Saved me from repeating myself.
Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
251–260 of 459 posts
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#252i think it makes someone stand out ever so slightly, though an active GitHub does more so. But in my case I'm interested in writing more so it's supposed to incentivize that behavior from me, so a creative outlet
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#253Absolutely nothing besides teaching me how awesome tailwind typography is.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#254For me it has done a couple of things. I do have to say though. I write like a couple blog posts a year or longer inbetween. Ive only recently starting doing more frequent posts.
1. It lets me experiment with web tech. I redo my website every few years. Be it JS, CSS, static generated sites, etc. I usually find a theme I like and start modifying it to see how things work nowadays. Most recent attempt is to use that with a Golang and go:embed to make a self-contained blog in a binary.
2. Sometimes I just want to share knowledge or info. Might not be perfect, but its fun to get it out of my head instead of letting it stew. If it helps 1 person figure something out, it is a win. I recently had a coworker find my blog post on setting up Stable Diffusion on AMD through Hacker News by accident. He used it as a reference to get his own stuff working for a less than perfect setup.
3. I once posted one of my posts on here. It surprisingly went well, and had some good discussion on it. So that is fun. But I am of the mindset that I don't want to post my own articles (as their own HN posts, I am fine with linking to things in comments on occasion). They should show up on HN naturally if they are useful to someone enough to get posted. I also fear them getting ripped to shreds (probably some form of imposter syndrome) by HN readers.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoever you use, Medium, Substack, Wordpress, your blog is in their hands. If one day you forget to do XYZ task, they can take it all away. You need to control your audience to reduce chances of "unforeseen circumstances"
Can you elaborate on: > If one day you forget to do XYZ task, they can take it all away. What kinds of tasks? Who's they? I can see Medium and Substack changing their rules and stuff. But WordPress? Isn't it controlled entirely by you?
>> What kinds of tasks? Who's they?
They is whatever service you are signed up to that is outside of your control.
"Takes it all away" I think is really meant to mean a multitude of things. At the worst end is the service closing down unexpectedly. They may have been impacted by a cyberattack, haven't been paying hosting bills, never tested backups etc. Your site is under something.theirdomain.com and theirdomain.com is sold in a fire sale. Your audience can't get to the site and you can't redirect them.
More frequently there is an abhorrent change to the service from your perspective. Perhaps they start inserting ads into your content, charging for previously free features, or even repurposing your content per their terms that you didn't read when signing up to coolservice.com. These kinds of changes are more insidious. On the lowest end, they may just change their system to be a worse experience for you with some new user interface that you don't like.
You can see how these things are going to go from the start. Startup invests in a nice user interface and they are declared the new darling without any viable business model. They can only operate this way for a while because it's unsustainable. Things change for the worse and the pattern is repeated. Sometimes the new kid considers how to make a sustainable business which can be an anathema in their startup community and things stay better for longer. I've not studied Substack, but I think they may have thought more about this.
>> But WordPress? Isn't it controlled entirely by you?
WordPress.com hosts WP for you. WordPress.org offers the open source version of the product.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoever you use, Medium, Substack, Wordpress, your blog is in their hands. If one day you forget to do XYZ task, they can take it all away. You need to control your audience to reduce chances of "unforeseen circumstances"
Can you elaborate on: > If one day you forget to do XYZ task, they can take it all away. What kinds of tasks? Who's they? I can see Medium and Substack changing their rules and stuff. But WordPress? Isn't it controlled entirely by you?
They could be referencing wordpress.com, which is the hosted version of WordPress, rather than wordpress.org which is the open-source self-hosted version.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#257There is an extensive network of caves under my city that were used by beer breweries in the 1800's to store beer. They are all but inaccessible, and, at the time, kind of a myth. Most people didn't believe they still existed. I was fascinated by this and I compiled as much information as I could find on my personal website in the early 2000's. One day I received an email, "do you want to go into the caves? I know so…
> Best part is I didn't get murdered.
I was almost going to say this sounds crazy dangerous and more like a trap, but 15 years ago I would have done the same and probably came out safe.
I don't know what changed, it feels like things are getting more dangerous, but unsure if it's perception, or the truth.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#258I had a fairly extensive personal web site for a number of years used as a professional profile. Unfortunately someone I met on a dating app turned out to be a bit of a psychopath and I had to pretty much cut her off. She managed to find the web site on the public Internet and get in contact with me directly and caused me a lot of problems leading to me having to dispose of the web site, the domain, my phone number and update lots of professional contacts.
I prefer a lot of anonymity now. I don't have any social media profiles or public facing stuff. And you know what? It has done no harm whatsoever to my professional life or connections. All that stuff that sucks you in is 100% optional.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#259Cost me money.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#260I started, I just didn't have the time and realized my blog was **. Looking around most other blogs are equally bad. There are some good writers out ther but the majority of tech people aren't.