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Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

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Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#271

Post by graemep »

kukkeliskuu wrote: post #269
graemep wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the tiny cost of running a blog, especially if you have a domain name, is it worth the saving? Its not even much work if you use a static site builder.

Reliability? It took me around 15 minutes to create a site with Claude Code using GitHub Pages with custom domain and somebody else is taking care that it is always running. What is the alternative?

Shared hosting still exists which means someone else will take care of a static site very cheap.

You could use Claude, or you could use one of many static site builders.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#272

Post by ghaff »

the_gipsy wrote: post #199
simonw wrote: post #88

Here 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…

Do you use AI to write content nowadays? Or to review and format it?

The only time I used AI for writing was when I was cleaning up some reference architectures and needed some fairly boilerplate text for the intro background. But basically don't really use AI; maybe if I did more coding these days.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#273

Post by ghaff »

zingar wrote: post #217
yoz-y wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just follow people on Mastodon and read stuff they link.

What are your servers and or people to follow? My mastodon timeline is a wasteland

Bluesky isn't the Twitter of old but it's at least something. I gave Mastodon a spin for a while but it's pretty desolate in my experience.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#274

Post by xtiansimon »

Peteragain wrote: post #250

I am always delighted when I come across a good one, but finding good ones is the problem. Ross Wilkinson (CSIRO) many years ago said there were 3 ways to find things: browsing - from were you are, look about. If you're in the high street and hungry, walk and look. It is no use knowing what is 5km away or what was available there 6 months ago. Categories are another - think Dewey Decimal system. These are expensive t…

I took a MOOC course for teachers which advocated long form blogging for course assignments + social media short posts with appropriate tags to publicize/connect with classmates.

At the time they suggested using Twitter or Facebook. And while I had a twitter account, I rarely used it. Over the period of the course, I managed to cultivate a nice community out of a largely unused account, and connected with like minded individuals on programming and, due to the course’s target audience, teachers.

The course then taught you to analyze the social media posts using the Twitter API. Turtles all the way down. It was the best MOOC I ever participated in.

So this experience has become my prototype for blogging and publicity—blog+social media.

I’ve not continued the blogging (the class was in 2010?), but I have tried to cultivate, for example, on BlueSky a community of _only_ my personal and professional interests (not unlike HN content), but politics, entertainment and sports keep muddying the waters.

It’s impossible to control your feeds these days, so I don’t know if Blog+Social is a pattern that works _today_ with the current crop of social. Not sure if people who are NOT _in it for the money_ can achieve the personal engagement necessary to carry on.

Small aside, during COVID NYC Python community met on online. It continued for over a year and then fizzled out. But oh what a glorious year of weekly online meetups. And every one had the good taste to keep it to Python and their ruddy projects. Hehe.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#275

Post by adiian »

llm_nerd wrote: post #259
adiian wrote: post #254

IMO blogs were killed by big tech and social media. By creating centralized ways to distribute information. They started by killing rss, was way too decentralized. Facebook, Twitter, every single platform are just gate keepers that have complete power on what you see. They all start in the same way, making it convenient to access information, by centralizing it. Once you change your habits, they make it in such a way…

IMO blogs were killed by big tech and social media The social media part is true, though in a way that is more user-benefitting than many bloggers (such as myself) appreciate or will acknowledge. And HN is one such "social media" site that invariably helped "kill" blogs, so there's an irony that this is being discussed here. Before HN / Reddit (others will put Twitter / Bluesky / whatever else in here), I had a list…

I would partially disagree here regarding reddit/HN. They are closer to the old forums than to blogs. You do not follow people, you follow themes, concept, "ideas". They are constituted by a bunch of impersonal people with a common interest.

But those forums were also killed by social media. Reddit/hn along with a few other platforms are modern impersonations of those forums. Also the groups on social media are replacing those forums.

In m opinion "the good content will rise on social media", eventually. But you will have to see 9 junk promoted content for an eventually good one.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#276

Post by ksec »

bell-cot wrote: post #249
ksec wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest problem so far is with cost. I dont like recurring fees. I could pay a one-time fee for say 100 pages and last an eternality ( or 50 years or something ). I also dont like subscription, and it has nothing to do with subscription fatigue, it is just the way I manage my money since before Youtube or Netflix took off. And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I use HN comments as more like a…

Isn't Wordpress hosting still free, at [something_unique].wordpress.com? Biggest downside I know of: Wordpress is too much learning curve & overhead for a simple personal blog.

Thank You! This lead to me login and rediscover I actually had a blog 15 years ago.

The thing that stopped me was much like what you said, learning curve and too much friction. Right now I have bearblog, mataroa.blog and nicheless, all with their own strength and flaws.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#277

Post by ghaff »

ksec wrote: post #142
simonw wrote: post #88

Here 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…

My biggest problem so far is with cost. I dont like recurring fees. I could pay a one-time fee for say 100 pages and last an eternality ( or 50 years or something ). I also dont like subscription, and it has nothing to do with subscription fatigue, it is just the way I manage my money since before Youtube or Netflix took off. And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I use HN comments as more like a…

Believe it or not, Blogger still exists and is free. I did some research when I was looking to spin up a blog for professional purposes. I ended up just rolling it into my personal blog though, for various reasons, I haven't done a lot with it yet. Project for the new year.

You can hate on Google all you like but it hasn't been killed by Google yet and has been a long time--and is simple, adequate, and free even if it doesn't handle all the more advanced use cases.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#278

Post by tjpnz »

_zagj wrote: post #150
loktarogar wrote: post #41

AI scrapes niche blogs, Google deranks or spam drowns them out. It's really not a good time to be starting niche blogs.

> AI scrapes niche blogs And further, the LLMs will DDOS you in the process, completely disregarding robots.txt, so self-hosting is a pain-in-the-ass, forcing you to use (and trust) something like Cloudflare (or the Anubis, or Kiwiflare).

Is Kiwiflare available as a FOSS project?

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#279

Post by ghaff »

biztos wrote: post #195
HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much of that mercenary approach to blogging today resulted ultimately from the 2008 crisis. It feels like there was less pressure to make ends meet, and consequently no pressure to hustle, before that. And maybe it is also the influencer self-branding culture of Instagram being seen as the default internet, so when people do alt-internet things they carry over those same values knowingly or unknowingly.

Additional factors that come to mind: the slow realization that you could be writing for an audience of one (yourself) after a brief surge of "famous bloggers"; and the rise of other forms of writing (social media, etc) that at least give you the illusion of an immediate audience. "Engagement metrics" and so on -- even if they represent the opposite of attention. I think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes e…

>I think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes elsewhere

That's been true of me. A paragraph or three that I would once have done as a blog now slip neatly and easily into social media of various sorts. Going to try to do something about that next year but this year ended up crazy for various reasons.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#280

Post by marginalia_nu »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #92

There 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.

My search engine has some not-very-obvious tools for exploring the link graph, that will occasionally turn up interesting things.

Similarity navigation: https://marginalia-search.com/site/simonwillison.net

Backlinks: https://marginalia-search.com/site/simonwillison.net?view=li...

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