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

I used to think I would blog but I came to realize that it takes a certain personality to believe that others want to read what you think, and ultimately that’s not me.

Which is freeing: I can just write without caring about what anyone except myself thinks.

I refer back to it quite often. And it helps me clarify my thoughts to write them down.

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 I've recently played with and deployed on internal tools was a SPA built using just js. No react etc. Basic router which makes use of the history API and use the observer pattern with MVC for "components" but generally those are just entire pages.

And a "component" or "page" is just a function that takes a router (could extend it to include props I guess ala react) and returns a Promise.

All the router does is looks up the function in a map and calls it replacing the top level div on the page with the returned HTMLElement.

All external loading happens at the page level and not at component level and it's simple enough.

There's a point where you need a bigger framework like react but I find it a pain to include react and npm etc when all I need is some very simple pages with some dynamic content.

A writeup on the pros and cons etc might be fun.

The next thing I'm playing with is possibly something like a job system(well promises in JS would work fine) and using that for state updates. Think goroutines and channels. There are some existing articles on that but they reference very old libraries and I feel there might be no reason to use a library or even channels on the web for that concept.

This describes exactly how I started out. This setup held for a bit less than two years, then I went for a multi-page setup.

The first thing that I actually scripted was an RSS feed. And the with the first refactoring of the header, I went for an SSG.

If you want actually want to blog, I'd say: the best setup is whatever gets the least into the way of actually writing and hitting publish. Styling, deployment, navigation structure, JS-based routing, all cool, but only of secondary importance when your goal is writing in public.

I just finished Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird and it has a meaningful response to this.

“I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. The thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.”

For me, writing is like tidying up a messy room. When the clutter is gone, I can think more clearly and focus on new ideas, so I believe there is still a lot of value in writing without worrying about readers.