131–140 of 196 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
- `add_action(‘template_redirect’, ‘my_scramble_func’)`
- or `add_filter(‘the_content’, ‘my_scramble_func’)`
Wordpress is PHP so you get the power of doing whatever as the request loads.
`Template_redirect` would allow you to redirect to a specific template/page.
`the_content` would allow you to return different content for that path.
Then you just need to check the user-agent/IP. I’m sure there’s a PHP library you could install with composer to do this.
What would be fun in my opinion is leaving the metadata the same but replacing only the meat. For example article titled “How to Update Your Blog” would still have the title and headings, but then return “Step one: open your blog editor
hajfineidif hahahe lorem ipsum…
” for the paragraphs.1. https://csswizardry.com/archive/
2. A fact I am embarrassed to admit in present company. I still can’t remember how it happened.
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'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…
Why publish at all? Why not just write privately?
Sometimes others want to express a (non trivial) idea to someone else, and your writing may be the best thing they know that gets the message across. Then they can send it.
Sometimes (or rather, always) your idea and writing is not the best or final thought you have on the subject. But it is not until someone has read and commented/replied (thoughtfully) that you understand what the next refinement is.
And then there is serendipity, just putting it out there to see what might (or might not) come of it.
Plus maybe one finds it motivating to have it actually accessible for others. As a clear goal and a standard to hold each piece to.
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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!).
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> 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
On that …
- It's generally easier for people to know what they _don't_ like than what they _do_. Preferences are defined by process of elimination.
- The commonality is: get lots of people on the same page about you, and you've got a big audience / broad appeal. But the most engaged audience is the one who has strong emotions attached, so being an offender guarantees a ravenous audience … and is generally easier.