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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

#161

Post by greenie_beans »

idlewords wrote: post #13

The best writing advice I ever got was from a college professor—"everybody's got 100 bad essays in them. You just have to get them out." I feel like this is what blogging is especially good for. You can clear out the awful stuff and then try to incrementally improve. I would diametrically disagree with point #7—if you want to write well, you need to revise the hell out of it. I guess pick whose writing you like bette…

there's a lot of good writing advice out there, but some of the best i got was from a college professor, too. i will botch it:

each sentence should make sense based on every prior sentence. each sentence should be able to stand alone on its own sheet of paper.

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

#162

Post by Y_Y »

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

It should be enough to look at the earnings reports of Kreamy Frozen Chicken to know that chicken is the most delicious ice cream flavor.

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

#163

Post by econ »

0xEF wrote: post #126
snackbroken wrote: post #57

Earlier 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…

It primarily refers to what you consider interesting.

When you have a decent number of posts and some visitors you can see which sub set they find the most interesting.

You can also make a blog about things that don't interest you at all. This is the shortest route to success and you will hate your new job :)

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

#164

Post by stevenicr »

greenie_beans wrote: post #136
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 are some good self-hosted blog alternatives? something with features similar to ghost/substack

wordpress.org is the defacto standard right?

set plugins and themes to auto-update, add wordfence and change default settings.

use updraft or similar to pull full backups on a schedule.

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

#165

Post by econ »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #61
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…

> 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 don't have to type. I wrote some things with hundreds of links then assumed the reader was at least somewhat familiar with the set of links above each paragraph. I may even try keep opinions out of it (less effort) and simply paint a context with references for the reader to do their own thinking.

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

#166

Post by LeroyRaz »

I have a very different view. I think quality takes effort, and unless you are extremely gifted, or extremely practiced as a writer (i.e., you've done it professionally for years) what you write as a first draft is probably terrible.

As such, if you actually want to produce text worth reading, you'll need to spend (a lot of) time editing and critiquing each draft you write.

I also think the world abounds with supposedly quirky people, who think that that is enough. It is (almost certainly) not enough.

Unless you are incredibly unusual and individualistic, your quirckyness is not sufficient to make your work worth reading. The problem is that there are lots of interesting, unusual and deep people, and some of them also spend a huge amount of time and effort on the craft of writing.

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

#167

Post by rednafi »

gtirloni wrote: post #142
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 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.

I just post it manually on twitter, bluesky, mastodon, and linkedin. Works well for me. I tend not to look for a tool until a process starts hurting.

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

#168

Post by spc476 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #127
pyuser583 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The non-blog parts of my site [1] are in XML and I use xsltproc to generate HTML. It's technically a static-site generator. It works, but my God, is XSLT a verbose (functional) language.

[1] https://www.conman.org/

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

#169

Post by pyuser583 »

spc476 wrote: post #168
TeMPOraL wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The non-blog parts of my site [1] are in XML and I use xsltproc to generate HTML. It's technically a static-site generator. It works, but my God, is XSLT a verbose (functional) language. [1] https://www.conman.org/

I loved XSLT. I thought it was the most perfect language ever created. What was I thinking?

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

#170

Post by eviks »

gamedever wrote: post #144
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…

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…

> Nothing about substack wastes readers time.

Login modal wastes time.

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