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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?

#161

Post by peterspath »

lightveil wrote: post #151

the problem I always have with starting a personal blog is that-I want to write about my projects, but I also want to write about introspective life things. And I'm always fearful that introspective life things would detract (perhaps significantly, if they are too revealing) from employers/etc looking at me as a potential hire. This is not so much about politics (I don't find a strident need to blog about my politica…

I have done the second way. I have split it up in categories, so people can subscribe to different categories rss feeds if they don't want the whole feed. I have ~1000 daily readers now. With all kinds of interests.

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

#162

Post by kukkeliskuu »

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…

I use GitHub Pages for personal blogs. Connect it with your personal domain name in case later you want to run it somewhere else.

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

#164

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

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…

I enjoy having a place to write that I can call my own, and it is a major flex when a topic comes up for a client like, say, migrating giant Subversion projects to Git, and I can whip out [1] and say "ah, I happen to know a thing or two about that".

[1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/reposurgeon/

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

#165

Post by postalcoder »

soiltype wrote: post #138
postalcoder wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Glad you like it!

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

#166

Post by nelsonfigueroa »

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.

Yeah there could be better ways but I've found a handful of sites that are useful like https://indieblog.page/. I actually wrote up a list of my favorite personal blog discoverability sites here: https://nelson.cloud/how-i-discover-new-blogs/

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

#167

Post by crackalamoo »

lightveil wrote: post #151

the problem I always have with starting a personal blog is that-I want to write about my projects, but I also want to write about introspective life things. And I'm always fearful that introspective life things would detract (perhaps significantly, if they are too revealing) from employers/etc looking at me as a potential hire. This is not so much about politics (I don't find a strident need to blog about my politica…

My two cents: if you're not doing anything too political or controversial, it's fine or even beneficial to mix in the occasional personal essay with the professional.

After all, many of your readers are also human beings with lives, maybe even lives similar to yours based on your professional content. (The rest of your readers are LLMs.) Your readers might appreciate your perspectives on random life things or just getting to see what their favorite blogger is up to.

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

#168

Post by yoz-y »

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.

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

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

#169

Post by crackalamoo »

ctxc wrote: post #61

I do have a fairly new personal blog, but I'm not sure how discoverability works. It seems like you'd get traffic from search engines a few years back, but now the only traffic I've had is from a HN post. Everything points to optimizing for "AEO" for LLMs now

I'm a little skeptical of AEO. What's the point if AI users just ask the LLM to retrieve the information and never visit your blog? I almost never click the links ChatGPT gives me

Maybe it makes sense if you're selling a product or service, but I don't see the appeal of AEO as the new SEO. Maybe I'm missing something?

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

#170

Post by crackalamoo »

codazoda wrote: post #14
Peacefulz wrote: post #12

I want to start one myself. More of a public journal, but all the same. I keep having fits and starts and things distract me from the habit. That, and I'm never satisfied with my implementation in the end and I always want to try new or different things.

I standardized on pure HTML and CSS and wrote about why: https://joeldare.com/why-im-writing-pure-html-and-css-in-202...

I also use pure HTML and CSS (and a touch of hand-written JavaScript)
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