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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?

#361

Post by johannes1234321 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #327
ghaff wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sites like this one really emphasize monetization. Natural I suppose since it's startup-focused. But people used to be fine with blogs not having a monetary element at all.

I suppose if I were younger that might be of interest. I'm not looking for opportunities at this point. I live in a small town, I have probably one of the best (local) tech jobs I've ever had, not strictly on pay but the pay is enough and the overall chill level and quality of life is something I would not give up. I've sometimes thought about blogging but for what? I'm not interested in promoting myself or my "brand…

To have notable income from blogging requires a very different frequency and posts which attract a broader audience (unless I go really deep and paywall it for experts) That turns blogging from keeping notes and sharing experience to a Job in itself. A Job I for one wouldn't like.

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

#362

Post by bluebarbet »

bccdee wrote: post #347
bluebarbet wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If one posts a couple of solid paragraphs as a reply, one looks like an autistic weirdo info-bombing. As one should. The rando who spams a discussion thread with an impenetrable wall of text is like that guy who uses their "question" at the end of an in-person panel discussion to ramble incoherently for three minutes. Yes, here we can scroll past it, but it's still presumptious and annoying. This is not primary cont…

> This is not primary content In a forum, the discussion IS primary content. That's the problem: Reddit has shifted away from being a discussion forum toward an endless-scroll content feed. > Here we're all nobodies to everyone else. For my part I try to remember that fact - and get to the point. Kind of an odd turn of logic. If being a nobody devalues your anecdotes or tangents, then it equally devalues your point.…

My point is that the primary content at the top of the page has a byline. It's already vouched for, somewhat, by the reputation of the domain, or publication, or author. We have an idea of whether to spend our time investigating further. By contrast my rando comment (or yours) has nothing to recommend it but some opaque username. That's why I (and I'm betting most people) will scroll right past the "autistic weirdo"'s wall of text. And why I personally choose to try not to write that text.

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

#363

Post by sdqali »

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 old blog posts come up in the first page of search results for niche topics a lot, and it is very satisfying when someone reaches out to say that they benefited from it.

On a side note, after writing frequently for ~12 years, I didn't write anything for the next 6. This discussion came at the right time - it nudged me to publish two posts yesterday.

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

#364

Post by d_sem »

intrasight wrote: post #352
d_sem wrote: post #351

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

Just deep dive into the technology of your choice. Write clearly and comprehensively about your projects, the roadblocks you faced, and how you overcame them. Another recommendation is to blog on a collaborative project. Could be with just one other person. That way you're reaching a wider social network. What's very satisfying is googling on some technical problem and finding in the top search results my own blog ar…

any particular platforms that one could host the blog?

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

#366

Post by stackghost »

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…

>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.

>3. If you blog more frequently than that it can be a really valuable resource for your future self. I love being able to look back on what I was thinking and writing about ten years ago. Having a good tagging system helps with this too - I can review my tag of "scaling" or "postgresql" and see a timeline of how my understanding developed.

These are generally why I blog. I write the articles with an audience in mind, because I don't know a concept if I can't explain it cogently. And also I actually tend to refer back to my blog for my own reference surprisingly regularly. For example, I wrote an article on installing Debian on a PC Engines APU over the serial interface, and then getting the Unifi Controller running. Every so often when I update the Debian install on that box, or decide to change OSes on a different APU I'll refer to that article.

You wouldn't think that that would be so difficult but it was a surprisingly baroque process.

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

#368

Post by sowbug »

chemotaxis wrote: post #62
sowbug wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume that search engines these days don't care as much about showing results that won't make them money. Either you bought search ads, your site is showing ads from their network, or you're SOL.

I think they do. The problem is different. It used to be that if you had a blog about something like guitar maintenance or linear algebra, that was enough to show up in the results, because no one else was directly competing with you. Over time, a lot of companies figured out that if they start posting content-farmed articles on notionally non-commercial topics, this drives people to their website, so you ended up wi…

I'm not sure whether we're disagreeing all that much. Your examples are of low-quality results. From a user's point of view, the one and only job of a search engine is to surface high-quality results, especially if it's hard for the engine to tell.

But the incentive for search engines to pick profitable results over quality results has only gotten stronger over time.

Just imagine a world where your one-person, part-time, labor-of-love guitar-maintenance blog were the top search result, simply because it had the best content. Democratizing access to information was the original promise of the web. I don't think we're there anymore, and I don't think it's correct to let search engines off the hook because their lucrative job has gotten harder.

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

#369

Post by walterbell »

bluebarbet wrote: post #362
bccdee wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not primary content In a forum, the discussion IS primary content. That's the problem: Reddit has shifted away from being a discussion forum toward an endless-scroll content feed. > Here we're all nobodies to everyone else. For my part I try to remember that fact - and get to the point. Kind of an odd turn of logic. If being a nobody devalues your anecdotes or tangents, then it equally devalues your point.…

My point is that the primary content at the top of the page has a byline . It's already vouched for , somewhat, by the reputation of the domain, or publication, or author. We have an idea of whether to spend our time investigating further. By contrast my rando comment (or yours) has nothing to recommend it but some opaque username. That's why I (and I'm betting most people) will scroll right past the "autistic weirdo…

> nothing to recommend it but some opaque username

Persistent usernames enable history of community contribution and reception.

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

#370

Post by walterbell »

efilife wrote: post #240
ksec wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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neocities works well with static site generators, which can be run locally or elsewhere in the cloud
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