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Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

henrikkarlsson.xyz

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Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#71

Post by jraph »

gerdesj wrote: post #36

Why do you insist on only using the middle third of my screen to display content? I'm over 50 and my eyes are not quite what they used to be. Your 12pt (ish) text is largely legible to me but why do you insist on your idea of presentation, rather than mine? The whole point of the www as far as I recall is that you send a message and I receive it. How it is formatted should largely be a matter for the recipient, with…

Content width is an odd thing to complain about:

- everybody limits it. This is because no matter the size of your screen, the human eyes are somewhat limited to lines of 70-130 characters. Higher than that, and your eyes have hard time finding the next line at the end of the previous one because the travel is too high. As a web page writer, you need to take care of that, because the default presentation will be bad for everyone if you don't.

- as it happens, the author uses Subtrack so they might not even have picked that size consciously.

- reader mode works on this page, so you can use this to read the post the way you want, and if you like the content and would like to read it regularly, there is an RSS feed that you can use with a client that displays posts the way you want.

The last point is why separate style sheets and correctly structured content are so nice: if you have such a strong opinion, you can tweak stuff or even ignore the style sheet and use yours. And reader mode actually makes that practical for most blog posts / articles.

(that said, I agree that the width seems particularly small, I replaced it with 80ex just to try and it looked better to me - but I just set up a new WordPress website and the default 2025 theme has the same ~730px width for the content, I don't know what's with this default size)

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#72

Post by gffrd »

snackbroken wrote: post #57
rednafi wrote: post #43

I 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…

> If you don’t promote your work, no one else will. This has not been my experience. If you do interesting things then there are plenty of people who are willing to bring attention to it. I've been cold-emailed by journalists wanting to interview me without ever doing anything other than a) make my work publicly accessible and b) collaborate with like-minded people. Perhaps I'm lucky (probably). Perhaps my work would…

> the only way to achieve broad appeal is to not offend anyone's tastes and the only way to do that is to be bland

Careful. While I agree with the premise, you make it sound binary. You can have broad-er appeal while still being individual.

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#73

Post by nthingtohide »

semking wrote: post #24

Serious question, as someone who recently started writing: • How do you guys feel about your thoughts, ideas and creativity being scraped and secretly added to the training corpus of AI models?

People donate their bodies for science after death. I am ready to donate my thoughts. My thoughts are just clever rearrangement of already existing ideas, just like my body is of atoms.

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#74

Post by pyuser583 »

rednafi wrote: post #43

I 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…

What tech do you recommend for own site? Wordpress?

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#77

Post by egeozcan »

gffrd wrote: post #69
fsckboy wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don’t be that JS guy who rewrites their entire site every week in a different stack and writes a blog post about it. seems like a perfectly reasonable idea for a blog about different stacks. I'm not advocating it, but there's nothing wrong with it if that's what interests you.

You’re missing the point. OP is saying don’t be the person who says they want to write about Frogs, but who then spends an immense amount of effort not writing about Frogs, and writing about procrastination instead.

If it had been phrased like yours, I'd completely agree. I reread that part from the OP, but the point really doesn't come across.

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#78

Post by al_borland »

1dom wrote: post #68
al_borland wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a question more people need to ask. Be it a blog, YouTube channel, podcast, or whatever else, they all need to be rooted in having something worth to sharing to some small piece of the world. Many people get caught up in thinking the blog, YouTube, or podcast is the thing, when it’s just the thing that lets you share the real thing. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to really integrate this lesson.

That sounds like a chicken/egg scenario: how are you supposed to know if you have something worth sharing without producing that something first to make that assessment? I think putting more questions and uncertainty in the way of actually just writing/podcasting/youtubing is what stops a lot of people really building the habit in the first place.

That’s just it, a lot of people want to write, podcast, or be a YouTuber, but they struggle with ideas. They want to use the medium, but they don’t have content ideas. The “real thing” I was talking about is the overarching theme or topic. What are you into, what are you going to write, podcast, or make videos about?

I think understanding what you want to share helps solve the major stumbling block that leads to thousands of blogs with one entry that is effectively hello-world. If told to draw anything, most people will sit with a blank page. However, if they are told to draw a castle, those bounds give them the freedom to start and create, and it can evolve from there.

What are you into to? What hobbies do you have? What do you know, or have opinions about, that others might be interested in? This is your theme, the “real thing”. Writing, podcasting, or video production, without this usually falls flat after 1 or 2 attempts, and it makes it impossible for a habit to form.

If you’re already into something and doing it on a regular basis, then you’re just writing about, talking about it, or recording what you’re already doing or thinking about all the time anyway. The content and ideas can flow more easily, especially at the beginning. Not to mention, being more motivated to make the content, since it’s already a passion.

So many people are trying to make content about nothing, because they aren’t really doing anything else… and this is where friction is born. Do something you find interesting, then share that thing and your perspective on it. Start with the doing, not the sharing (writing, podcasting, and YouTubing is the sharing).

Hopefully this clarifies what I was getting at and resolves the chicken/egg thoughts.

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#79

Post by crackalamoo »

pyuser583 wrote: post #74
rednafi wrote: post #43

I 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…

What tech do you recommend for own site? Wordpress?

It probably doesn't matter much either way, but I use vanilla HTML/JS

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#80

Post by crimsoneer »

jongjong wrote: post #41

[flagged]

I can name 5 excellent "semi-technical" blogs off the top of my head, so this suggests me to me you need to do a better job of nurturing your digital reading list more than anything else (and I say that as a big user of LLMs). Blogs aren't there to replace... tutorials and documentation.
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