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

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

#161

Post by palidanx »

Initially I sent out Mailchimp newsletters to my closest friends, but found the interface a bit clunky, so instead switched to Wordpress. What I do is write specifically for the audience of my friends, send them the newsletter, and post it on the Internet.

What I found kind of interesting, is when I would see some of my friends months later, they would cite something they found interesting from the blog. Occasionally, I peek at the metrics, and it is in the low single digits, but I'm okay with that as long as my friends have seen it.

My guess is with the inundation of shallow knowledge and posts people resonate with deeper writing.

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

#162

Post by smsm42 »

I have a blog still, which I've maintained since 2001. But I have no interest in having "personal brand", whatever it is, I just enjoy it. I also read a number of technical blogs. Most of them I found by word of mouth - somebody referenced it somewhere, the content was good, I got interested, browsed the other entries and decided this is something I want to be reading on the ongoing basis.

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

#163

Post by jpc0 »

i-dont-remember wrote: post #160
jpc0 wrote: post #136

Your post actually inspired me to want to start blogging so I will share what I'm thinking about. Plain HTML only with a single page and hyperlinks into a specific article. Very basic styling and no JS, don't even necessarily want to have a css file, just inline in the header. Very likely just setting font family to sans and be done with it. I sometimes play with esoteric stuff that might be fun to blog about. Stuff…

if you want to get started writing super quick, you can also take a look at some of the super minimalist platforms that are basically as you describe - like https://bearblog.dev/ and https://mataroa.blog/ . I've stumbled on both from submissions to HN and they have become my recommendations for friends that want to write, especially the couple who are prone to jumping down technical rabbit holes & not ever getting to…

> Bear Blog has been built as a platform and not as an individual blog generator. It is more like Substack than Hugo. Due to this it isn't possible to individually self-host a Bear Blog.

Guessing the other is similar.

To be honest a single HTML file which is what I'm thinking of, I can grab a shared server from any of the old school hosting providers ans upload an HTML page... Or deploy staight to cloudflare/gcp/azure/aws just as easily.

Sure for some people that is a lot of work but I do a lot of devops/infra work and it will take me more time to write the HTML page than to deploy it on the web with SSL... To put it into perspective I already have a VPS with nginx infront if it...

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

#164

Post by rishikeshs »

I think more than anything, the sense of tweaking, writing and publishing my blog is unmatched!

I wrote a bit about it recently here: https://rishikeshs.com/blogging-friction/

Apart from the joy of it, my blog has helped me in my career. I had applied for a job in my niche area which required me to have some writing experience. But I never had anything other than my blog to showcase. This gave the interviewer bit of a confidence and eventually ended up giving me an offer.

On the dev side, I learnt hugo, the whole world of static generators and eventually had a slight programming because of my blog. When a client reached out to me out of the blue for a project, I asked him how he found me. He found me via blog and my online presence made him more confident in giving me work.

Other than this, my blog is a wiki of my life. As someone else said in comments, I don’t care if no one reads, I’ll still publish.

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

#165

Post by 1024kb »

theshrike79 wrote: post #122
simonw wrote: 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…

POSSE is the way. I don't have a blog, but I POSSE by keeping stuff I write in Obsidian. The internet is a circular loop of "engagement", the same crap comes up everywhere. People as recommendations for the same stuff, argue about the same things. I got tired of rewriting the same thing from memory so now I have it pre-written (And sourced in some cases) in Obsidian. I can just copy-paste from there with minor modifi…

This feels like the perfect segway to POSSE my own blog, that I have recently started. I went through the same process when trying to chose a framework to write my blog, and I was never happy with the options. so...

https://g9h.io/write-your-own-static-site-generator.html

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

#166

Post by skydhash »

bitbasher wrote: post #99
nicce wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the "worth it" includes provable portfolio of skills, I don't know a better place than series of well-written blog posts. Other "worth it" could be the development of your writing skills, documenting own learning path and so on. Maybe something can be even useful for you as well later on. If you think "worth it" as a way to get attention, get job offers automatically e.g., likely not worth it unless it gets HN fro…

I've had hn "front page" blog posts multiple times, and no I never got any job offers ;p

I think it’s more kind of a supportive role. Like a portfolio for an artist, it helps with marketing yourself to the other person. Like: “Yes, I know embedded programming, I even blogged about $PROJECT I did a while back”. Having something that can be independently verified and judged helps more that talking.

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

#168

Post by carlosjobim »

theshrike79 wrote: post #123
dewey wrote: 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 think the issue nowadays is that people expect to have a MILLION FOLLOWERS and a revenue stream and a personal brand and and... In the ye olden days people just blogged about stuff they found interesting. If nobody read it, it was still out there for someone to find. I can remember multiple times where finding some obscure blog helped me debug an issue I had. Now it's all hidden in Reddit or even worse in TikTok or…

In ye olden days, people who were online had a stable income from a cushy job or retirement, with ample of free time and energy to do a bit of blogging.

In today's world of global economic depression, everybody is fucking bloodshot eyed desperate to make enough money to have a roof over their head. So if they have time and energy to make a quality blog, it means they are scraping by financially and need to monetize ASAP. And if they are employed it means they don't have the time or energy left when they're at home to make a quality blog.

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

#169

Post by mikewarot »

theshrike79 wrote: post #122
simonw wrote: 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…

POSSE is the way. I don't have a blog, but I POSSE by keeping stuff I write in Obsidian. The internet is a circular loop of "engagement", the same crap comes up everywhere. People as recommendations for the same stuff, argue about the same things. I got tired of rewriting the same thing from memory so now I have it pre-written (And sourced in some cases) in Obsidian. I can just copy-paste from there with minor modifi…

The whole point is to point back to something public, building links to increase it's Google Juice. I thought Obsidian was a private repository, thus there are no links, and all you're doing is feeding some future AI, for no private benefit.
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