[flagged]
Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
41–50 of 196 posts
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#42My advice is do it for yourself, any engagement is a bonus, and don't lock it behind a wall like Substack etc.
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#43I have been maintaining a semi-successful blog [1] for the last five years and have learned a few things along the way:
- Own your content: Medium, Substack, Hashnode, Dev.to—all of them suck. Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time.
- No one cares about the technology behind your site unless it’s huge. So it should be the least of your concerns. Don’t be that JS guy who rewrites their entire site every week in a different stack and writes a blog post about it.
- Consistently writing is a lot of work, and there’s no way around it.
- Picking a niche and writing about it yields better results than trying to write about anything and everything.
- No one will probably read it for a long time, and that’s okay. You should write only for yourself in the beginning.
- POSSE is the way to go. If you don’t promote your work, no one else will.
- That said, if it took less time to write than it would take someone to read, it’s probably not worth writing.
[1]: https://rednafi.com
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#44I have been maintaining a semi-successful blog [1] for the last five years and have learned a few things along the way: - Own your content: Medium, Substack, Hashnode, Dev.to—all of them suck. Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time. - No one cares about the technology behind your site unless it’s huge. So it should be the least of your concerns. Don’t be that JS guy who rewrites their entire site every w…
POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
I didn’t know what this acronym meant. Hopefully I saved someone a Google search.
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> is this like "I want to be in a band" of a previous generation? People started blogs for that? I thought that was more the realm of supermarket bulletin boards next to the firewood flyer. Maybe I'm just from a previous previous generation. How can "a friend" post something on a supermarket bulletin board now that they don't seem to exist?
“Do you want to be a Writer, or do you want to write ?” I think that almost any question of the form “Do you want to be an X er, or do you want to X ” is useful these days.
100%. As a kid growing up near a golf course I knew lots of kids who wanted to be a pro golfer (me too). Did they want to spend 10 hrs a day at the range hitting ball after ball? Not so much. Lots of people want to be Warren Buffett - do they want to read 10-ks for 10 hrs a day? Not so much.
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#46[flagged]
Hard disagree. I write for myself and still use the search functionality on my site [1] to find things quickly.
I also regularly read the work of Julia Evans, Brandur Leach, Armin Ronacher, and Patrick Dubroy, and none of them generate slop about the latest tech. On top of that, engineering blogs from Netflix, Uber, Stripe, and Salesforce are irreplaceable for me.
I use LLMs a ton and still think human writing is even more valuable now that generating formulaic junk is so easy.
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#47I have been maintaining a semi-successful blog [1] for the last five years and have learned a few things along the way: - Own your content: Medium, Substack, Hashnode, Dev.to—all of them suck. Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time. - No one cares about the technology behind your site unless it’s huge. So it should be the least of your concerns. Don’t be that JS guy who rewrites their entire site every w…
>POSSE
What does this mean? (Googling wasn't helpful.)
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#48I have been maintaining a semi-successful blog [1] for the last five years and have learned a few things along the way: - Own your content: Medium, Substack, Hashnode, Dev.to—all of them suck. Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time. - No one cares about the technology behind your site unless it’s huge. So it should be the least of your concerns. Don’t be that JS guy who rewrites their entire site every w…
I'd argue that you could write only for yourself for your entire life and still have a successful blog.
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#49I have been maintaining a semi-successful blog [1] for the last five years and have learned a few things along the way: - Own your content: Medium, Substack, Hashnode, Dev.to—all of them suck. Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time. - No one cares about the technology behind your site unless it’s huge. So it should be the least of your concerns. Don’t be that JS guy who rewrites their entire site every w…
I'd argue that you could write only for yourself for your entire life and still have a successful blog.
Yep. The success metric isn’t unidimensional here. Having external readers is just a cherry on top. I didn’t even think anyone else would find my writings interesting, let alone useful.
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#50I have been maintaining a semi-successful blog [1] for the last five years and have learned a few things along the way: - Own your content: Medium, Substack, Hashnode, Dev.to—all of them suck. Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time. - No one cares about the technology behind your site unless it’s huge. So it should be the least of your concerns. Don’t be that JS guy who rewrites their entire site every w…
>POSSE What does this mean? (Googling wasn't helpful.)
POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.