Ask HN: How do people find your blog?

To be honest I'm not sure, since I removed Google Analytics from my blog a few months ago and didn't bother replacing it with anything else. I do link to my blog from my few social media profiles, but in general I kind of just go with the "post and let it be discovered" thing. This is mostly because I use it as a public journal of sorts rather than something I want to drive a big audience for.

I started blogging in early 1998. Originally my goal was recording what I did so when it went wrong I could describe what I had done when seeking help. Now I write so I document want I did so I can do it again when I need to repeat it. That 'what did I do wrong'-aspect is there there and still heavily used.

How do people find me? Search engines I think. Many times I have encountered an obscure error message, searched for it on the webs, and found it documented in my own blog post.

Write what you're doing and how you're doing. Document the errors and the solutions for that error. Don't restrict your blog post to a list of steps. Things can and will go wrong. Document them too.

I read the mailing lists looking for answers and from time to time I would see someone had asked a question which I knew the answer. I would post the link to my blog post.

Start off by documenting everything you do as you do it. When you're replacing old SSDs with new and faster SSDs, write about that. Document each step. Someone else will be grateful that you did. Likely, that person will be you when you do to do it again a few years later.

One of my most popular blog posts is how to untar a tarball.... Do not underestimate what others will find useful.

I do nothing for my site besides just write about stuff I'm thinking about. I do try to keep it simple and fast-loading. Google searches sometimes turn up things I write. I guess I'm not going for much more than that! I'm a huge fan of RSS, and plan to write about my efforts getting Tiddlywiki (my site generator) to generate valid RSS feeds, but that work isn't complete yet.

As a reader, I continue to use RSS (self-hosted FreshRSS instance), which is great for tracking other blogs as well as Mastodon feeds. This has been great over the past week, since so many interesting folks are joining Mastodon.

EDIT: To your last point, anything I write that shows up submitted on social media (including HN) is posted by others...I don't tend to post stuff myself.