81–90 of 113 posts
Results: Much learning. Fun. Friendships. Kind notes from strangers. Occasional satisfaction.
I agree with you, Jose. Thanks! -Cliff
The internet is ephemeral. Blogging platform user accounts, domain names, VPSes, IP addresses, home servers, and software like Wordpress, Apache/Nginx, or Linux distributions don't last forever and require frequent maintenance and updates. If you passed away tomorrow, it's unlikely your content would be accessible online for more than a few years from now.
If you want your work to survive as long as possible, print your texts on acid-free materials and store them in a plastic bag within a Thermos-like container to protect against temperature, humidity, and light changes, as well as water and chemicals. Distribute copies globally for redundancy against disasters and fires, and there's a reasonable chance your work will be around for at least a thousand years.
However, we blog and put our work online not for ownership or preservation, but to get it out there. The internet is a communication tool, and it has short-attention-span readers anyways. The goal is to disseminate your work rather than own or preserve it. So does it matter if it's on a platform that will die in a decade?
If you want your work to be preserved for many hundreds of years and in a way that's accessible to everyone, you need to build a monument. Otherwise, you can pick one of the two: dissemination or preservation. Though of course, improving the longevity of your content on the internet can be done and it's not entirely black and white. But if we are looking at the big picture and using words like "forever", I don't think internet is a medium for preserving anything on that scale, nor will it exist in the form it does today a hundred years from now.
"Spend your time creating something" Check: making topological shapes "Get a domain you like " Check: kleinbottle.com "Maintain it for a long time, [perhaps as] static html" Check: since 1996 "Share your writing, photos, designs" Check: everything's self-written & self-coded "No investors" Check. Results: Much learning. Fun. Friendships. Kind notes from strangers. Occasional satisfaction. I agree with you, Jose. Than…
List of reasons why this is very narrow minded: 1. You still own your work if you post it other places, just not the platform. 2. You own the platform if you host it on a VPS, but not the hardware. 3. You own the hardware if you host it at home, but still, only license the software which runs it. 4. Many more. You want real advice? Ignore this guy, and just start. Most of you people concerned on where you should star…
Exactly. Whether you control the underlying operating system (or network connection) or just the content at the application layer, you're still relying on someone else. If you don't have good content to share, it's moot anyway. At the end of the day, any service trades control for convenience/access. I run a podcast hosting service that's slightly more expensive than hosting yourself with WordPress. Paying me to host…
Who even cares about this? Everybody's first few blog posts suck. It is better to be prolific than perfect.
The underlying truth behind all such discussions is that too many people focus on the mechanics of content hosting and delivery but have nothing special to actually share. So they will spend all their time engineering the perfect blog site from scratch or moving from platform to platform looking for an ideological fit while no one really cares about consuming any of their output. My advice is always to forget about t…
> ”If there is value in what you write then the readers will be there” I don’t think that’s true anymore. Of course, it depends on how you define “value”, but I think having something “special” to share not always attract readers. Controversial takes, click bait, hate bait, exaggerated praising to a specific niche, all of this works better than “value” in your writing to get readers. Even if you stick to “value”, you…
I get the point of results counter to common wisdom though. The pendulum is always swinging so sometimes one side is right and sometimes its the other but that doesn't make it wrong. Life requires timing along with critical thinking.
The underlying truth behind all such discussions is that too many people focus on the mechanics of content hosting and delivery but have nothing special to actually share. So they will spend all their time engineering the perfect blog site from scratch or moving from platform to platform looking for an ideological fit while no one really cares about consuming any of their output. My advice is always to forget about t…
How will the readers find you?
Just like with other products and services: you market it.
The underlying truth behind all such discussions is that too many people focus on the mechanics of content hosting and delivery but have nothing special to actually share. So they will spend all their time engineering the perfect blog site from scratch or moving from platform to platform looking for an ideological fit while no one really cares about consuming any of their output. My advice is always to forget about t…
I've been running a blog on a Perl/flatfile static site generator (with MySQL bolted on later for search) since 1999. Made a few tweaks over the years, but the core of the same. Had lots of people over the years suggest better ways to run a blog, but none of them were getting the traffic I got (well, used to get), and none of their options are nearly as easy to use. If you do use a third party, please regularly downl…
"Spend your time creating something" Check: making topological shapes "Get a domain you like " Check: kleinbottle.com "Maintain it for a long time, [perhaps as] static html" Check: since 1996 "Share your writing, photos, designs" Check: everything's self-written & self-coded "No investors" Check. Results: Much learning. Fun. Friendships. Kind notes from strangers. Occasional satisfaction. I agree with you, Jose. Than…
So yesterday I was reviewing my options for rebooting my tech blogging, and went looking at the platforms. I was steering towards HashNode after reading the advice from another technical blogger to say to just focus on your content. It does look like a quality site for technical blogging. But for me a must-have is the ability to write off-line and it doesn't look like that is possible with HashNode. It has an API but it's WAY more complicated than is warranted and seem to exist just for the purpose of saying that it's technically possible to upload your content instead of using their online editor.
Another thing that happened yesterday is that after searching for over an hour, I was still unable to locate my old Blogger site where I was writing about computer vision some time around 2006. I've changed computers several times since then, and whatever notes I had did not make the transition to my newer workstations. So sad. Clearly this could happen even if you self-publish but I think it's less likely. I still have all of my original self-published blog articles, and those were from around the same time.
Anyway, yesterday I had settled on either using Blogger again, or using HashNode. But after reading this article and the HN discussions I'm not so sure. I am going to look back at my self-written SSG from ~2008, and see how hard it would be to have those same semantics in the cloud (wasn't an option back then). A static site is fine if you don't need the social and collaborative features.
Another thing I'll mention - in the context of the POSSE principle mentioned by others - is that IFTTT is like $5/month and seems well-suited to the POSSE approach of publishing.