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Why blog if nobody reads it?

andysblog.uk

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Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#81

Post by Pooge »

chistev wrote: post #71
Pooge wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you mean by posts are not links? Not GP, but he is right; the behavior of your website is semantically incorrect. Looks like you redirect the users to your blog posts by using instead of . I also agree that your website should absolutely not require JavaScript to work. Clicking on links is something that is possible with 0 lines of JavaScript. > I don't have a RSS feed but I have a newsletter with a subscri…

> Not GP, but he is right; the behavior of your website is semantically incorrect. Looks like you redirect the users to your blog posts by using instead of . I'll fix this. Thanks. > This is also not very hacker-friendly behavior. Why should users give you their email addresses when a RSS feed is much easier to implement and use? I'll do this too. Thanks.

I'm glad you took it nicely. You should definitely post here when you write a new article.

There's always something to learn! Just remember to do things the easiest way possible; allows you to "redirect" users using HTML-only, while needs an event attached to it using JavaScript. There are many things that people use JavaScript for but that are 100% possible using HTML. We should favor those.

Also, writing a static website removes a plethora of vulnerabilities. Collecting email addresses comes with its legal burden, too (do you delete people's email addresses if they ask you to and are in the EU?).

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#82

Post by TeaVMFan »

I blog on technical topics as a reminder to my future self. I increasingly find myself needing the details of some command line or process from long ago, and having my own notes easily searchable is a great time saver. Hopefully it helps someone else too.

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#84

Post by arjie »

There's quite a few reasons I write a blog:

* It'll eventually be scraped into an AI and my factual stuff being in there is good

* It might help some random person who finds it

* Maybe my friends will read it

* Maybe my kids will read it when I die (and if I die prematurely they'll be able to form a shape of what their father is like)

* Simply observing things is worthwhile to me

It's not a brand building exercise or anything. In fact, I doubt very many non-bots visit my blog. Cloudflare reports 11k uniques/month but I think it's all bots. Also, in many cases it's notes for myself for the future. I have mine as a wiki, and I post blog stuff under the blog/ prefix.

My wife and I are expecting a baby in a month or so and I've been chronicling what the process of pregnancy was like. I sometimes just wanted a "here's one path through it" to just get an idea of how this goes and found that hard. Most people write a lot of advice but I wanted to just chronicle the actual experience https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/index.php/Pregnancy

Even though my wife and I have an unusual one (IVF with genetic embryo selection) maybe something in there will be useful through an LLM.

Another one of the things it appears I'm at 99th percentile or higher at is getting facts into Wikipedia that other people have trouble doing. So sometimes I like to write about my experience doing that https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/index.php/Blog/2024-10-17/Path...

One of the other last reasons for me to write a blog is that it's just sometimes so beautiful to read someone's human expression of personality and if I'm lucky someone who feels that way can read mine. A Hacker News Comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40650982) about a deleted Wikipedia page pointed me to an old mathematician's site and it's such a heartwarming and bittersweet feeling reading his joy and sadness: https://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/m-mat/AKECHI/index.ht... but even Time Cube counts!

Yeah, I did manage to rescue that Wikipedia article too. Made me happy :)

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#85

Post by jwagenet »

Aurornis wrote: post #46
n_ary wrote: post #14

Earlier 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.

> 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. I always read blogs if people include them in resumes. It’s really cool when an applicant has a blog with unique and interesting content, but I can’t remember this happening without us already having been very impressed by the candidate’s resume. More…

Maybe it’s different in embedded, but as a mech e: any moderately complex hardware project will likely cost orders of magnitude more than a software project to prototype and manufacture. Off the self electronic parts have become much cheaper, but if you need more than some plastic, 3D parts it’s still expensive.

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#86

Post by MattSayar »

eccentricwind wrote: post #19
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #4

Related: Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42685534 Why I still blog after 15 years https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41646531 Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42872276

> Remember when maintaining a blog was THE way to build your developer brand? Jeff Atwood's (co-founder of Stack Exchange) Coding Horror comes to mind, and how the teenage me was amazed at how someone got offered such a good job with such an amazing office [0] because of blogging. The smaller, more intimate internet was truly something else. [0]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/five-things-you-didnt-know-abo...

I still reference Jeff's stuff when I blog. Such good stuff

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#87

Post by geerlingguy »

righthand wrote: post #80
ZeWaren wrote: post #6

I document technical things on my blog and hardly anyone reads it. But later on when I need that thing again, I just go there and I have the perfect documentation available for the topic (it's perfect since I wrote it hahaha).

Your intention is still to pass on the knowledge though regardless of traffic otherwise why even publish if it’s just for you? What is the difference from the Documents dir at that point?

I can stay in my browser and use Google, DuckDuckGo, or even my on-site search (I use Apache Solr, I'm a little weird compared to the typical hosted blog) and don't have to go into some webapp or search on some local notes app.

I can also add permalinks to any of the posts from anywhere, and share them in public documentation or bug reports and such, a handy feature.

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#88

Post by XorNot »

Because it's a handy way to be able to remember what I was doing, and might help someone somewhere someday (frequently me if it's a slightly non-obvious thing that I find I need to remember later)

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#89

Post by lucasoshiro »

Writing something for others is teaching, and teaching is one of the steps of the Feynman technique. Even if you don't follow it, writing and teaching forces you to organize the subject in your head. You force yourself to make the subject clear to your audience, and you are part of your audience.

If someone will read it or not is out of your control, and it's completely unpredictable.

Using some examples of mine:

1. Once I wrote a blog post about writing a quicksort in Python using only lambdas, based on the lambda calculus theory which I found very interesting and challenging to explain in clear way. Some people liked it, but it was not proportional to the hard work involved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38848905

2. Once a friend asked me why I write my scripts in Ruby, I told him a few reasons and I wrote in my blog just as a personal reference, to have in hands if someone else asks me the same thing. Turns out that it reached the #1 here in HN and even the creator of Ruby tweeted about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40763640

So, don't do it for the others. Do it for yourself. And I won't say "keep doing it and someday someone will see", I can't guarantee that, but a least you'll have a chance.

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