51–60 of 173 posts
I'd say that maintaining a personal blog is more about the long-term effect of building your content.
It's a way to express yourself in the way you want, having your own UI, your own styles, your own way to write things on it.
In the final sense, it's everything about you, having readers is more a consequence of it. And IMO you shouldn't care about if you have it or not.
In my case, I enjoy having a personal space. I had multiple posts I really wanted to write and share with my friends.
I don't want to spend time and energy promoting the blog and competing for attention. But I know some people enjoy following it. That said, I also shared a few posts on HackerNews and Reddit and some of them went viral (10k+ views).
But most posts get very few views. So it's worth it only if I do it for me and my friends, and don't have much expectations.
1) I write a personal blog [0] whose posts I sometimes share here [1]. I write mainly to understand what I think and to have a "prepared statement" for conversations I am having with friends. If I develop a brand at some point, great, but it's not the point. 2) Looking at some blogs that routinely do well on HN (e.g. Dan Luu [2], Jake Seliger, [3] or Jeff Kaufman [4]), I don't see a lot of SEO-/algo-aware optimizatio…
If you’re worried your blog has to compete AI-generated content, I’m not sure that you should be writing it.
[0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2024/11/16/blogging-through-the...
[1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/technical-b...
Yes. I like _writing_ because it's an effective way of learning (at least for me), since explaining something is very different than "just" doing something. I don't track visitors/analytics on my blog, so I don't really care how many people read it, but it forces me to dive just a little bit deeper into topics than I usually would for side projects and experiments. I also have no problem admitting if I misunderstand…
I would go even further. Trying to develop a “brand” that stands above the noise isn’t worth it. That’s not saying writing isn’t important. I don’t think I understand a subject unless I can teach it, explain it and argue both sides about why you should and shouldn’t use it. If I were going to go into independent consulting as oppose to working for consulting companies, I might start a blog a year ahead of time. But i…
Not to mention that while you may not host the blog yourself, you will own the content. You can transport it anywhere, regardless of the shape of your blog.
As far as brand, finding readers and sharing content goes, I think plugging your blog posts here and there to your communities and social media platforms of choice is sufficient. Being algorithmically savvy about the process can be good, but posting to your favorite Discord server, your favorite social media network, and even just emailing/texting/DMs people works well too. Also... HN is good for this too, of course.