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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?

#311

Post by simonw »

spragl wrote: post #290
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…

6. It is good training for your communication skills. But write it yourself, dont let LLMs do it. Otherwise forget the sixth reason.

Yes!

Good written communication is one of the key skills needed at the senior / staff engineer level. Blogging is a great way to exercise those skills.

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

#313

Post by cosmicgadget »

simonw wrote: post #133
HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean creating a blogroll to show other blogs you recommend, that is no longer so effective now that mobile phones are most of the world’s default interface to the internet. Themes for common blogging platforms like Wordpress generally hide the sidebar, blogrolls included, on mobile.

No not a blog roll - more a link blog or a habit of linking back to pieces you found relevant or interesting.

Agreed on this. Blogrolls are okay for people wandering the blogosphere but you only get so much from "check out this peer of mine". Topical links (here is another informative post about x) are much nicer for a reader who is already reading about x. And link blogs are great because they endorse specific content from someone.

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

#314

Post by theletterf »

I chose to make my personal site a blog. I guess they'd call it a nice blog, since I only write about technical writing. It's great for networking and your career. Personal brand and all that.

I would never return to personal blogging, though. That ship sailed around 2007, when social media appeared and trolls killed the last remaining personal blogs. The GeoCities safe haven vibe died then.

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

#315

Post by wkat4242 »

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…

The problem for me is, wordpress is a security disaster especially the plugins. I don't want to constantly worry about updating in time. One day too late and you can be screwed. I've seen it happen with other people.

I'm a huge fan of self hosting but internet facing stuff I don't want to run myself but all the commercial blogging services like medium have scummy tracking and analytics built in, or try to get my readers to subscribe to things.

Then I tried substack but they lean too heavily on the "newsletter" paradigm which I hate. Also they are starting to enshittify now too.

I don't mind paying for a service but they always want to double dip in tracking readers and selling subscriptions to them as well. Yuck.

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

#316

Post by goodthink »

NoiseBert69 wrote: post #210

I have nich'ed tech blog too. Mostly about self-developed things. Sadly this is the most valuable data source for LLM fuckers. But honestly: without having an efficient way to fight them crawlers I'm not willed to write for it anymore. Is there an efficient solution I can add? It lives on a Shared Web Hoster. For self-hosted stuff there's Anubis. Also willed not to use Cloudfare.

Basic Auth My blog: https://chalculator.com/blog Use Credentials: User: croquet Pass: yadayadayada Pain in the butt, links won't work without the creds, but they only need to be entered once.

Also, my blog comes complete with an IDE in the browser!

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

#317

Post by nickjj »

pardon_me wrote: post #243
nickjj wrote: post #227

I'm not sure about this. I've released a new post every week for 10 years straight. My traffic in the last 2 years is worse than the first 2 years. At the blog's peak I was getting around 180k unique visitors a month for years. I was able to build a whole business around selling tech courses and doing contract work for the last 10 years but now traffic is so little that this is no longer feasible (not even close). Ju…

Personal blogs are completely different from a web-based business which relies on SEO to be profitable. The idea of personal blogging is for your own growth and history.

> The idea of personal blogging is for your own growth and history.

That was why I started. Any business I got were byproducts of writing organically about the things I was working on. Courses were also a byproduct of doing the same type of contract work for many different clients.

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

#318

Post by caseyohara »

wkat4242 wrote: post #315
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…

The problem for me is, wordpress is a security disaster especially the plugins. I don't want to constantly worry about updating in time. One day too late and you can be screwed. I've seen it happen with other people. I'm a huge fan of self hosting but internet facing stuff I don't want to run myself but all the commercial blogging services like medium have scummy tracking and analytics built in, or try to get my read…

This is where static site generators can be a good option. I’m in the same boat. I don’t have any appetite for self hosting and maintaining some internet-facing application with a web server and a database and a million dependencies in between. So for my personal site, I generate it locally and stick the static files on S3. No database, no servers, no headache.

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

#319

Post by maxerickson »

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…

Seems like "you like to write and expect to enjoy it" should be high on the list.

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

#320

Post by unsungNovelty »

theletterf wrote: post #314

I chose to make my personal site a blog. I guess they'd call it a nice blog, since I only write about technical writing. It's great for networking and your career. Personal brand and all that. I would never return to personal blogging, though. That ship sailed around 2007, when social media appeared and trolls killed the last remaining personal blogs. The GeoCities safe haven vibe died then.

I have been hearing that blogging died since I started my personal website. The spotlight changed since social networking sites. That is all. Blogging is still alive and well.

And I wrote about this after RibbonFarm's retiring post as well - https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2024/life-of-a-blog-b...

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