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If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

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Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#121

Post by kowalevski »

d3nj4l wrote: post #56

As a minor counterpoint: I've come to dread blogs and newsletters because so many of them are written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to. These days the only blogs I trust are the ones I see on the top of HN or lobsters, which is unfortunate because I have interests beyond tech and I find it very, very difficult to find good blogs I…

btw does anyone have invite to lobste.rs? i have technical blog (not great but i try to improve it) and i'd like to share content on lobsters to have feedback.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#122

Post by criddell »

lincolnq wrote: post #105

In the last few months, for some reason, my (completely unmaintained) LinkedIn has started to top search results for my name -- over my regularly updated personal website and blog (at lincolnquirk.com) when you search for my name on Google. The same has happened with a friend of mine whose blog is far more popular than mine. It's incredibly frustrating.

Why do you think that is? I'm thinking LinkedIn may be considered more authoritative or trustworthy than a personal blog. How is google to know that your blog is actually your blog?

I've recently noticed more people writing on LinkedIn (which might just be my impression and not true) and I wonder if that's part of the reason?

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#123

Post by quakkels2 »

solarengineer wrote: post #7

How do you all discover blogs? I used to discover blogs via the Yahoo Directory, blog rolls (where we mention others' blogs as external links to follow up), Live Journal's listing, and cross-referencing of blog posts. Google search used to surface blog posts too. Now it's all on Medium - where I don't grudge those who want reliable hosting+discoverability and want to get paid for content, and where Medium charges for…

I like to start with a blog I already know and like, and then I use a tool I built to spider the RSS feed to find links to sites that also have RSS feeds. I figure that if I find a blog interesting, they'll probably link to other blogs that I'll find interesting. The tool is hosted on heroku: https://rdengine.herokuapp.com/ I give a rationale for it here: https://quakkels.com/posts/rss-is-wonderful/

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#124

Post by asicsp »

slightknack wrote: post #14
tinyprojects wrote: post #11

I've built a service that lets you create a micro-blog from a paper journal: https://paperwebsite.com/ It's given me great joy just publishing my unfiltered thoughts on the internet straight from my pen, which sounds similar to the "unfocused blogs" the author was talking about. Perhaps in this highly edited, Instagram world we now live in - the raw, unedited nature of a blog is a bit more scary. I still love them th…

I vote that we add our blogs / other good blogs we have come across as children on this comment. I'll start, here's mine: - https://slightknack.dev/blog Here are some others: - https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com - https://www.gwern.net/index - https://danluu.com - https://tonsky.me/ - https://lemire.me/blog/ - https://waitbutwhy.com/ - https://www.kalzumeus.com/archive/ - https://blog.codinghorror.com/

Here's mine: https://learnbyexample.github.io/ (mostly about regex and cli one-liners)

Here's some lists of blogs (mostly programming oriented):

* https://jvns.ca/blogroll/

* https://blogsurf.io/blogs

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#125

Post by mkr-hn »

nly wrote: post #78

One thing I love about (most) blogs is that every post has a timestamp. Nothing worse than finding a useful article online, particularly with facts and figures in them, with no bloody timestamp

A weird advice worm ate its way through the blogosphere in the late 2000s and early 2010s that made people think that if content was "evergreen," it didn't need a time stamp. The reality is that even the best advice has a context of time and place, and translating it forward requires knowing that context. Some people still follow that advice, or don't even know about timestamps and just grabbed the first theme they liked that didn't have them.

For example: so much advice in photography that gets repeated without thought is from a time when automation wasn't very reliable, or from the early transition to digital. So new photographers end up being miserable in full manual when they'd learn faster with a little computer help, or they burn $2000 on a lens they aren't skilled enough to use when their modern $50 kit lens is sharper than almost any of the legendary film-era lenses that didn't have to contend with 20+ megapixel sensors revealing all their flaws. Any blog post from the 2000s on the subject would have been mostly right back then, but without a timestamp, it's hard to know where it fits.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#126

Post by [deleted] »

mabub24 wrote: post #66
d3nj4l wrote: post #56

As a minor counterpoint: I've come to dread blogs and newsletters because so many of them are written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to. These days the only blogs I trust are the ones I see on the top of HN or lobsters, which is unfortunate because I have interests beyond tech and I find it very, very difficult to find good blogs I…

> I've come to dread blogs and newsletters because so many of them are written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to. My way around that is to pay. I find paid newsletters/blogs tend to evade SEO crap, for good reason: no one actually likes writing or reading that shit. Also, usually by forgoing the SEO crap they can focus on niche topi…

[deleted]

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#127

Post by criddell »

slightknack wrote: post #14
tinyprojects wrote: post #11

I've built a service that lets you create a micro-blog from a paper journal: https://paperwebsite.com/ It's given me great joy just publishing my unfiltered thoughts on the internet straight from my pen, which sounds similar to the "unfocused blogs" the author was talking about. Perhaps in this highly edited, Instagram world we now live in - the raw, unedited nature of a blog is a bit more scary. I still love them th…

I vote that we add our blogs / other good blogs we have come across as children on this comment. I'll start, here's mine: - https://slightknack.dev/blog Here are some others: - https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com - https://www.gwern.net/index - https://danluu.com - https://tonsky.me/ - https://lemire.me/blog/ - https://waitbutwhy.com/ - https://www.kalzumeus.com/archive/ - https://blog.codinghorror.com/

I think https://micro.blog is worth checking out as well. Manton Reece has done some really great work trying to support the indie web.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#128

Post by aembleton »

habibur wrote: post #112
lonk11 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discovery of good sources of information such as blogs is hard. And I think the biggest problem is the lack of trust. Everyone wants to grab your attention [1]. So how do you know that others won't waste your attention? To solve this problem I am building https://linklonk.com that cultivates trust as you rate content. When you upvote a link you connect stronger to the feed that posted it (which could be a blog's feed…

We need a standard API to subscribe to blogs on other sites, that will appear on our blog feed as news feed -- like how facebook or tweeter feeds work. RSS is too personal, too much outside the flow.

I don't understand how RSS is too personal. An RSS feed of a blog is usually the same for all readers of the blog.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

#130

Post by pixelgeek »

sergioisidoro wrote: post #30

Medium, in an attempt to monetise blogging and give financial incentives to writing with paywalling, has absolutely damaged my perception of blogging. It was the perfect platform, and so nice to find interesting blogs and articles that only wanted to share information and stories. But then it started eating away the blog platform space, and then took all that hostage with paywalls. There's not that many companies I r…

I think the blog space was dead prior to Medium showing up. Medium seemed to be a way to try to get the better writers still out there into a single space. Then they realised they had to pay all those folks and killed the site with their paywall.
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