Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

#121

Post by branon » Mon, Jul 18, 2022, 3:06 PM UTC

xena wrote: post #107

I've found it worth doing. My blog (xeiaso.net, formerly christine.website) is the main way that I get employed at this point. It also helps that people link it here a lot. After 100 articles or so writing got a lot easier and now people rely on my blog for a lot of things. I think it's worth it, but I've also been exclusively self-hosting it. I currently have the code (and writing) open source on GitHub ( https://gi…

Hey I read your blog a lot and it's definitely one of the more impressive I've seen, I don't write much (yet) but the structure and style of xeiaso.net is something I admire and would like to emulate

Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

#122

Post by iamflimflam1 » Mon, Jul 18, 2022, 3:07 PM UTC

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #118

During pandemic I started up a YouTube channel (I'm sure I'm not alone...) just to document my side projects ( https://www.youtube.com/c/atomic14 ) - for some reason I've found it much easier to publish videos than write blog posts. The YouTube channel has done fairly well with around 24,000 subs and has led to a lot of interesting conversations and consulting work. My original intention was to do blog posts in conju…

The actual blog is a Jekyll site hosted on S3 and CloudFront - it's due a bit of a redesign and refresh, but does the job.

Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

#123

Post by eropple » Mon, Jul 18, 2022, 3:07 PM UTC

krageon wrote: post #110

hkon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube took over that niche. What used to be a blog post is now a 10 minute video.

It didn't, because there is barely anything of any substance on YouTube. If there is, it's by someone with a production team - which is very far removed from the use-case of a blog.

I think that's a really dismissive claim. I'm literally browsing HN coming off of this video by toldinstone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDeQkttORoc

Substantial, I think. I've been there and I learned stuff from this video. And he does not have "a production team".

I kinda find that YouTube feeds you what you want to find, once it knows a little about you. If you want insubstantial content, it's absolutely there, but you can tell it not to serve you slop in an instant.

Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

#124

Post by cableshaft » Mon, Jul 18, 2022, 3:08 PM UTC

xena wrote: post #107

I've found it worth doing. My blog (xeiaso.net, formerly christine.website) is the main way that I get employed at this point. It also helps that people link it here a lot. After 100 articles or so writing got a lot easier and now people rely on my blog for a lot of things. I think it's worth it, but I've also been exclusively self-hosting it. I currently have the code (and writing) open source on GitHub ( https://gi…

> people keep copying it, slathering it in ads and rehosting it

Didn't occur to me that could be a thing, but of course it is. People suck.

Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

#125

Post by Barrera » Mon, Jul 18, 2022, 3:09 PM UTC

> Writing up my thoughts in presentable state took too much time/effort.

What you may not realize is how crucial writing is to thinking. You won't really know what you think about a topic until you try to put those thoughts into a persuasive or informative essay. The "time/effort" is an investment in your brain.

This is something I've personally experienced hundreds of times.

It's possible to do as you are doing and not publish written thoughts. However, doing so motivates thinking about the topic from many different perspectives as you try to anticipate objections/questions.

Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

#126

Post by dynamite-ready » Mon, Jul 18, 2022, 3:09 PM UTC

I'm new to blogging (shameless plug https://raskie.com), so keenly feel the pain of writing content. But it's a satisfying experience, even if it can be a bit frustrating. If it's a tech blog, sometimes, the feeling of completion is at least as satisfying as solving a particularly difficult programming problem, or writing a small program. All the more satisfyingly when people read the content, and appreciate it in some small way.

So yeah. I find it valuable, even if I do sometimes feel like 'I could be writing some code / designing something right now'.

A problem I think I have is knowing when to stop writing... I look around at other people's blogs, and see all these succinct, perfectly targeted paragraphs, all the while considering my work to be bloated and overly long. But I do try to reread and rewrite stuff. I think it's a skill worth working on, so that's another reason why I spend the time doing it.

Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

#127

Post by dhosek » Mon, Jul 18, 2022, 3:09 PM UTC

I view my two main blogs (https://finl.xyz for the finl project and https://dahosek.com for my writing) to largely be an investment in the future. I occasionally get people visiting the former who have interesting suggestions (it was actually someone from HN who got me to consider rust as the dev language and that was definitely worth it alone). The writing site, in some ways is most useful to me so that I know where I can go to get to links to my published writing, but I’ve had occasional others visit and comment (in one case, a question that I had about an author that I posted in one blog post, the author himself answered).

I keep no analytics on either site. I assume no one reads them and leave it at that. It makes me much happier that way.

Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

#128

Post by somenewaccount1 » Mon, Jul 18, 2022, 3:10 PM UTC

Back in 2010 I started a blog and my first post was how to use some auth plugin for Ruby on Rails (quite popular at the time). The article ranked number one on "how to use that thing", and I have to say, it was cool seeing my blog at the top of the google news results, and seeing actual traffic from users that I (hope) were getting some benefit from the writing.

That said, it was indeed a PITA to keep up and I eventually just let it die. That one article had taken almost 2 weeks to write and I didn't have that sort of time or interest to devote to other topics, which undoubtably would have been less interesting.

The point is though, for those that find early success, it can be quite pleasurable and addicting. For those that don't, it might be an exercise in pure personal growth.

Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

#129

Post by sandyarmstrong » Mon, Jul 18, 2022, 3:10 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #117

From the hiring side, I always spend time reading people's blogs, Github, or social media if they make an effort to include it on their resume. 9 out of 10 times, blogs are extremely stale content from 5+ years back. A lot of people start blogging at the beginning of their careers and then just stop. This creates a weird frozen-in-time effect where what's shown on their blog doesn't match their current skillset at al…

The trend to remove dates from blog posts is problematic for just this reason (as well as being reader-hostile).

Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

#130

Post by psim1 » Mon, Jul 18, 2022, 3:11 PM UTC

I found blogging to be too open-ended. I need some prompting, and I found that by participating in topical forums related to my interests and expertise. When someone would pose a problem or ask a question, I would dig into the threads that interested me a lot and found great satisfaction in working with anyone to solve an interesting problem.

After a few years of this I have become known in some of these communities as an expert, have received requests for paid work, have been referred for paid work, and have absolutely learned a lot.

My only tip if you take this direction is to find community forums that are specific -- not Reddit. Reddit has too many casual browsers and commenters and is not well-regulated. Participate in forums that are more professionally oriented or have a professional feel. If you see a lot of troll posts, don't waste your time.