaluating your original motive to work on the project.
- lapcat 2y ago> I should add, for context, that my friend and I are talking about writing beautiful essays here. If you want to write the most precise thing possible, you need to edit mercilessly and accept that the writing ends up flat and disjointed. I don't think that merciless editing and beauty are opposed. The author perhaps underestimates the extent to which artists mercilessly edit their own work. The author employs the metaphor of musical improvisation, but the best musical pieces are usually composed, not improvised. I like jazz, but... not for the songwriting. For stream of consciousness writing, you'd almost be better off posting on social media. I've been blogging for over 15 years, and my advice, admittedly ironic, is to not take advice from anyone. Actually, that's my advice on many subjects. Everyone wants to impose their own little idiosyncrasies on you, but what works for them won't necessarily work for you. One's idiosyncrasies are not universal truths.
- naveen_k 2y agoI've been putting off starting a blog to document my side projects for a long time. Finally having it up feels great - it motivated me to organize my thoughts and publish rather than letting them sit as unstructured notes.
- idlewords 2y agoThe best writing advice I ever got was from a college professor—"everybody's got 100 bad essays in them. You just have to get them out." I feel like this is what blogging is especially good for. You can clear out the awful stuff and then try to incrementally improve. I would diametrically disagree with point #7—if you want to write well, you need to revise the hell out of it. I guess pick whose writing you like better, between me and the author, and take the corresponding advice.
- lazyant 2y agoyes; quantity leads to quality
- deadbabe 2y agoIt’s better to get those bad essays out in the form of comments, you get instant feedback and you’ll know what works and what doesn’t work when you go to write a real blog.
- alxexperience 2y agoWhile I agree, I know it can be hard to start writing as well, because you are so worried about the quality. One of my professors from college brought up a great point that "No one will read your shitty first draft except you." I find that phrase very helpful, because usually when I write, the first draft is always a giant mess. But you're able to craft it and edit it the best way that you can. So you can push out what you think is good work, and continue to improve as you write more.
- idlewords 2y ago
- langsoul-com 2y agoAdvice to use substack, medium and a few others similar. No point hosting a blog or anything of the sort, unnecessary effort in the beginning when you don't know if you'll continue.
- wonger_ 2y agoManuel maintains a list of (low-fuss) blogging platforms: https://manuelmoreale.com/blog-platforms https://manuelmoreale.com/blog-platforms
- aradox66 2y agoOTOH setting up a static blog site is a great way to procrastinate on actually writing blog posts
- AndrewStephens 2y agoHey, no need to call me out specifically like that.
- heelix 2y agoOuch... that actually hits a bit close to home. After having a couple of blogging homes fold out from under me, I've kicked around the idea of coding up my own blog - which usually was in whatever framework/language I was getting ramped up in. I realize I've probably ported/built something a half a dozen times in the last decade, and never bothered to take the final step to deploy it before starting the next rewrite.
- duggan 2y agoTake the last step! Just try not to account for it as the culmination of a decade’s work in your head. I recently rebuilt my own blog over the course of a month or so after a decade hiatus (and wrote about it, of course[1]). I enjoyed the process of working through all my little ideas and deploying it — and continuing to tinker on it. 1: https://duggan.ie/posts/ignoring-good-advice-and-building-my-own-blog-again https://duggan.ie/posts/ignoring-good-advice-and-building-my...
- RajT88 2y agoThis is good advice! I had a personal blog for a while which nobody read, but lately my Medium articles have gathered hundred of reads (writing down stuff I figured out in side projects nobody else bothered to write down).
- semking 2y agoSerious question, as someone who recently started writing: • How do you guys feel about your thoughts, ideas and creativity being scraped and secretly added to the training corpus of AI models?
- a-priori 2y agoYou can’t worry about it. It’s the world we live in now. The alternative is to not write anything of significance on the internet, which would be of no benefit to anyone.
- nemomarx 2y agoI wonder if any noticeable group of people are retreating to paper journals or letter circles again. Probably not, but you never know.
- semking 2y agoTo books, yes! 100%!
- semking 2y agoThat's precisely my problem: the only alternative is worse because no one would benefit.
- tonyedgecombe 2y agoYou can’t really blame the blogger for that though. Letting a AI learn from your content devalues it as they can regurgitate it for a few dollars a month.
- throwaway290 2y ago"This is the world we live in" is a good excuse to never right any wrongs.
- a-priori 2y ago
- narag 2y agoA colleague gave me the best advice when I was teaching programming courses: you haven't learned from books but from professional experience (actually both, but anyway) just tell them what worked and what didn't. And why. I applied the same method when writting my long defunct blog. Nobody was really interested in my opinions, but my experience both positive and negative was somehow valuable.
- gerdesj 2y agoWhy do you insist on only using the middle third of my screen to display content? I'm over 50 and my eyes are not quite what they used to be. Your 12pt (ish) text is largely legible to me but why do you insist on your idea of presentation, rather than mine? The whole point of the www as far as I recall is that you send a message and I receive it. How it is formatted should largely be a matter for the recipient, with some hints from the sender.
- jraph 2y agoContent width is an odd thing to complain about: - everybody limits it. This is because no matter the size of your screen, the human eyes are somewhat limited to lines of 70-130 characters. Higher than that, and your eyes have hard time finding the next line at the end of the previous one because the travel is too high. As a web page writer, you need to take care of that, because the default presentation will be bad for everyone if you don't. - as it happens, the author uses Subtrack so they might not even have picked that size consciously. - reader mode works on this page, so you can use this to read the post the way you want, and if you like the content and would like to read it regularly, there is an RSS feed that you can use with a client that displays posts the way you want. The last point is why separate style sheets and correctly structured content are so nice: if you have such a strong opinion, you can tweak stuff or even ignore the style sheet and use yours. And reader mode actually makes that practical for most blog posts / articles. (that said, I agree that the width seems particularly small, I replaced it with 80ex just to try and it looked better to me - but I just set up a new WordPress website and the default 2025 theme has the same ~730px width for the content, I don't know what's with this default size)
- eviks 2y ago> human eyes are somewhat limited to lines of 70-130 characters. Higher than that, and your eyes have hard time finding the next line at the end of the previous one because the travel is too high. That's unfortunately a common myth even re regular text (even more so re code with all the extra structural helps) that's responsible for a lot of vertical space waste. But at any rate you can adjust your window to whatever is comfortable, no need for the author to incorrectly guess what's best for you
- madhadron 2y ago> (I should add, for context, that my friend and I are talking about writing beautiful essays here. If you want to write the most precise thing possible, you need to edit mercilessly and accept that the writing ends up flat and disjointed.) There speaks someone who has never spent time writing poetry, and probably isn't very good at editing.
- jongjong 2y ago[flagged]
- rednafi 2y agoHard disagree. I write for myself and still use the search functionality on my site [1] to find things quickly. I also regularly read the work of Julia Evans, Brandur Leach, Armin Ronacher, and Patrick Dubroy, and none of them generate slop about the latest tech. On top of that, engineering blogs from Netflix, Uber, Stripe, and Salesforce are irreplaceable for me. I use LLMs a ton and still think human writing is even more valuable now that generating formulaic junk is so easy. [1]: https://rednafi.com/search https://rednafi.com/search
- crimsoneer 2y agoI can name 5 excellent "semi-technical" blogs off the top of my head, so this suggests me to me you need to do a better job of nurturing your digital reading list more than anything else (and I say that as a big user of LLMs). Blogs aren't there to replace... tutorials and documentation.
- msephton 2y agoMy advice is do it for yourself, any engagement is a bonus, and don't lock it behind a wall like Substack etc.
- rednafi 2y agoI have been maintaining a semi-successful blog [1] for the last five years and have learned a few things along the way: - Own your content: Medium, Substack, Hashnode, Dev.to—all of them suck. Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time. - No one cares about the technology behind your site unless it’s huge. So it should be the least of your concerns. Don’t be that JS guy who rewrites their entire site every week in a different stack and writes a blog post about it. - Consistently writing is a lot of work, and there’s no way around it. - Picking a niche and writing about it yields better results than trying to write about anything and everything. - No one will probably read it for a long time, and that’s okay. You should write only for yourself in the beginning. - POSSE is the way to go. If you don’t promote your work, no one else will. - That said, if it took less time to write than it would take someone to read, it’s probably not worth writing. [1]: https://rednafi.com https://rednafi.com
- revicon 2y agoPOSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. I didn’t know what this acronym meant. Hopefully I saved someone a Google search. https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE
- narmontas 2y agoI searched for this and then came back, only to find the answer below!
- bookofjoe 2y agoI asked Perplexity what this acronym stands for and this is its reply: https://imgur.com/a/oWfIjkZ https://imgur.com/a/oWfIjkZ
- apercu 2y agoThe interwebs is such hot garbage that we now need to use ChatGPT to search.
- southernplaces7 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- SteveVeilStream 2y agoMy favorite two reasons for blogging: 1) Because sometimes you are right about something and it's nice to show that you were thinking about it ahead of time. An example would be my prediction in 2023 (which is fairly late in all fairness,) that one of the most important improvements in AI in the near future would be the ability to interact with any GUI as if it was an API. 2) Because often you are wrong about something and having it written down and in public will keep you honest about hindsight bias. An example would be predictions I made about lasting impacts of the pandemic on how we approach healthcare and minimizing respiratory infections in general.
- jopsen 2y agoAlso nice that people you interact with online or old friends who look you up, can see some of the stuff you do. Without having to resort to Facebook. Whether that's hobbies, a home renovation project, a public presentation you did at work, a life event (wedding, kids, etc).
- jopsen 2y agoUnless you aim for your blog grow a following. You really don't need to overthink anything! A picture and 3 sentences can be a blog post. You can talk about a hobby, a trip, a vacation or random thoughts. Sometimes people will find a how-to blog post through Google. Sometimes an old friend or former teacher will look you up. In reality, you'll probably be happier if your blog never grows a steady following :)
- theshrike79 2y agoDaring Fireball by John Gruber (used to) frequently post just links to a post/article with a short excerpt. No need to write a full-on 10k+ word novella on everything.
- roydivision 2y agoA slight tangent - does anyone have advice on anonymous blogs? I would accept an email address as being the sole contact, but nothing else.
- yapyap 2y agobearblog.dev?
- theshrike79 2y agoHaven't tried this myself yet, but came across this while sorting my Obsidian inbox: https://pico.sh/pgs https://pico.sh/pgs Basically you can ssh/scp/rsync static pages there. The only personal thing you provide is an SSH public key pair.
- alp1n3_eth 2y agoWith Paragraph.xyz I'm pretty sure you can sign-up with just a crypto wallet.
- mangeshm 2y agoHey, you are a great inspiraiton and I really like to read your blogs. I have been maintaining a broken blog since I was 16 (currently 19) and last year I started writing actively about everything I do. I started reading more and more books and have seen a lot of improvements in writing. I am not inspired by anyone's writing style but yes I am writing for the sake of my own curiosity and fun. I did follow some of your ideas on how you write though xD my blog: https://mangeshm.xyz/ https://mangeshm.xyz/ some recent articles about my thinking and some stories I've written.
- raesene9 2y agoI've been blogging for just over 20 years at this point, my main takeaways 1) Blog for yourself and no-one else. Write things up because you find them interesting or you learned something. Trying to second-guess things like what will be popular or get engagement is not a fun time for what is likely to be a hobby. 2) Keep it low maintenance and simple publishing process. I use Github pages and Jekyll, but other similar options are available. 3) If you're doing technical content, try to have practical examples. I've had multiple times where I thought I knew how something worked and, in the process of writing a blog with practical examples, found out I was wrong about how it worked!
- MisterTea 2y agoPoint 3 is very important and something that needs to be done more often. I would also say have someone who works in the domain you're writing about read it and give feedback.
- zerr 2y agoWhy publish at all? Why not just write privately?
- jononor 2y agoSometimes you talk to someone (possibly online, usually about a shared interest), and they ask you what your thoughts are on X. Then you can just link them, if you have written on X (or related). Sometimes others want to express a (non trivial) idea to someone else, and your writing may be the best thing they know that gets the message across. Then they can send it. Sometimes (or rather, always) your idea and writing is not the best or final thought you have on the subject. But it is not until someone has read and commented/replied (thoughtfully) that you understand what the next refinement is. And then there is serendipity, just putting it out there to see what might (or might not) come of it. Plus maybe one finds it motivating to have it actually accessible for others. As a clear goal and a standard to hold each piece to.
- raesene9 2y agoA couple of reasons (for me anyway) 1) Main reason is that if I've spent time working something out, I can save other people the time doing that, by writing down the details in a searchable place. 2) If I want to explain something to someone, it's easy if I can just point them to a blog I've already written 3) (bit of an unintended consequence) It helped get me my last two jobs :D Being able to point to a long history of technical blog posting was relevant when I got a job in advocacy as that's one of the necessary skills.
- christophilus 2y agoSpeaking from experience, start by building some tools to make blog publishing more pleasant— build a markdown processor in your favorite language, then write your own syntax highlighting and html parser / transformer, then benchmark and optimize the heck out of it, then decide blogging isn’t all that interesting, and write some games instead.
- rchaud 2y agoEvery post about blogging that reaches the top of HN turns into a discussion about static site generators, without fail.
- fallinditch 2y agoBear Blog looks like a good option for a new (minimalist) blog. Can anyone recommend it? https://bearblog.dev/ https://bearblog.dev/
- memhole 2y agoIt was my likely first choice before deciding to roll my own. I’d recommend getting a domain which will cost you $5/month or so to use with bear iirc. Mataroa is another option similar to bear.
- denvaar 2y agoOne thing that helps me write is to picture someone I know who I'm talking to. This helps me to include the appropriate level of context, and it also impacts the "voice" I will use. I think the author basically mentions this as one of the their list items.
- csswizardry 2y agoPoint 13, ironically, reminds me of one of the best bits of writing[1] I ever did. I somehow lost an entire near-complete draft[2] of an article, so I had to write it again from scratch. It came out much, much better than the original. 1. https://csswizardry.com/archive/ https://csswizardry.com/archive/ 2. A fact I am embarrassed to admit in present company. I still can’t remember how it happened.
- GrumpyNl 2y agoHost your own. Keep it simple.
- LeroyRaz 2y agoI have a very different view. I think quality takes effort, and unless you are extremely gifted, or extremely practiced as a writer (i.e., you've done it professionally for years) what you write as a first draft is probably terrible. As such, if you actually want to produce text worth reading, you'll need to spend (a lot of) time editing and critiquing each draft you write. I also think the world abounds with supposedly quirky people, who think that that is enough. It is (almost certainly) not enough. Unless you are incredibly unusual and individualistic, your quirckyness is not sufficient to make your work worth reading. The problem is that there are lots of interesting, unusual and deep people, and some of them also spend a huge amount of time and effort on the craft of writing.
- xena 2y agoOwn your platform. If you host your own blog, you have the ability to make it do literally anything you want. It's such a superpower that's severely underrated.
- hindsightRegret 2y agoI found that a nice compromise between self-hosting and publishing on a Medium / Substack is using Github pages + Notion published links: - You get one free site per GitHub account - I forked https://github.com/academicpages/academicpages.github.io https://github.com/academicpages/academicpages.github.io and updated the blog posts to link to published Notion pages. - This gives you a great WYSIWYG editor and all the nice features that Notion provides (collab edit, embeds, tables, LaTeX, view/edit anywhere). - Notion handles the SEO too. - See https://mikeshen.github.io/year-archive/ https://mikeshen.github.io/year-archive/ and an example post - https://mikeshen.notion.site/Deepnote-Embeds-Share-Your-Results-0a026d654b1940b9840ad109835ed033 https://mikeshen.notion.site/Deepnote-Embeds-Share-Your-Resu....
- stevenicr 2y agoThe article spends a good amount of time suggesting how to write better blog posts over time, which I appreciate, but the title doesn't fit as well as it could. I feel the title should be more about 'how to write better blog posts over time' or something. I was expecting to hear advice more about creating or maintaining a blog itself, which is more than just writing (in my mind) - The site pulls a bitdefender warning about malicious something or another, not sure what the trigger is. I've commented elsewhere about blog software since on HN this inevitably comes up on similar threads. I've got some stuff about modern wordpress blog design and such on this page: https://steveiscritical.com/learn-websites-and-coding/ https://steveiscritical.com/learn-websites-and-coding/ Might have to make a more well rounded wordpress blog stuff that includes backups, securing and hosting considerations then submit a more complete article at some point.