Two years ago I started a niche blog and tech site focused on hardware and software guides for Linux creatives. Even set up a forum because I was fed up with digging through scattered mailing lists and Discord servers for information. I like to think it has helped some people and it gives me a chance to practice writing human-readable documentation.
link?
Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
131–140 of 405 posts
Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
#132Here are some reasons to start a personal blog: 1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value. 2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they co…
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It's not. I don't use LLMs to write for me.
I mainly use them as a thesaurus and proof reader, and occasionally let VS Code autocomplete finish a sentence for me when I'm writing longer form pieces.
Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you blog I think it's really important to develop a habit of linking to other people's blogs. That's how blog discovery used to work back in the 200xs and it can still work effectively today.
If you mean creating a blogroll to show other blogs you recommend, that is no longer so effective now that mobile phones are most of the world’s default interface to the internet. Themes for common blogging platforms like Wordpress generally hide the sidebar, blogrolls included, on mobile.
No not a blog roll - more a link blog or a habit of linking back to pieces you found relevant or interesting.
Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
#134Two years ago I started a niche blog and tech site focused on hardware and software guides for Linux creatives. Even set up a forum because I was fed up with digging through scattered mailing lists and Discord servers for information. I like to think it has helped some people and it gives me a chance to practice writing human-readable documentation.
how's it going?
Quite well, plenty of new skills to learn.
Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
#135I don't know about being back, but it certainly isn't dead. A few years back, I used to get at least 10k readers a day. That number went down to less than 100 a day at it's lowest, I was writing 10 entries a year at most. Last year, I wrote just 4. One thing I failed to notice was that RSS was still active. So this year, I started consistently contributing, over 150 so far, and I see RSS picking up right where it lef…
I hadn't looked at my feed subscriber stats in a while, turns out I had around 6,000 at the start of 2025 and I'm up to around 12,000 now - very healthy! I use my own server-side tracking to count them - I look out for the user-agent from feed software like Feedly and pull the number out of it: Feedly/1.0 (+https://feedly.com/poller.html; 694 subscribers; ) Here's my code for that: https://github.com/simonw/simonwill…
Oof, mine says 68 for feedly. I got some catching up to do. I'll ask AI to draw a pelican reading RSS news.
Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
#136There are just not enough ways to discover personal blogs. HN is a great source, but you'll notice over time there are always AskHN posts asking something like "What is a site like HN for..", and people trying to build HN clones. Reddit was good for a while for this, but hasn't been for a long time. I'm hoping people rediscover/reinvent slashdot.
While we are here, may I ask what are some blogs you guys read regularly? (Regularly as in: going back to read new articles as opposed to a one-off link shared on some other platform.)
Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
#137There are just not enough ways to discover personal blogs. HN is a great source, but you'll notice over time there are always AskHN posts asking something like "What is a site like HN for..", and people trying to build HN clones. Reddit was good for a while for this, but hasn't been for a long time. I'm hoping people rediscover/reinvent slashdot.
I really wish someone came up with an reddit alternative - perhaps stick to STEM + lifestyle topics only to keep things free of national/international politics - and thus free of interference/censorship.
Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
#138There are just not enough ways to discover personal blogs. HN is a great source, but you'll notice over time there are always AskHN posts asking something like "What is a site like HN for..", and people trying to build HN clones. Reddit was good for a while for this, but hasn't been for a long time. I'm hoping people rediscover/reinvent slashdot.
Try hcker.news' small web filter[0], which uses Kagi's small web list[1] to show a hacker news timeline that consists only of personal blogs. It works really well if you're looking for a cozier timeline. 0: https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true 1: https://kagi.com/smallweb
This is really cool, thanks!
Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
#139There are just not enough ways to discover personal blogs. HN is a great source, but you'll notice over time there are always AskHN posts asking something like "What is a site like HN for..", and people trying to build HN clones. Reddit was good for a while for this, but hasn't been for a long time. I'm hoping people rediscover/reinvent slashdot.
There’s https://kagi.com/smallweb
Noone uses Kagi.... compared to the big engines.
Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
#140Creating a blog is like a fart in the wind. You have to do everything. Marketing, dissemination etc etc. Good luck. Do not feed the AI overlords for nothing.