Host your own.
Keep it simple.
Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
141–150 of 196 posts
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#142I 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 is the way to go. If you don’t promote your work, no one else will.
I agree but when I tried this a few weeks ago, it looked like a lot of work to publish on my own blog and then replicate everywhere else. I didn't find a good tool and got lost trying out fediverse stuff.
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I would have loved to seen their expression …
That's like an actor breaking character during a play and it pops the bubble of reality the audience has been living in.
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#144I 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…
Strong disagree on Medium, Substack, etc. There are very famous and popular blogs on both with tons of followers. My sister asked for a blog, I steered her to substack. Zero effort, just works.
> Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time.
Nothing about substack wastes readers time.
Conversely, what wastes their time is your site being down or hacked and what wastes your time is maintaining your blog's infra, updating because vulnerabilities, and/or using bad UIs like blogging from github (maybe passable for nerds, not for non-nerds)
A blog isn't about the tech you use. It's about the writing. Worrying about tech is not going to add a single reader to your blog.
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#145Serious 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 don't like the idea of intellectual theft without attribution/citation. If it is shared publicly/into the public domain, I believe the least that should happen is attribution/citation where possible - especially if a for-profit entity is using the content.
On the other side, for many of my thoughts/ideas/creativity, I find it is often a question of, do I die alone with it in my head or put it out there, maybe for someone to find, use or be inspired by? If it's a question of one or the other, I think perhaps I'd rather let it go free so the value isn't lost (assuming, that what I have to write/say/share is of some value).
I have seen that mechanism be exploited.. sometimes you put something out there, someone uses it, and there is zero attribution/citation. For myself, I prefer to try (most of the time) to treat non-fictional writing in the traditional sense of an academic paper and include citations whenever they are useful and I can - even for non-academic purposes - for the purposes of giving credit to others. It's nice to share credit and show how things connect, IMHO.
FWIW, I like some of the inspiration behind Creative Commons, but even old school citations (MLA/ALA or heck, even just this kind of inline citation style [1] that is common on HN and other sites is better than zero).
There are citation generators online also [2] - for formal purposes/writing/papers you must get these formats right, but for informal/casual use, I think simple citation is better than no citation.
[1] simple citation style, or even just paste the URL - at least you're giving credit.
[2] example, https://zbib.org/
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#146I 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 had the exact same experience. I'd add that Substack will give you some mildly helpful distribution at times as well.
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#147I 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 are some good self-hosted blog alternatives? something with features similar to ghost/substack
This is a long-shot, but take a look here:
https://github.com/simonw/datasette.io
http://blosxom.com/documentation/users/blog.html
http://blosxom.com/documentation/users/install/dynamic/isp.html
I love the idea of it in that it's just markdown files! `vim ~/blog/entries/some-random-thought.txt` end ups with $AUTHOR of `chown`, $DATE of the file modification time, tree of `mkdir -p ~/blog/entries/some/category` ... it's just trivial to backup, restore, and work with. You can even (probably) hook it up to a static regen which is probably safer: http://blosxom.com/documentation/users/install/static/
The link to datasette is if you're wanting to nerd around a bit more, as it's kindof a combo of sqlite and a web server for rendering data from within it. The linked github repo is how their main site is built/rendered and it definitely has aspects of "blogginess", and you can kindof see how it's done. The neat thing of `let tags = "SELECT DISTINCT tags FROM posts"` or transforming blogging into effectively updating/adding records in a database is an extension of the blosxom zen of "it's just files [records], yo! go forth and edit them..."
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#148I 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…
Strong disagree on Medium, Substack, etc. There are very famous and popular blogs on both with tons of followers. My sister asked for a blog, I steered her to substack. Zero effort, just works. > Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time. Nothing about substack wastes readers time. Conversely, what wastes their time is your site being down or hacked and what wastes your time is maintaining your blog's infra…
Substack is trash. VC-backed, full of tracking pixels and privacy-invading anti-features, constant push to monetize, cross-promote and increase engagement... Every blogger who has moved there has gotten less interesting than they were when they were independent. It's everything that is wrong about social media cynically branded as some kind of alternative media outlet.
Of course there is plenty of money to be made as a social media influencer who specializes in long form content, and if that's the career a person is interested in building then sure - Substack, Medium, whatever - great choice. But for people who are interested in blogging as it used to be, independent writers who want to write without the pressure of editors, without paywalls, without popups, without forcing their readers into signup funnels... It might be a bit more work to set up, but tools like WordPress, Ghost etc are better suited.
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#149Earlier 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…
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 reader…
I know people here don't like site analytics, but for this one it's pretty good.
Setup Matomo or similar analytics software, write about a bunch of topics and review after a year which topics your readers are most interested in, for which they search on your site etc.
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#150Earlier 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…
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 reader…
Don’t evaluate your audience; it’s a losing game. Write things so you can find them later, and leave the rest to chance. Worked quite well for me.