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Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

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141–150 of 173 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

#141
My 20 year old blog is private to myself. I have observed I keep having the same plans and ideas at different times. It has been very useful to pin those ideas down to a persistent plan or strategy.

I have also found it useful as I am an external thinker and over sharer. A day rarely passes that I don't send up a random thought to the blog, rather than it being an unnecessary whatsapp.

Re: Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

#143
post #141

My 20 year old blog is private to myself. I have observed I keep having the same plans and ideas at different times. It has been very useful to pin those ideas down to a persistent plan or strategy. I have also found it useful as I am an external thinker and over sharer. A day rarely passes that I don't send up a random thought to the blog, rather than it being an unnecessary whatsapp.

The replies here seem to give away the change that has brought about the ruining of the web. I have a blog, if I have to do a bunch of research to figure something out, I will write it up and date it and put it on the blog. I may use it as my notes research later, if someone else finds it useful... added bonus... That is much the way the original web used to work, and search engines just helped you find that. They no longer help you find helpful people, only SEO optimized, or ad supported content. If you want to build a following, then you are part of the new web, if you want to contribute to a searchable index of knowledge freely, then you are part of the old... IMHO...

Re: Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

#144
It's less about maintaining a personal blog than it is about regularly doing and writing about things that are "blog-worthy". There are many channels besides blogs - youtube, podcasts, social media, live feeds, github, huggingface - but they all require interesting content. I wouldn't get hung up on the medium, do interesting stuff and publish it.

Re: Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

#145
post #5

Define "worth it", but I've written a blog post about some printer driver issue two years ago and it now happened twice that someone (Older person, not very technical) reached out over email and asked for some further help and I could walk them step by step through using a Terminal, booting into macOS recovery mode and fixing the issue. The Apple store and Epson told them to do a clean install so they were very grate…

I wrote an article on how to resolve ink blobs smearing onto a page for Epson Expression printers years ago - just based on the people who've written me (which is just a fraction of the number that have found and viewed the page), I've extended the life of many Epson printers.

Re: Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

#147
Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

I keep an offline blog of sorts that is more or less only for the times when I want to reply with a long winded comment that is too much for an HN reply. If that occurs I fire up a VM, grab a LetsEncrypt cert and plonk down either a simple HTML or Text file created with vi to reply. There is no sense in my keeping the VM active given I block all the search engine, CDN networks and archive sites.

Re: Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

#148
It’s hit or miss. Most of the blog posts I write get little to no attention.

But a couple I wrote got picked up by a bunch of media publications, and resulted in a few job/contracting offers (none of which I accepted but they were still offers).

So it’s a lottery, IMO. But when one breaks through, it could be potentially worth it

Re: Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

#149
post #141

My 20 year old blog is private to myself. I have observed I keep having the same plans and ideas at different times. It has been very useful to pin those ideas down to a persistent plan or strategy. I have also found it useful as I am an external thinker and over sharer. A day rarely passes that I don't send up a random thought to the blog, rather than it being an unnecessary whatsapp.

The replies here seem to give away the change that has brought about the ruining of the web. I have a blog, if I have to do a bunch of research to figure something out, I will write it up and date it and put it on the blog. I may use it as my notes research later, if someone else finds it useful... added bonus... That is much the way the original web used to work, and search engines just helped you find that. They no…

This is exactly why I started to blog 20 years ago. To remind myself how to do things and help those who stumbled across the posts. It was a way of saying thank you other people's posts who had helped me.

Re: Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

#150
post #82

The fact that so few people blog these days makes blogging even more influential than it used to be. You can establish yourself as something of a global expert on some topic just by writing about it a few times a month over the course of a year! Don't expect people to come to your blog. Practice https://indieweb.org/POSSE - Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - post things on your blog and then tweet/toot…

This. I've been doing mostly non-technical blogging since blogging was a thing, and this all tallies with my experience. And that last paragraph is key: "There's a lot to be said for writing for its own sake, too."

In short, when you are blogging you are actually writing for yourself. If other folks find it useful/interesting/amusing, that's gravy.

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