Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

Any 101 tips for starting a blog that will stand the test of time?

This post really resonates with me, especially points 1, 3, and 5. I started blogging in 2001. I have old articles lying around that are completely obsolete - about PEAR, Swing, GWT, Subversion, etc.

I did it to share without having any idea who was reading or not. Probably nobody back then.

But it became a habit. Beyond tech topics, I started blogging about broader subjects: organization, hiring, salaries, company building.

And it's incredible how much I relied on it later as a sort of documentation, especially for everything related to company building. It's so valuable to re-read why we made certain decisions in the past. And it's also so valuable to be able to point new colleagues to that knowledge base.

And technically, I had fun. I went through Joomla, self-hosted WordPress, wordpress.com. I built my own plugins. Then I developed my own open source static blog generator (bloggrify.com) in the Nuxt ecosystem. That's when I created an English version of my blog.

Then I started feeling the need to share differently. I had the impression that blogging was becoming outdated, that younger generations weren't reading anymore. So I tried video format on YouTube.

I really enjoyed video production - there's still so much to learn: equipment, techniques, new tools.

But I realized that each format has its pros and cons. It's so much easier to update text when it becomes obsolete. It's also so much faster to produce. Video is so hard to make. So I got back into writing and even took it further by creating a blogging platform (writizzy.com).

In short, I learned a lot because I documented everything I did, which forced me to dig deeper into each topic to avoid saying nonsense. I also learned a lot because I wanted to test approaches, make videos, learn to build a static site generator and many other things, purely for the sake of learning.

Today, one piece of advice I give to every senior dev is to take the time to write. Doesn't matter if it's to publish somewhere or not. But to lay out your ideas, dig deeper into them, get perspective.

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There was a brief moment where it felt like a really fresh take on blogging, but the number of big names that have come in make it feel a lot less "wild west, anyone could go big on this platform". The addition of Substack Notes (essentially, X / Twitter built in to Substack) also sort of brings it down to earth. It's hard to pretend your "longform reading" is more sophisticated than the low-attention-span Tiktok masses when you've got Twitter baked in.

I still like Substack overall, there is a vibe over there that I certainly like more than Twitter or Instagram. But it also has that air of snooty elitist nerdism that characterized the middle days of Twitter - and it seems like the level of get rich quick self promotion is at least in line with the rest of the net.

I have both types of blog post on my site - deeply personal like talking about my ADHD (https://www.jvt.me/posts/2022/10/04/adhd/) or salary history (https://www.jvt.me/posts/2022/09/21/year-later-salary-histor...) and weekly notes, but also a lot of tech stuff. And as an IndieWeb website, I use it as my social media too, so people can read posts/replies to social media all in one place!

I don't feel like I've had any negative impact from that, or I'm very privileged to be able to say I don't care if I have had any impact from that - I've done fairly well for myself, and I can remind people I'm a full human being!