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I 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, H
by rednafi 2y ago
I 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 agoThanks! You saved me from exactly that.
- lippihom 2y agoNice - thanks.
- akoboldfrying 2y ago>POSSE What does this mean? (Googling wasn't helpful.)
- rednafi 2y agoPOSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
- mvkel 2y agoI'd argue that you could write only for yourself for your entire life and still have a successful blog.
- rednafi 2y agoYep. The success metric isn’t unidimensional here. Having external readers is just a cherry on top. I didn’t even think anyone else would find my writings interesting, let alone useful.
- cryptopian 2y agoOften, the only reason I write is to have a method of sorting out the soup of thoughts in my head into a recognisable shape, with the accountability that being public brings to it (no, you can't have the link to my site!).
- oe 2y agoWell said. Sometimes I notice that I’m thinking about a thing for days or weeks and the only way to make it stop is to write a post about it.
- walthamstow 2y agoPeople focus a lot on the 'web', and not enough on the 'log'
- dredmorbius 2y agoProblem in a nutshell, excellent.
- mvkel 2y agoBring back .plan files!
- masutaka 2y agoThe term POSSE is new to me. It is a great learning experience.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- snackbroken 2y ago> If you don’t promote your work, no one else will. This has not been my experience. If you do interesting things then there are plenty of people who are willing to bring attention to it. I've been cold-emailed by journalists wanting to interview me without ever doing anything other than a) make my work publicly accessible and b) collaborate with like-minded people. Perhaps I'm lucky (probably). Perhaps my work would've gotten more attention if I spent more effort promoting it (probably). The things I do because I find them interesting are not things I feel the need to promote, because I'm not doing them for attention. If your goal is to grab a lot of attention, you will inexorably have to do things that are not interesting because the only way to achieve broad appeal is to not offend anyone's tastes and the only way to do that is to be bland.
- gffrd 2y ago> the only way to achieve broad appeal is to not offend anyone's tastes and the only way to do that is to be bland Careful. While I agree with the premise, you make it sound binary. You can have broad-er appeal while still being individual.
- meiraleal 2y agoOne can have even broader appeal by offending everyone
- gffrd 2y agoTrue! On that … - It's generally easier for people to know what they _don't_ like than what they _do_. Preferences are defined by process of elimination. - The commonality is: get lots of people on the same page about you, and you've got a big audience / broad appeal. But the most engaged audience is the one who has strong emotions attached, so being an offender guarantees a ravenous audience … and is generally easier.
- shermantanktop 2y ago> Careful. I witnessed a memorable moment at work when an engineer responded to a VP and started by saying “careful.” Had it been another engineer, it would have been ignored as authoritative-sounding filler. But the VP did not take it well.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> That said, if it took less time to write than it would take someone to read, it’s probably not worth writing. Is that actually a possibility? I can't type faster than I can read.
- kqr 2y agoYou can if yountype complicated tjings and include typos that make it hard to decode anything much less a run on sentence like this that includes redundancies and extra meaningless words saying the same thing which is easy to type but takes ages to read.
- moehm 2y agoWell done.
- rednafi 2y agoLLMs
- econ 2y agoYou don't have to type. I wrote some things with hundreds of links then assumed the reader was at least somewhat familiar with the set of links above each paragraph. I may even try keep opinions out of it (less effort) and simply paint a context with references for the reader to do their own thinking.
- fsckboy 2y ago>Don’t be that JS guy who rewrites their entire site every week in a different stack and writes a blog post about it. seems like a perfectly reasonable idea for a blog about different stacks. I'm not advocating it, but there's nothing wrong with it if that's what interests you.
- eclipsed0x01 2y agoThat close minded opinion you quoted left a bad taste in my mouth and makes me not want to check the OP's blog out. Almost every opinion people have has been covered by someone else in some way unless you are working at the forefront of something, so it usually depends on how you value-add to existing things with your own experience. It's also that sort of I-know-what's-better attitude that turns a personal thing into a competitive thing. What is semi-successful anyway...
- gffrd 2y agoYou’re missing the point. OP is saying don’t be the person who says they want to write about Frogs, but who then spends an immense amount of effort not writing about Frogs, and writing about procrastination instead.
- pyuser583 2y agoWhat tech do you recommend for own site? Wordpress?
- crackalamoo 2y agoIt probably doesn't matter much either way, but I use vanilla HTML/JS
- inetknght 2y agoYou don't need some fancy tech. Blogs have been around for 30+ years and function just fine on such old tech. The only new tech you should use is certbot and own your own domain. Write in markdown and serve directly, or export to HTML. Or write in LibreOffice Writer and export to HTML. Upload HTML to a basic webserver. You don't need a fancy load balancer or denial-of-human-system or anything.
- ineptech 2y agoYou make this sound trivial, but I did this (not with a blog per se, but with a silly one-shot parody website I made for fun) and the first time it got posted on HN it exceeded my hosts bandwidth limits in the first hour despite only having a handful of images. Unless you never write anything popular, you at least need a static host like github pages or a cdn or something behind it.
- inetknght 2y ago> Unless you never write anything popular, you at least need a static host like github pages or a cdn or something behind it. No, you just need a host that doesn't have ridiculously small limits. You can easily find find hosts with limits in hundreds of GB, or TB, or even unmetered. You can find them for free, and you can find them for quite cheap compared to most technologists' incomes.
- skydhash 2y agoWere each image 1 MB? My rule of thumb is to have smaller pictures in the page and to link to their full size if needs be. If your webpage exceed a ebook in size while not having more features, there’s a wrong decision made somewhere.
- pithanyChan 2y ago> if it took less time to write than it would take someone to read, it’s probably not worth writing. Disagree. If it took less thinking than it will take reading, then yes, probably not worth it. But if you can trim your writing to the pith in every paragraph or even line, people will love you. Too many people babble to keep the underlying lies and fraud and their complicity burried in narratives.
- _t9ow 2y ago> trim your writing to the pith in every paragraph or even line This takes a lot of time. Writing concisely is much more challenging and time-consuming than writing verbosely. Writing unnecessarily long essays means that your readers end up spending more time reading them than you did writing them. As Blaise Pascal wrote: "I only made this letter longer because I had not the leisure to make it shorter."
- jrflowers 2y agoI like this post about the value of brevity that starts with “disagree”, immediately agrees with what it’s responding to, and then goes on to talk about a completely unrelated thing
- Chris2048 2y ago> all of them suck. > POSSE is the way to go Can you host your own blog, but replicate (in part) in dev.to? Is it against their TOS to have a link to an original, or even only include teasers advertising the 'real' blog post? It's kind of like having you main git repo somewhere, but cloning to GitHub for the community.
- RobotToaster 2y ago> No one cares about the technology behind your site You know a blog is going to be good when it's using the default wordpress theme from 10 years ago.
- sidpatil 2y agohttps://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/ https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/
- RobotToaster 2y agoI was hoping someone would post that (^_^)
- rednafi 2y agoExactly. Or a pure HTML and CSS site, like Daan Luu’s or Russ Cox’s blog.
- greenie_beans 2y agowhat are some good self-hosted blog alternatives? something with features similar to ghost/substack
- ramses0 2y agoThis is a long-shot, but take a look here: https://github.com/simonw/datasette.io I've been blogging for decade(s) with: http://blosxom.com/documentation/users/blog.html http://blosxom.com/documentation/users/install/dynamic/isp.html ...it's basically a janky (possibly insecure?) perl-cgi-script which converts a directory of markdown files into a blog. I love the idea of it in that it's just markdown files! `vim ~/blog/entries/some-random-thought.txt` end ups with $AUTHOR of `chown`, $DATE of the file modification time, tree of `mkdir -p ~/blog/entries/some/category` ... it's just trivial to backup, restore, and work with. You can even (probably) hook it up to a static regen which is probably safer: http://blosxom.com/documentation/users/install/static/ http://blosxom.com/documentation/users/install/static/ The link to datasette is if you're wanting to nerd around a bit more, as it's kindof a combo of sqlite and a web server for rendering data from within it. The linked github repo is how their main site is built/rendered and it definitely has aspects of "blogginess", and you can kindof see how it's done. The neat thing of `let tags = "SELECT DISTINCT tags FROM posts"` or transforming blogging into effectively updating/adding records in a database is an extension of the blosxom zen of "it's just files [records], yo! go forth and edit them..."
- stevenicr 2y agowordpress.org is the defacto standard right? set plugins and themes to auto-update, add wordfence and change default settings. use updraft or similar to pull full backups on a schedule.
- gtirloni 2y ago> POSSE is the way to go. If you don’t promote your work, no one else will. I agree but when I tried this a few weeks ago, it looked like a lot of work to publish on my own blog and then replicate everywhere else. I didn't find a good tool and got lost trying out fediverse stuff.
- rednafi 2y agoI just post it manually on twitter, bluesky, mastodon, and linkedin. Works well for me. I tend not to look for a tool until a process starts hurting.
- gamedever 2y agoStrong disagree on Medium, Substack, etc. There are very famous and popular blogs on both with tons of followers. My sister asked for a blog, I steered her to substack. Zero effort, just works. > Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time. Nothing about substack wastes readers time. Conversely, what wastes their time is your site being down or hacked and what wastes your time is maintaining your blog's infra, updating because vulnerabilities, and/or using bad UIs like blogging from github (maybe passable for nerds, not for non-nerds) A blog isn't about the tech you use. It's about the writing. Worrying about tech is not going to add a single reader to your blog.
- alisonatwork 2y agoSubstack is trash. VC-backed, full of tracking pixels and privacy-invading anti-features, constant push to monetize, cross-promote and increase engagement... Every blogger who has moved there has gotten less interesting than they were when they were independent. It's everything that is wrong about social media cynically branded as some kind of alternative media outlet. Of course there is plenty of money to be made as a social media influencer who specializes in long form content, and if that's the career a person is interested in building then sure - Substack, Medium, whatever - great choice. But for people who are interested in blogging as it used to be, independent writers who want to write without the pressure of editors, without paywalls, without popups, without forcing their readers into signup funnels... It might be a bit more work to set up, but tools like WordPress, Ghost etc are better suited.
- eviks 2y ago> Nothing about substack wastes readers time. Login modal wastes time.
- hackitup7 2y agoI've had the exact same experience. I'd add that Substack will give you some mildly helpful distribution at times as well.