Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by stevenicr » Sat, Feb 01, 2025, 11:37 PM UTC

The article spends a good amount of time suggesting how to write better blog posts over time, which I appreciate, but the title doesn't fit as well as it could.

I feel the title should be more about 'how to write better blog posts over time' or something. I was expecting to hear advice more about creating or maintaining a blog itself, which is more than just writing (in my mind) -

The site pulls a bitdefender warning about malicious something or another, not sure what the trigger is.

I've commented elsewhere about blog software since on HN this inevitably comes up on similar threads.

I've got some stuff about modern wordpress blog design and such on this page: https://steveiscritical.com/learn-websites-and-coding/

Might have to make a more well rounded wordpress blog stuff that includes backups, securing and hosting considerations then submit a more complete article at some point.

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

#192

Post by a-priori » Sun, Feb 02, 2025, 9:25 PM UTC

throwaway290 wrote: post #175

a-priori wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t worry about it. It’s the world we live in now. The alternative is to not write anything of significance on the internet, which would be of no benefit to anyone.

"This is the world we live in" is a good excuse to never right any wrongs.

It’s not. It’s a recognition that you have to act within the world as it exists today.

That doesn’t mean you can’t work to change the world, and in fact in order to do so you first need to see how it actually is.

But it does also means you need to decide which battles to fight.

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

#193

Post by throwaway290 » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 3:35 AM UTC

a-priori wrote: post #192

throwaway290 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is the world we live in" is a good excuse to never right any wrongs.

It’s not. It’s a recognition that you have to act within the world as it exists today. That doesn’t mean you can’t work to change the world, and in fact in order to do so you first need to see how it actually is. But it does also means you need to decide which battles to fight.

The comment literally just said "you can't worry about it, it's the world we live in". That's the point, you can't just use the second part as an excuse to not fight battles or changing. Because that sort of requires worrying about things.

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

#194

Post by thomastjeffery » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 4:20 PM UTC

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…

This is what I tend to use HN/Reddit comments for... I know I would probably be better off writing a blog, but I'm too busy procrastinating to make that happen.

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

#195

Post by jraph » Tue, Feb 04, 2025, 6:50 AM UTC

eviks wrote: post #188

jraph wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's unfortunately a common myth even re regular text A common myth that seems quite well researched [1], no? Do you have some evidence of the contradictory? > you can adjust your window to whatever is comfortable Websites all have different layouts, you'd have to change the window width (and/or zoom level) for each website. That would be quite clunky… on devices where it's at all possible. Forcing users to resiz…

But it isn't well researched, that's precisely the myth that in these areas there's solid science with precise thresholds! I've read your article and it includes many gems such as max line length of 80 cpl, which is useless to determine whether a line of 150 is bad. Or it suffers from a universal issue of this kind science - tiny sample sizes or unrepresentative composition (the perennial college student, here goes y…

Interesting points, thanks.

So IIUC, for you, evidence is weak and we don't actually know either way and we haven't explored alternatives to limiting light length enough that could help comprehension and speed. Fair enough.

> I also don't get why would you ever need to adjust window width per website?

Because websites define different margins, may have a side menu, or two... There might be stuff around the content that take width. And responsive designs may worsen the effect.

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

#196

Post by saelthavron » Mon, Feb 10, 2025, 11:45 PM UTC

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…

>> 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.

Both of those are promoting your work so it is your experience. Your experience just has been that you haven't had to put much work into promoting your work so it doesn't feel like promoting your work to you.