Bear Blog looks like a good option for a new (minimalist) blog. Can anyone recommend it?
https://bearblog.dev/
Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
111–120 of 196 posts
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#112I 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.
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#113Serious 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?
All of these replies say don’t worry about it and just blog but I say detect the IPs and user agents and return a scrambled post. If you’re small enough they probably won’t care to go the extra effort to scrape you.
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Often, the only reason I write is to have a method of sorting out the soup of thoughts in my head into a recognisable shape, with the accountability that being public brings to it (no, you can't have the link to my site!).
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#115I 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?
You don't need some fancy tech. Blogs have been around for 30+ years and function just fine on such old tech. The only new tech you should use is certbot and own your own domain.
Write in markdown and serve directly, or export to HTML. Or write in LibreOffice Writer and export to HTML.
Upload HTML to a basic webserver. You don't need a fancy load balancer or denial-of-human-system or anything.
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
The interwebs is such hot garbage that we now need to use ChatGPT to search.
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#117I 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?
I’d not use Wordpress personally. Luckily for you, there are plenty of options: https://manuelmoreale.com/blog-platforms
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#118Earlier 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.
> Careful.
I witnessed a memorable moment at work when an engineer responded to a VP and started by saying “careful.” Had it been another engineer, it would have been ignored as authoritative-sounding filler. But the VP did not take it well.
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#119Serious 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 do not like it either.
I have a blog that admittedly does not get much traffic, and I have started to add random words after each paragraph. The background is white, and these words are white, so they are invisible to most people. Maybe it is not that effective, but it makes me feel better.
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#120Serious 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?
All of these replies say don’t worry about it and just blog but I say detect the IPs and user agents and return a scrambled post. If you’re small enough they probably won’t care to go the extra effort to scrape you.
Is there a way to do that in WordPress on a shared host?