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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

#121

Post by southernplaces7 »

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

Thanks! You saved me from exactly that.

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

#122

Post by MisterTea »

raesene9 wrote: post #86

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 simila…

Point 3 is very important and something that needs to be done more often. I would also say have someone who works in the domain you're writing about read it and give feedback.

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

#123

Post by rchaud »

christophilus wrote: post #105

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.

Every post about blogging that reaches the top of HN turns into a discussion about static site generators, without fail.

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

#124

Post by rchaud »

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…

> Why do you insist on only using the middle third of my screen to display content?

You can always read these posts in Reader Mode on your browser and adjust the text size, paragraph width etc. Even on this site, I have to magnify the display to 130% to view comfortably on a hiDPI screen.

The reason why most blogs are narrow is because blog templates are still from the 2000s in terms of how they show content on desktop . Traditionally the right hand third of the screen would display ads or a blog roll, while the left hand third would show the site's navigation .

Over time this changed, but what stayed the same was showing body text in the central third columns.

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

#125

Post by ineptech »

inetknght wrote: post #115
pyuser583 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You make this sound trivial, but I did this (not with a blog per se, but with a silly one-shot parody website I made for fun) and the first time it got posted on HN it exceeded my hosts bandwidth limits in the first hour despite only having a handful of images. Unless you never write anything popular, you at least need a static host like github pages or a cdn or something behind it.

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

#126

Post by 0xEF »

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…

When people give advice to content creators in the form of "when you do interesting things" my brain immediately jumps to one question; how do you know what other people consider interesting?

Honest question, because I am just starting out, myself. I have a small blog where I share my opinions and projects related to technology I enjoy. However, if I were to do a thought experiment and assume my audience is HN readers, I'd hesitate to say anyone here would find my posts very interesting. I like them, but I am not sure who else would.

I genuinely do not understand how to evaluate an audience, so I just write what I like to write and hope for the best.

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

#127

Post by TeMPOraL »

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?

SGML.

Just joking. Sort of. There's apparently a modern tool you can use to transpile SGML to HTML[0], and I'm itching to try it out.

--

[0] - https://sgmljs.net/docs/producing-html-tutorial/producing-ht... - yes, it's an NPM package, and yes, you can run it in the browser, but you can also use it on a server, or as a static site generator.

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

#128

Post by inetknght »

ineptech wrote: post #125
inetknght wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You make this sound trivial, but I did this (not with a blog per se, but with a silly one-shot parody website I made for fun) and the first time it got posted on HN it exceeded my hosts bandwidth limits in the first hour despite only having a handful of images. Unless you never write anything popular, you at least need a static host like github pages or a cdn or something behind it.

> Unless you never write anything popular, you at least need a static host like github pages or a cdn or something behind it.

No, you just need a host that doesn't have ridiculously small limits. You can easily find find hosts with limits in hundreds of GB, or TB, or even unmetered. You can find them for free, and you can find them for quite cheap compared to most technologists' incomes.

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

#129

Post by skydhash »

ineptech wrote: post #125
inetknght wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You make this sound trivial, but I did this (not with a blog per se, but with a silly one-shot parody website I made for fun) and the first time it got posted on HN it exceeded my hosts bandwidth limits in the first hour despite only having a handful of images. Unless you never write anything popular, you at least need a static host like github pages or a cdn or something behind it.

Were each image 1 MB? My rule of thumb is to have smaller pictures in the page and to link to their full size if needs be. If your webpage exceed a ebook in size while not having more features, there’s a wrong decision made somewhere.

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

#130

Post by lippihom »

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

Nice - thanks.
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