I love reading technical blogs, and Fabien Sanglard’s are some of the best out there https://fabiensanglard.net/
also the simple design of the website makes it great
Why blog if nobody reads it?
261–270 of 373 posts
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#262Writing a blog is always rewarding, but it's a difficult exercise, especially if one's writing in another language. Not only do you have some proficiency in writing fluid sentences and paragraphs, it's sometimes taxing to formulate something in a language that's not your mother tongue.
I'm curious if people around here have tips on diminishing friction and how to write better/more easily.
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
I regularly have conversations with people that end up with some form of "Let's not belabor this over beers but I'll send you a link to something I wrote. It may be a little bit stale but let me know what you think and we can follow up." Blogging has internal benefits of organizing thoughts or even just being a fun hobby. But it's external validation as well. Sure, writing a book is even more but that's probably 100s…
> "Let's not belabor this over beers but I'll send you a link to something I wrote. It may be a little bit stale but let me know what you think and we can follow up." How is it being received by those people? I can't help but imagine the response being: "Okay but then what's the point of us sitting here with beers?" EDIT: If I was hanging out talking with someone, and have them terminate an interesting conversation t…
I agree. Mentioning blog in the end is probably a better way. Finish the conversation, chain of thoughts and then before switching over to next topic or when saying byes or even a day or two later send them your post. But not in the middle of a conversation.
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#264Over a decade, I've learnt to blog as if no one will ever read my blog posts. With social referral traffic now completely dead, the only traffic I get to my blog is when my posts appear on Hacker News ( https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=minimaxir.com ), and even that is going down year-over-year. However, the process of writing a blog post forces me to invent new workflows and is in itself very educational, so i…
> With social referral traffic now completely dead, the only traffic I get to my blog is when my posts appear on Hacker News Not being a blog writer, that seems rather crazy to hear with how "social" the WWW has supposedly gotten. WP claims, there's 33 sites "with at least 100 million (monthly) active users". [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_... Top sites are up at multi-1000 millio…
I think we have seen a general trend towards centralized platforms on the internet. Where you had many individual niche sites before, now you have a few all-encompassing platforms. There are some exceptions, but I generally find that many of those platforms want to maximize your time on the platform itself. As a consequence, they do what they can to keep you from leaving the platform via a link to some other website.
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#265Personal sites are dead because the Internet search is broken. I personal sites could easily be found, and filtered, or sorted to provide interesting ones, then Personal sites would be booming. That is why I created my own domains list: https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database It contains links with properties in JSON. I can find personal things using "personal" tags. I can filter them using numerical "pa…
I think Google should create a walled garden of blogsearch, on the lines of Google Scholar, have some top-down verfication of good content / blogs. In the age of AI, such a product could act as a discovery mechanism for authentic human writings which could be included in training data for LLMs (uncontaminated steel even in age of AI).
What an appalling idea.
1. A walled garden? Run by Google? Aside from locking this discoverability away in a walled garden, how many years before Google kills it out of corporate disinterest?
2. So, blogs with Google tracking promoted higher? Blogs with copyright information excluded as it is not legal for LLM's to train on it? What do you think would happen?
It's fraught with problems.
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, after a year or two, blogs become your experience logs to prove experience and credibility once the landscape is killed by GenAI slops and SEO scams. Anyone can generate a big portfolio of projects these days(be it graphics, video, software, writing etc) but blog posts from 2023 and before are proof and undeniable.
A dark pattern on your self hosted blogging website is to backdate blog posts and make yourself seem very good at predicting future trends. There is no reason why you have to write a blog over a long period of time, you could quickly pump out several blog posts and link to them to establish credibility quickly.
If some one is determined to find out the authenticity then it’s possible right? Like Waybackmachine or similar tools?
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#267A lot of the comments here are about blogging to nobody (which I do) but I wanted to share how much I love reading people's personal blogs. I follow a bunch of developers (surprise surprise) and read mostly technical blogs, I've found a lot of developers mix writing blog posts about their personal and family life alongside technical posts. As I've been reading I've found those are some of my favourite posts, as someo…
I concur! Several of us also subscribe to your blogs' RSS feeds. If you're one of the nice people who put the full content of their blog posts into their feed, you might not see me as a visitor, but I definitely read and enjoy your blog.
As an occasional blog writer myself, I also like to announce manually on my social platforms I use (Mastodon and LinkedIn) when I blogged, and send a link to those socials post. The [full rationale is here][1]. They make it feel less like shouting in the void, which helps me stay motivated. I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the occasional likes and boosts I get from these, too :)
Simon Willison also has [good advice on how to write more][2], that I must admit I'm struggling to follow myself.
[1]: https://ergaster.org/posts/2024/03/06-welcoming-feedback/
[2]: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3leuudyabks2...
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#268I write blog like a diary but suitable for public audience.
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it may be the case that your possession of a tidbit of trivia and your particular interpretation of changes/reforms that came after Vatican II is causing you to interpret my comment in a different light than it was meant. I was actually envisioning something closer to the monastery that Alyosha was a part of in The Brothers Karamazov. It reminds me of the cliché admonishment of priests that pray in the street…
>If you know you will not (or perhaps should not) blog to gain an audience, why should you do it? I'm an atheist, so (knowing there are no gods) should I perform a ritual? Is the ritual for the gods' benefit, or for mine? Is the ritual for its own sake, something we do because we have always done it?
I think, in the end, it comes down to hope—how hopeful you are that your blogs will turn out to be beneficial one day.
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#270What the blogosphere needs is a “recommendations” page. Like the front page of YouTube but for blog posts (and not ad-revenue-driven). Where you can (quietly and privately) upvote and downvote and it'll adapt to your interests.