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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

#81

Post by watwut »

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.

Nothing wrong with that either. It is an unpaid hobby. Doing what you feel like doing is perfectly fine.

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

#83

Post by duggan »

heelix wrote: post #30
aradox66 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH setting up a static blog site is a great way to procrastinate on actually writing blog posts

Ouch... that actually hits a bit close to home. After having a couple of blogging homes fold out from under me, I've kicked around the idea of coding up my own blog - which usually was in whatever framework/language I was getting ramped up in. I realize I've probably ported/built something a half a dozen times in the last decade, and never bothered to take the final step to deploy it before starting the next rewrite.

Take the last step! Just try not to account for it as the culmination of a decade’s work in your head.

I recently rebuilt my own blog over the course of a month or so after a decade hiatus (and wrote about it, of course[1]).

I enjoyed the process of working through all my little ideas and deploying it — and continuing to tinker on it.

1: https://duggan.ie/posts/ignoring-good-advice-and-building-my...

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

#84

Post by watwut »

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?

I kinda lost motivation to write tutorials and such. It is going to be an input for AI, so why bother.

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

#85

Post by mangeshm »

Hey, you are a great inspiraiton and I really like to read your blogs. I have been maintaining a broken blog since I was 16 (currently 19) and last year I started writing actively about everything I do.

I started reading more and more books and have seen a lot of improvements in writing. I am not inspired by anyone's writing style but yes I am writing for the sake of my own curiosity and fun. I did follow some of your ideas on how you write though xD

my blog: https://mangeshm.xyz/ some recent articles about my thinking and some stories I've written.

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

#86

Post by raesene9 »

I've been blogging for just over 20 years at this point, my main takeaways

1) Blog for yourself and no-one else. Write things up because you find them interesting or you learned something. Trying to second-guess things like what will be popular or get engagement is not a fun time for what is likely to be a hobby.

2) Keep it low maintenance and simple publishing process. I use Github pages and Jekyll, but other similar options are available.

3) If you're doing technical content, try to have practical examples. I've had multiple times where I thought I knew how something worked and, in the process of writing a blog with practical examples, found out I was wrong about how it worked!

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

#87

Post by narmontas »

revicon wrote: post #44
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…

POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. I didn’t know what this acronym meant. Hopefully I saved someone a Google search. https://indieweb.org/POSSE

I searched for this and then came back, only to find the answer below!

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

#88

Post by pithanyChan »

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 it took less time to write than it would take someone to read, it’s probably not worth writing.

Disagree. If it took less thinking than it will take reading, then yes, probably not worth it. But if you can trim your writing to the pith in every paragraph or even line, people will love you.

Too many people babble to keep the underlying lies and fraud and their complicity burried in narratives.

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

#89

Post by a-french-anon »

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.

You're supposed to be capable of introspection and ask yourself "would I truly be interested in what I want to write? Do I even have an idea of what I want to write?" before writing anything...

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

#90

Post by rednafi »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #61
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…

> That said, if it took less time to write than it would take someone to read, it’s probably not worth writing. Is that actually a possibility? I can't type faster than I can read.

LLMs
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