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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

#91

Post by _t9ow »

pithanyChan wrote: post #88
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.

> trim your writing to the pith in every paragraph or even line

This takes a lot of time. Writing concisely is much more challenging and time-consuming than writing verbosely. Writing unnecessarily long essays means that your readers end up spending more time reading them than you did writing them.

As Blaise Pascal wrote: "I only made this letter longer because I had not the leisure to make it shorter."

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

#92

Post by echoangle »

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…

Limiting width is what you should do, if the lines are too long you will struggle to find the next line when skipping back.

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

#93

Post by spc476 »

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.

I started writing my blogging engine [1] in late 1999, and spent almost the next two years trying to get it perfect, while at the same time using it for blogging (locally at first). I finally got fed up with trying to perfect the software and just went public with it. I still use it after 25 years. Granted, there hasn't been a line of code that hasn't changed in that time, but it still feels the same to me, as it still works the same from a user perspective (entries can be added via a web interface, email, file (that was true even 25 years ago) and the PUT method (added last year); the storage system hasn't changed either and is backward compatible such that the code in 2001 (when I first went public) could still work on the data today). And yes, it is still a CGI script. I saw no need to change that over the years.

[1] https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog

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

#94

Post by pjc50 »

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?

It's already a real problem that the organic blogosphere was destroyed by "blogspam" and overt plagiarism of entire blogs into content farms that existed purely to push SEO, including SEO over the original blog. AI just makes this worse.

I'm also worried that if I wanted to find an audience the audience would first have to navigate the AI search hall of mirrors.

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

#95

Post by walthamstow »

mvkel wrote: post #48
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…

I'd argue that you could write only for yourself for your entire life and still have a successful blog.

People focus a lot on the 'web', and not enough on the 'log'

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

#96

Post by theshrike79 »

jopsen wrote: post #62

Unless you aim for your blog grow a following. You really don't need to overthink anything! A picture and 3 sentences can be a blog post. You can talk about a hobby, a trip, a vacation or random thoughts. Sometimes people will find a how-to blog post through Google. Sometimes an old friend or former teacher will look you up. In reality, you'll probably be happier if your blog never grows a steady following :)

Daring Fireball by John Gruber (used to) frequently post just links to a post/article with a short excerpt.

No need to write a full-on 10k+ word novella on everything.

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

#98

Post by mediumsmart »

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?

not thinking about that - anything I do is cc zero

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

#99

Post by theshrike79 »

roydivision wrote: post #75

A slight tangent - does anyone have advice on anonymous blogs? I would accept an email address as being the sole contact, but nothing else.

Haven't tried this myself yet, but came across this while sorting my Obsidian inbox: https://pico.sh/pgs

Basically you can ssh/scp/rsync static pages there.

The only personal thing you provide is an SSH public key pair.

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

#100

Post by Turboblack »

Animats wrote: post #2

Do they have something to say, or is this like "I want to be in a band" of a previous generation?

there are two types of blogs - sincere ones, where the author pours out his soul and talks about what he can't keep to himself, possibly raising some important issues, trying to convey them to the masses, and SEO blogs - where there are excrements of hashtags, advertising slogans, constant repetitions, and requests to throw a bone (support the project, you haven't supported the project yet? you can do it here, well, or here! did I forget to tell you that you can support the project? by the way, one more thing - support the project!). Such ones are immediately banned. I am also very annoyed by those who are already looking for a place for a banner from the first minutes of the site's existence. you will not survive in this world without this cent? 10 bucks a month - payment for personal shame?

all this conversion and optimization of texts for search engines turns bloggers into robots, and it is simply impossible to read the texts, they are not human, they are as if created by neural networks. who needs this hypocrisy?

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