Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

henrikkarlsson.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 196 posts

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

#101

Post by bookofjoe »

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 asked Perplexity what this acronym stands for and this is its reply:

https://imgur.com/a/oWfIjkZ

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

#102

Post by bookofjoe »

drewcoo wrote: post #3
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?

> 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?

Your question got me thinking about supermarket bulletin boards. I recall them from way back as busy places with lots of notes attached, but last year or thereabouts I remember seeing a small bulletin board with one note attached and thinking how unusual it was.

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

#103

Post by bookofjoe »

LtWorf wrote: post #33
dghlsakjg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ronnie Coleman put it succinctly: “Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.”

I don't want to be out of breath after 3 seconds of running. No thanks.

Me neither and yet I've been doing it for 45 years.

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

#104

Post by meiraleal »

gffrd wrote: post #72
snackbroken wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

One can have even broader appeal by offending everyone

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

#105

Post by christophilus »

Speaking from experience, start by building some tools to make blog publishing more pleasant— build a markdown processor in your favorite language, then write your own syntax highlighting and html parser / transformer, then benchmark and optimize the heck out of it, then decide blogging isn’t all that interesting, and write some games instead.

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

#106

Post by tonyedgecombe »

semking wrote: post #38
a-priori wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t worry about it. It’s the world we live in now. The alternative is to not write anything of significance on the internet, which would be of no benefit to anyone.

That's precisely my problem: the only alternative is worse because no one would benefit.

You can’t really blame the blogger for that though.

Letting a AI learn from your content devalues it as they can regurgitate it for a few dollars a month.

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

#107

Post by Chris2048 »

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…

> all of them suck.

> POSSE is the way to go

Can you host your own blog, but replicate (in part) in dev.to?

Is it against their TOS to have a link to an original, or even only include teasers advertising the 'real' blog post?

It's kind of like having you main git repo somewhere, but cloning to GitHub for the community.

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

#108

Post by LtWorf »

LtWorf wrote: post #33
dghlsakjg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ronnie Coleman put it succinctly: “Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.”

I don't want to be out of breath after 3 seconds of running. No thanks.

I see people got triggered by the obvious general lack of fitness in body builders. They are not more healthy than starving female models.

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

#109

Post by _glass »

nthingtohide wrote: post #70
idlewords wrote: post #13

The best writing advice I ever got was from a college professor—"everybody's got 100 bad essays in them. You just have to get them out." I feel like this is what blogging is especially good for. You can clear out the awful stuff and then try to incrementally improve. I would diametrically disagree with point #7—if you want to write well, you need to revise the hell out of it. I guess pick whose writing you like bette…

> then try to incrementally improve My technique is Da Vinci method just collect / discover lot of shiny pieces. Then stitch them together later. Develop these pieces separately like colored glass pieces in a mosaic, sort of inversion of divide and conquer, collect and assemble.

I was doing this, and then it is confusing for people to follow. Nowadays I do this, too. But when I am ready, I write up everything once, then add in the details.

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

#110

Post by RobotToaster »

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…

> No one cares about the technology behind your site

You know a blog is going to be good when it's using the default wordpress theme from 10 years ago.

Post reply on HN