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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?

#371

Post by komali2 »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #229
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…

About point 2: I have yet to have a job interview, in which the interviewer has even taken a look at my website. Well, actually I don't know that, of course, but what I want to say is, that none so far showed any sign or indication of having taken a look, and as a consequence also no sign or indication of knowing anything about any of my showcased projects. In 95% of the cases it was just that they want to do their o…

Depends on the company type. Seems like FAANG and companies trying to act like FAANG just follow a strict formulaic process and your portfolio or blog is kinda irrelevant there.

For startups and small companies I think it makes a huge difference.

At one job I was told explicitly I was hired mostly because the hiring manager liked my website - I wasn't the only one that passed the interview process and so my website was why I was chosen. He liked how minimalist it was.

At another, one of the engineers found a bug on my website and my interview was to pair program a fix with him.

When I'm in charge of hiring I strongly prefer candidates that have some kind of web presence that lets me structure the interview more towards what they've presented about themselves.

Also I have gotten clients that originally found me because they googled "how to rent a motorcycle in Taiwan" and I rank #1 for that search apparently.

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

#372

Post by julianlam »

Pacers31Colts18 wrote: post #10
julianlam wrote: post #4

Niche forums. Federated.

Does that actually exist? I know there are reddit type clones, but I'm yet to see anything that allows me to setup a niche server and only that.

Indeed! NodeBB is exactly that, and federates over ActivityPub.

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

#373

Post by julianlam »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #56
julianlam wrote: post #4

Niche forums. Federated.

I would love something that is close to phpBB but slightly more modern. Like, phpBB but with federation support and a clean API would be great. But most modern forum-like software is Reddit clones.

Hopefully NodeBB hits that mark. Inspired by phpBB and similar, federating, clean API.

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

#374

Post by HeinzStuckeIt »

bluebarbet wrote: post #342
HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media might be getting less attractive for that, though. Compare Reddit now to ten years ago, and you can see that even on more serious subreddits, everyone’s comments have become very short, often little more than a single line. If one posts a couple of solid paragraphs as a reply, one looks like an autistic weirdo info-bombing.

>If one posts a couple of solid paragraphs as a reply, one looks like an autistic weirdo info-bombing. As one should. The rando who spams a discussion thread with an impenetrable wall of text is like that guy who uses their "question" at the end of an in-person panel discussion to ramble incoherently for three minutes. Yes, here we can scroll past it, but it's still presumptious and annoying. This is not primary cont…

Two ordinary paragraphs like one would find in any serious publication, are now enough to make an “impenetrable wall of text”?

You also overlook the fact that many Reddit posts are not links to content. For example, they could be text-post questions posed to a community in order for the OP to receive guidance. This recent culture discouraging substantial discussion about things that are complex and can’t be abbreviated, makes the site less useful that way.

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

#375

Post by kukkeliskuu »

graemep wrote: post #271
kukkeliskuu wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My feeling about GitHub Pages is that it is not unreasonable just to forget about the site. For any cheap shared hosting I would psychologically feel the need to monitor the site somehow, periodically check that the credit card works etc.

For me, there is a large relative (percentual) difference in the perceived cognitive load. Perhaps not a huge actual difference, but when you are running tens of projects, everything counts.

Now I am not talking about actual reality but the psychological effect. It might be that some shared hosting site is in fact more reliable than GitHub Pages.

Obviously, a blog that you just forget is not that useful, but last site I created using this method was an advertisement site for a book. I have several blogs where I write occasionally.

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

#376

Post by emrah »

Back in the day there was demand due to popularity.. in 2025, people are on various social media sites. I hardly read blogs myself, especially ever since X allowed paying customers to write long posts.

Even if you wanted to go back to blogging, you'd have to do it on substack, medium or some such platform with social built in.

My money is blogging being mostly for SEO. I don't know who's on the other end of the clicks, but they aren't reading for readings sake..

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

#377

Post by bthallplz »

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…

> Just as a simple example, I have a once-in-a-while newsletter+blog on a niche topic, and I could get way more eyeballs if I'd just rephrase things as a Reddit post, but I'm nostalgic about it living its own life on the Free-ish Web. Or, I suppose, this comment right here, which could just as well be on a personal blog with a "backlink" to yours.

I've been thinking lately about still posting things to various places like here and Reddit but compiling them later on and posting them to my website (likely with a link to where I posted them originally). That seems like a good middle ground for me and would enable me to build up a decent resource for myself and others, if I'm up for cleaning up the texts to provide or remove context as necessary.

Much of this idea of mine is from a desire to archive and pull together more of the stuff I've put effort into that's spread all over the web.

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

#378

Post by grep_name »

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…

> If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't been updated in five years

Oh hey, that's me! This post might actually encourage me to get back on top of things. Not only do I have two articles (more recent than 5 years though), one of them has a glaring error that is somewhat foundational to what it's supposed to be about. I have to fix that, as well as my broken RSS feed, and get my git link re-directed to my self-hosted forge, and update all my remotes, remove some defunct links and menu options, and then decide which of my 68 (yes, 68!) blog drafts I want to focus on publishing next. Now that I've listed it out, I bet I can get all that done over the break.

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

#379

Post by _zagj »

tjpnz wrote: post #278
_zagj wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

IDK, I just meant a service like that is now table stakes for self-hosting, thanks to these AI vultures. Even the GPL, once viewed as radioactive by proprietary software companies, offers no protection, since they can just launder the code through an LLM rewrite.

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

#380

Post by baconbrand »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #149
baconbrand wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s a good reason. I think it’s a reason. It’s certainly demoralizing. Plagiarism sucks and feels bad. If I were to google something and see the AI overview parroting my blog post, sort of almost kind of paraphrasing my words and shoving the link to my actual blog off the phone screen entirely, I think I would personally travel to google headquarters and start swinging a baseball bat. But… For starters…

> If I were to google something and see the AI overview parroting my blog post, sort of almost kind of paraphrasing my words and shoving the link to my actual blog off the phone screen entirely, I think I would personally travel to google headquarters and start swinging a baseball bat. This is the only sensible reaction to the abuses that huge tech companies are dumping onto society. I do agree half heartedly with wh…

The future certainly does look bleak. I think not giving up on normal human expression, connection, and creativity is a good way to combat that.
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