A blogger I used to follow, Steve Pavlina, shut down his forums like in 2011 after 5 years of running them stating that they were always completely irrelevant to his biz model. He's still posting to his blog, daily, having started in 2004. Still going strong after 15 years.
Blogging Is Not Dead
31–40 of 132 posts
Re: Blogging Is Not Dead
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would hesitate to call recipe blogs "blogs." They're ad farms with good SEO and the thinnest veneer of content to get clicks. There are actual cooking and baking blogs of the quality you see in software where professionals or hobbyists talk about their craft but they won't show up on Google with terms like "$food_name recipe" and it doesn't really make sense for them to. Cooking blogs are for cooking nerds -- peopl…
It would actually made sense of them to show up. What google chooses to show does not make sense to show up. When it comes to cooking, google is just horribly bad.
Is there a "Hacker News" equivalent for cooking/foodie blogs? If not, there probably could be.
Re: Blogging Is Not Dead
#33Get out of the software development blogging bubble. Spend 3 minutes looking at each of the following: Look at woodworking blogs, recipe blogs, gardening blogs. One thing you'll note is that those are all filled with a shit fuck ton of ads and are completely unusable. I know this because my wife wades through that stuff and the only way she can is by using a blocker. I don't use a blocker because very few of the soft…
I would hesitate to call recipe blogs "blogs." They're ad farms with good SEO and the thinnest veneer of content to get clicks. There are actual cooking and baking blogs of the quality you see in software where professionals or hobbyists talk about their craft but they won't show up on Google with terms like "$food_name recipe" and it doesn't really make sense for them to. Cooking blogs are for cooking nerds -- peopl…
Do you have any examples of good cooking and baking blogs? I've been looking, but as you say, SEO is a problem for organic discovery for me.
Re: Blogging Is Not Dead
#34If you want to see more high quality blog posts, then I highly recommend taking actions to help promote and encourage them. Sign up for a mailing list or subscribe to an RSS feed when you find a blog that consistently produces quality material. Post new or old content on Hacker News, Reddit, Lobsters, Twitter, and other communities where you think they would be a good fit. Upvote and retweet quality content that you…
Interesting, I didn't know about the second chance queue. This appears to be the best source of information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380
Personally I was sad when my tiny python chess engine Sunfish [1] didn't make it past the two-three upvotes stage. However about half a year later somebody else submitted it and it got a lot of traction.
I wonder how accepted it is to resubmit the same, or a version of, your project or blog post, to try your luck again.
Re: Blogging Is Not Dead
#35We're overly attached to a specific idea of a "blog". In practice, "web logging" never died, even if the specific blog format has diminished over time. Blogs are websites that host posts in chronological order, but defined in a very specific way that excludes your Facebook and Twitter. The difference isn't self-hosting - Blogger and Wordpress.com host your blog. I reckon the difference is aggregation. Facebook groups…
Isn't the need for aggregators a failure of search engines? To the credit of Google, as much as I disdain them, combating SEO spam is a hard problem. I think that blogging feels "dead" because of SEO spam and because ads pay for jack shit these days.
Google knows very well that they're padding their search results with e-commerce sites to the detriment of meaningful content.
Re: Blogging Is Not Dead
#36Get out of the software development blogging bubble. Spend 3 minutes looking at each of the following: Look at woodworking blogs, recipe blogs, gardening blogs. One thing you'll note is that those are all filled with a shit fuck ton of ads and are completely unusable. I know this because my wife wades through that stuff and the only way she can is by using a blocker. I don't use a blocker because very few of the soft…
Unfortunately, blogs == spam in a lot of the non-technical world.
The /r/woodworking subreddit used to have a strict "no blogs" rule that finally got relaxed to just be more "no blog spam".
I noticed similar problems in Pinterest, where you'll find pins that have beautiful images but lead to spam garbage. So, there might have been a page that was initially hosting the image (probably copied from somewhere else), but then, it gets swapped out with an advertising garbage site. And the pin goes up in popularity because most users just don't care about the backing site.
The wider the potential audience, the bigger the potential for spam. And it sure doesn't seem like there's a great, consistent way to filter spam. Search engines do not appear to have kept pace since the rise of walled garden social networks.
At this point, I would pay for curated, interesting updates. It's just hard to see how a product like that would easy to find these days.
Re: Blogging Is Not Dead
#37> We also have webmentions, so, if bloggers start using it, it will help us find other's blogs. My informal research [1] shows approximately zero adoption of webmention. For 44 blog posts I have written in the past two years, I did not have a single external link to a host that would support it. [1] https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2020/01/checking...
Webmentions, pingbacks and the like were often abused for link spam. I disabled all of that on my blog ages ago (and I had to implement it in the first place, so... that was a drag).
Webmentions don't exist for that long. It's unlikely you had to disable them ages ago. But they are basically trackbacks and it's easy to conflate them.
That's also something I should repeat. As someone involved in an active blog engine project for many years now, webmentions annoyed me. They seemingly ignored that trackbacks existed and had already solved the issues webmentions now solve again. They should have been compatible, an extension ideally, but they are not. The project was not even interested enough to host a trackback/webmention converter, which would have given them an enormous adoption boost. Signals to me a complete disinterest of the "indie web" to integrate with the actually already existing independent and open web. I don't get it, it's a shame.
Re: Blogging Is Not Dead
#38If you want to see more high quality blog posts, then I highly recommend taking actions to help promote and encourage them. Sign up for a mailing list or subscribe to an RSS feed when you find a blog that consistently produces quality material. Post new or old content on Hacker News, Reddit, Lobsters, Twitter, and other communities where you think they would be a good fit. Upvote and retweet quality content that you…
Interesting, I didn't know about the second chance queue. This appears to be the best source of information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 Personally I was sad when my tiny python chess engine Sunfish [1] didn't make it past the two-three upvotes stage. However about half a year later somebody else submitted it and it got a lot of traction. I wonder how accepted it is to resubmit the same, or a versio…
The FAQ guidance seems to be that a few reposts a year iff the story didn’t already get transaction is fine — seems like a good barometer.
Personally, I’d prefer if someone reposted a good blog post or project rather than trying to develop new things just to have the ability to post something.
Re: Blogging Is Not Dead
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would hesitate to call recipe blogs "blogs." They're ad farms with good SEO and the thinnest veneer of content to get clicks. There are actual cooking and baking blogs of the quality you see in software where professionals or hobbyists talk about their craft but they won't show up on Google with terms like "$food_name recipe" and it doesn't really make sense for them to. Cooking blogs are for cooking nerds -- peopl…
Do you have any examples of good cooking and baking blogs? I've been looking, but as you say, SEO is a problem for organic discovery for me.
There are tons.
Food52
SpruceEats
Tiny Urban Kitchen
Serious Eats
A lot depends on your food and style preferences.
Re: Blogging Is Not Dead
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would actually made sense of them to show up. What google chooses to show does not make sense to show up. When it comes to cooking, google is just horribly bad.
Is there a "Hacker News" equivalent for cooking/foodie blogs? If not, there probably could be.
There is a subreddit for everything they say.