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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

#151

Post by rednafi »

RobotToaster wrote: post #110
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.

Exactly. Or a pure HTML and CSS site, like Daan Luu’s or Russ Cox’s blog.

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

#152

Post by moehm »

kqr wrote: post #64
thaumasiotes wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That said, if it took less time to write than it would take someone to read, it’s probably not worth writing. Is that actually a possibility? I can't type faster than I can read.

You can if yountype complicated tjings and include typos that make it hard to decode anything much less a run on sentence like this that includes redundancies and extra meaningless words saying the same thing which is easy to type but takes ages to read.

Well done.

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

#153

Post by tkjef »

Turboblack wrote: post #100
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?

there are two types of blogs - sincere ones, where the author pours out his soul and talks about what he can't keep to himself, possibly raising some important issues, trying to convey them to the masses, and SEO blogs - where there are excrements of hashtags, advertising slogans, constant repetitions, and requests to throw a bone (support the project, you haven't supported the project yet? you can do it here, well,…

i think you're exactly right. but to blog with zero SEO in mind sounds foolish as well.

you should blog, and by a blog definition that is going on the internet. to get more people to read it (often the goal) the easiest thing to do is utilize the tool people use to find things on the internet (search engines).

if there are issues with spam, keyword stuffing, forever run-on paragraphs of nothingness, well that is the search engine algorithm's job to fix. And they have a lot of money to fix it.

and if they don't fix it we should use a new search engine. it'll take time. but those seem like the dynamics at play in this scenario.

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

#154

Post by wholinator2 »

_glass wrote: post #109
nthingtohide wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah, I've been collecting many bits on my obsidian notes but I'm still in the stage of mostly dreaming of putting them together. But it is very interesting to see what thoughts i deem worthy of recording and which i don't. It's helped me significantly to form a coherent understanding of the world and politics, and i suspect one day it'll help me with finding novel research for my PhD

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

#155

Post by tkjef »

semking wrote: post #24

Serious 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?

like there's nothing i can do about it so i should embrace it, learn from it and integrate it.

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

#156

Post by tkjef »

yen223 wrote: post #31
semking wrote: post #24

Serious 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 take perverse pleasure in knowing that some future AI will be convinced that chicken is the best ice-cream flavour because some rando (me) posted it

this would have to be a largely targeted endeavor to offset such a fact. probably not worth the trouble. but interesting to think about.

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

#157

Post by tkjef »

pjc50 wrote: post #94
semking wrote: post #24

Serious 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?

It's already a real problem that the organic blogosphere was destroyed by "blogspam" and overt plagiarism of entire blogs into content farms that existed purely to push SEO, including SEO over the original blog. AI just makes this worse. I'm also worried that if I wanted to find an audience the audience would first have to navigate the AI search hall of mirrors.

it does make it worse. but it will get better IMO. any blogspam house is not going to last the next 5-10 years IMO.

as soon as i do something slightly spammy or excessive SEO-wise i get dinged for it. within 1-2 days. then i re-evalute what i did and revert it or change the strategy slightly.

those blogspam houses are just doing a few things right that are clearly being given too much weight.

and finding an audience was never easy. but social, newsletter, building free tools that link to your blog are some ways to do different than just SEO.

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

#159

Post by alp1n3_eth »

langsoul-com wrote: post #14

Advice to use substack, medium and a few others similar. No point hosting a blog or anything of the sort, unnecessary effort in the beginning when you don't know if you'll continue.

Obligatory "Substack has a Nazi Problem" article: https://archive.is/uyugO

Obsidian Publish, Micro.Blog, Ghost, BearBlog, HackMD, etc. are all great places to start, with less "baggage" associated with them. I know a lot of people write on Medium as well, but the account requirements that pop-up randomly are super annoying.

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

#160

Post by raesene9 »

zerr wrote: post #131
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…

Why publish at all? Why not just write privately?

A couple of reasons (for me anyway)

1) Main reason is that if I've spent time working something out, I can save other people the time doing that, by writing down the details in a searchable place.

2) If I want to explain something to someone, it's easy if I can just point them to a blog I've already written

3) (bit of an unintended consequence) It helped get me my last two jobs :D Being able to point to a long history of technical blog posting was relevant when I got a job in advocacy as that's one of the necessary skills.

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