I have been maintaining a semi-successful blog [1] for the last five years and have learned a few things along the way:
- Own your content: Medium, Substack, Hashnode, Dev.to—all of them suck. Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time.
- No one cares about the technology behind your site unless it’s huge. So it should be the least of your concerns. Don’t be that JS guy who rewrites their entire site every week in a different stack and writes a blog post about it.
- Consistently writing is a lot of work, and there’s no way around it.
- Picking a niche and writing about it yields better results than trying to write about anything and everything.
- No one will probably read it for a long time, and that’s okay. You should write only for yourself in the beginning.
- POSSE is the way to go. If you don’t promote your work, no one else will.
- That said, if it took less time to write than it would take someone to read, it’s probably not worth writing.
> If you don’t promote your work, no one else will.
This has not been my experience. If you do interesting things then there are plenty of people who are willing to bring attention to it. I've been cold-emailed by journalists wanting to interview me without ever doing anything other than a) make my work publicly accessible and b) collaborate with like-minded people.
Perhaps I'm lucky (probably). Perhaps my work would've gotten more attention if I spent more effort promoting it (probably). The things I do because I find them interesting are not things I feel the need to promote, because I'm not doing them for attention.
If your goal is to grab a lot of attention, you will inexorably have to do things that are not interesting because the only way to achieve broad appeal is to not offend anyone's tastes and the only way to do that is to be bland.
>> If you don’t promote your work, no one else will.
> This has not been my experience. If you do interesting things then there are plenty of people who are willing to bring attention to it. I've been cold-emailed by journalists wanting to interview me without ever doing anything other than a) make my work publicly accessible and b) collaborate with like-minded people.
Both of those are promoting your work so it is your experience. Your experience just has been that you haven't had to put much work into promoting your work so it doesn't feel like promoting your work to you.
When people give advice to content creators in the form of "when you do interesting things" my brain immediately jumps to one question; how do you know what other people consider interesting?
Honest question, because I am just starting out, myself. I have a small blog where I share my opinions and projects related to technology I enjoy. However, if I were to do a thought experiment and assume my audience is HN readers, I'd hesitate to say anyone here would find my posts very interesting. I like them, but I am not sure who else would.
I genuinely do not understand how to evaluate an audience, so I just write what I like to write and hope for the best.
>Don’t be that JS guy who rewrites their entire site every week in a different stack and writes a blog post about it.
seems like a perfectly reasonable idea for a blog about different stacks. I'm not advocating it, but there's nothing wrong with it if that's what interests you.
OP is saying don’t be the person who says they want to write about Frogs, but who then spends an immense amount of effort not writing about Frogs, and writing about procrastination instead.
That close minded opinion you quoted left a bad taste in my mouth and makes me not want to check the OP's blog out.
Almost every opinion people have has been covered by someone else in some way unless you are working at the forefront of something, so it usually depends on how you value-add to existing things with your own experience.
It's also that sort of I-know-what's-better attitude that turns a personal thing into a competitive thing.
Yep. The success metric isn’t unidimensional here. Having external readers is just a cherry on top. I didn’t even think anyone else would find my writings interesting, let alone useful.
Strong disagree on Medium, Substack, etc. There are very famous and popular blogs on both with tons of followers. My sister asked for a blog, I steered her to substack. Zero effort, just works.
> Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time.
Nothing about substack wastes readers time.
Conversely, what wastes their time is your site being down or hacked and what wastes your time is maintaining your blog's infra, updating because vulnerabilities, and/or using bad UIs like blogging from github (maybe passable for nerds, not for non-nerds)
A blog isn't about the tech you use. It's about the writing. Worrying about tech is not going to add a single reader to your blog.
Substack is trash. VC-backed, full of tracking pixels and privacy-invading anti-features, constant push to monetize, cross-promote and increase engagement... Every blogger who has moved there has gotten less interesting than they were when they were independent. It's everything that is wrong about social media cynically branded as some kind of alternative media outlet.
Of course there is plenty of money to be made as a social media influencer who specializes in long form content, and if that's the career a person is interested in building then sure - Substack, Medium, whatever - great choice. But for people who are interested in blogging as it used to be, independent writers who want to write without the pressure of editors, without paywalls, without popups, without forcing their readers into signup funnels... It might be a bit more work to set up, but tools like WordPress, Ghost etc are better suited.
> if it took less time to write than it would take someone to read, it’s probably not worth writing.
Disagree. If it took less thinking than it will take reading, then yes, probably not worth it. But if you can trim your writing to the pith in every paragraph or even line, people will love you.
Too many people babble to keep the underlying lies and fraud and their complicity burried in narratives.
> trim your writing to the pith in every paragraph or even line
This takes a lot of time. Writing concisely is much more challenging and time-consuming than writing verbosely. Writing unnecessarily long essays means that your readers end up spending more time reading them than you did writing them.
As Blaise Pascal wrote: "I only made this letter longer because I had not the leisure to make it shorter."
I like this post about the value of brevity that starts with “disagree”, immediately agrees with what it’s responding to, and then goes on to talk about a completely unrelated thing
You can if yountype complicated tjings and include typos that make it hard to decode anything much less a run on sentence like this that includes redundancies and extra meaningless words saying the same thing which is easy to type but takes ages to read.
You don't have to type. I wrote some things with hundreds of links then assumed the reader was at least somewhat familiar with the set of links above each paragraph. I may even try keep opinions out of it (less effort) and simply paint a context with references for the reader to do their own thinking.
> POSSE is the way to go. If you don’t promote your work, no one else will.
I agree but when I tried this a few weeks ago, it looked like a lot of work to publish on my own blog and then replicate everywhere else. I didn't find a good tool and got lost trying out fediverse stuff.
You don't need some fancy tech. Blogs have been around for 30+ years and function just fine on such old tech. The only new tech you should use is certbot and own your own domain.
Write in markdown and serve directly, or export to HTML. Or write in LibreOffice Writer and export to HTML.
Upload HTML to a basic webserver. You don't need a fancy load balancer or denial-of-human-system or anything.
...it's basically a janky (possibly insecure?) perl-cgi-script which converts a directory of markdown files into a blog.
I love the idea of it in that it's just markdown files! `vim ~/blog/entries/some-random-thought.txt` end ups with $AUTHOR of `chown`, $DATE of the file modification time, tree of `mkdir -p ~/blog/entries/some/category` ... it's just trivial to backup, restore, and work with. You can even (probably) hook it up to a static regen which is probably safer: http://blosxom.com/documentation/users/install/static/
The link to datasette is if you're wanting to nerd around a bit more, as it's kindof a combo of sqlite and a web server for rendering data from within it. The linked github repo is how their main site is built/rendered and it definitely has aspects of "blogginess", and you can kindof see how it's done. The neat thing of `let tags = "SELECT DISTINCT tags FROM posts"` or transforming blogging into effectively updating/adding records in a database is an extension of the blosxom zen of "it's just files [records], yo! go forth and edit them..."
The best writing advice I ever got was from a college professor—"everybody's got 100 bad essays in them. You just have to get them out."
I feel like this is what blogging is especially good for. You can clear out the awful stuff and then try to incrementally improve.
I would diametrically disagree with point #7—if you want to write well, you need to revise the hell out of it. I guess pick whose writing you like better, between me and the author, and take the corresponding advice.
My technique is Da Vinci method just collect / discover lot of shiny pieces. Then stitch them together later. Develop these pieces separately like colored glass pieces in a mosaic, sort of inversion of divide and conquer, collect and assemble.
I was doing this, and then it is confusing for people to follow. Nowadays I do this, too. But when I am ready, I write up everything once, then add in the details.
While I agree, I know it can be hard to start writing as well, because you are so worried about the quality. One of my professors from college brought up a great point that "No one will read your shitty first draft except you."
I find that phrase very helpful, because usually when I write, the first draft is always a giant mess. But you're able to craft it and edit it the best way that you can. So you can push out what you think is good work, and continue to improve as you write more.
It is very scary. Oddly that makes blogs kind of a good place to start, since almost no one will find them or read them. It's public writing, but a lot less nerve-wracking than putting yourself out there in other formats (like forum posts).
It’s better to get those bad essays out in the form of comments, you get instant feedback and you’ll know what works and what doesn’t work when you go to write a real blog.
In high school I did a report on a local poet and author.
What struck me back then was he said in an interview that you need to go through at least a thousand sheets of paper before you start producing anything good.
As a high schooler dreading to write a 4 page report on the guy, a thousand pages sounded ludicrous.
This is what I tend to use HN/Reddit comments for... I know I would probably be better off writing a blog, but I'm too busy procrastinating to make that happen.
I've been blogging for just over 20 years at this point, my main takeaways
1) Blog for yourself and no-one else. Write things up because you find them interesting or you learned something. Trying to second-guess things like what will be popular or get engagement is not a fun time for what is likely to be a hobby.
2) Keep it low maintenance and simple publishing process. I use Github pages and Jekyll, but other similar options are available.
3) If you're doing technical content, try to have practical examples. I've had multiple times where I thought I knew how something worked and, in the process of writing a blog with practical examples, found out I was wrong about how it worked!
Point 3 is very important and something that needs to be done more often. I would also say have someone who works in the domain you're writing about read it and give feedback.
1) Main reason is that if I've spent time working something out, I can save other people the time doing that, by writing down the details in a searchable place.
2) If I want to explain something to someone, it's easy if I can just point them to a blog I've already written
3) (bit of an unintended consequence) It helped get me my last two jobs :D Being able to point to a long history of technical blog posting was relevant when I got a job in advocacy as that's one of the necessary skills.
Sometimes you talk to someone (possibly online, usually about a shared interest), and they ask you what your thoughts are on X. Then you can just link them, if you have written on X (or related).
Sometimes others want to express a (non trivial) idea to someone else, and your writing may be the best thing they know that gets the message across. Then they can send it.
Sometimes (or rather, always) your idea and writing is not the best or final thought you have on the subject. But it is not until someone has read and commented/replied (thoughtfully) that you understand what the next refinement is.
And then there is serendipity, just putting it out there to see what might (or might not) come of it.
Plus maybe one finds it motivating to have it actually accessible for others. As a clear goal and a standard to hold each piece to.
I echo the other responses to your question. Just recently I had two instances where an old blog post of mine contained a solution to a problem a coworker encountered. I publish these notes mostly so that I don't forget about them, but it's an added degree of satisfaction when it proves helpful to others. I wrote a bit about this in one of my recent posts [1]. Don't be afraid of the rabbit holes!
> I should add, for context, that my friend and I are talking about writing beautiful essays here. If you want to write the most precise thing possible, you need to edit mercilessly and accept that the writing ends up flat and disjointed.
I don't think that merciless editing and beauty are opposed. The author perhaps underestimates the extent to which artists mercilessly edit their own work. The author employs the metaphor of musical improvisation, but the best musical pieces are usually composed, not improvised. I like jazz, but... not for the songwriting. For stream of consciousness writing, you'd almost be better off posting on social media.
I've been blogging for over 15 years, and my advice, admittedly ironic, is to not take advice from anyone. Actually, that's my advice on many subjects. Everyone wants to impose their own little idiosyncrasies on you, but what works for them won't necessarily work for you. One's idiosyncrasies are not universal truths.
This is a question more people need to ask. Be it a blog, YouTube channel, podcast, or whatever else, they all need to be rooted in having something worth to sharing to some small piece of the world.
Many people get caught up in thinking the blog, YouTube, or podcast is the thing, when it’s just the thing that lets you share the real thing. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to really integrate this lesson.
That sounds like a chicken/egg scenario: how are you supposed to know if you have something worth sharing without producing that something first to make that assessment?
I think putting more questions and uncertainty in the way of actually just writing/podcasting/youtubing is what stops a lot of people really building the habit in the first place.
there are two types of blogs - sincere ones, where the author pours out his soul and talks about what he can't keep to himself, possibly raising some important issues, trying to convey them to the masses, and SEO blogs - where there are excrements of hashtags, advertising slogans, constant repetitions, and requests to throw a bone (support the project, you haven't supported the project yet? you can do it here, well, or here! did I forget to tell you that you can support the project? by the way, one more thing - support the project!). Such ones are immediately banned. I am also very annoyed by those who are already looking for a place for a banner from the first minutes of the site's existence. you will not survive in this world without this cent? 10 bucks a month - payment for personal shame?
all this conversion and optimization of texts for search engines turns bloggers into robots, and it is simply impossible to read the texts, they are not human, they are as if created by neural networks. who needs this hypocrisy?
i think you're exactly right. but to blog with zero SEO in mind sounds foolish as well.
you should blog, and by a blog definition that is going on the internet. to get more people to read it (often the goal) the easiest thing to do is utilize the tool people use to find things on the internet (search engines).
if there are issues with spam, keyword stuffing, forever run-on paragraphs of nothingness, well that is the search engine algorithm's job to fix. And they have a lot of money to fix it.
and if they don't fix it we should use a new search engine. it'll take time. but those seem like the dynamics at play in this scenario.
“Do you want to be a Writer, or do you want to write?” I think that almost any question of the form “Do you want to be an Xer, or do you want to X” is useful these days.
what the gp is getting at is that back in the day there were people who wanted to be in a band not out of any particular musical talent or even inclination but because a lot of their friends were doing it and it looked like a cool thing to do.
Your question got me thinking about supermarket bulletin boards. I recall them from way back as busy places with lots of notes attached, but last year or thereabouts I remember seeing a small bulletin board with one note attached and thinking how unusual it was.
Speaking from experience, start by building some tools to make blog publishing more pleasant— build a markdown processor in your favorite language, then write your own syntax highlighting and html parser / transformer, then benchmark and optimize the heck out of it, then decide blogging isn’t all that interesting, and write some games instead.
Readit News
- Own your content: Medium, Substack, Hashnode, Dev.to—all of them suck. Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time.
- No one cares about the technology behind your site unless it’s huge. So it should be the least of your concerns. Don’t be that JS guy who rewrites their entire site every week in a different stack and writes a blog post about it.
- Consistently writing is a lot of work, and there’s no way around it.
- Picking a niche and writing about it yields better results than trying to write about anything and everything.
- No one will probably read it for a long time, and that’s okay. You should write only for yourself in the beginning.
- POSSE is the way to go. If you don’t promote your work, no one else will.
- That said, if it took less time to write than it would take someone to read, it’s probably not worth writing.
[1]: https://rednafi.com
I didn’t know what this acronym meant. Hopefully I saved someone a Google search.
https://indieweb.org/POSSE
https://imgur.com/a/oWfIjkZ
This has not been my experience. If you do interesting things then there are plenty of people who are willing to bring attention to it. I've been cold-emailed by journalists wanting to interview me without ever doing anything other than a) make my work publicly accessible and b) collaborate with like-minded people.
Perhaps I'm lucky (probably). Perhaps my work would've gotten more attention if I spent more effort promoting it (probably). The things I do because I find them interesting are not things I feel the need to promote, because I'm not doing them for attention.
If your goal is to grab a lot of attention, you will inexorably have to do things that are not interesting because the only way to achieve broad appeal is to not offend anyone's tastes and the only way to do that is to be bland.
> This has not been my experience. If you do interesting things then there are plenty of people who are willing to bring attention to it. I've been cold-emailed by journalists wanting to interview me without ever doing anything other than a) make my work publicly accessible and b) collaborate with like-minded people.
Both of those are promoting your work so it is your experience. Your experience just has been that you haven't had to put much work into promoting your work so it doesn't feel like promoting your work to you.
Careful. While I agree with the premise, you make it sound binary. You can have broad-er appeal while still being individual.
Honest question, because I am just starting out, myself. I have a small blog where I share my opinions and projects related to technology I enjoy. However, if I were to do a thought experiment and assume my audience is HN readers, I'd hesitate to say anyone here would find my posts very interesting. I like them, but I am not sure who else would.
I genuinely do not understand how to evaluate an audience, so I just write what I like to write and hope for the best.
seems like a perfectly reasonable idea for a blog about different stacks. I'm not advocating it, but there's nothing wrong with it if that's what interests you.
OP is saying don’t be the person who says they want to write about Frogs, but who then spends an immense amount of effort not writing about Frogs, and writing about procrastination instead.
Almost every opinion people have has been covered by someone else in some way unless you are working at the forefront of something, so it usually depends on how you value-add to existing things with your own experience.
It's also that sort of I-know-what's-better attitude that turns a personal thing into a competitive thing.
What is semi-successful anyway...
You know a blog is going to be good when it's using the default wordpress theme from 10 years ago.
> Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time.
Nothing about substack wastes readers time.
Conversely, what wastes their time is your site being down or hacked and what wastes your time is maintaining your blog's infra, updating because vulnerabilities, and/or using bad UIs like blogging from github (maybe passable for nerds, not for non-nerds)
A blog isn't about the tech you use. It's about the writing. Worrying about tech is not going to add a single reader to your blog.
Of course there is plenty of money to be made as a social media influencer who specializes in long form content, and if that's the career a person is interested in building then sure - Substack, Medium, whatever - great choice. But for people who are interested in blogging as it used to be, independent writers who want to write without the pressure of editors, without paywalls, without popups, without forcing their readers into signup funnels... It might be a bit more work to set up, but tools like WordPress, Ghost etc are better suited.
Login modal wastes time.
Disagree. If it took less thinking than it will take reading, then yes, probably not worth it. But if you can trim your writing to the pith in every paragraph or even line, people will love you.
Too many people babble to keep the underlying lies and fraud and their complicity burried in narratives.
This takes a lot of time. Writing concisely is much more challenging and time-consuming than writing verbosely. Writing unnecessarily long essays means that your readers end up spending more time reading them than you did writing them.
As Blaise Pascal wrote: "I only made this letter longer because I had not the leisure to make it shorter."
Is that actually a possibility? I can't type faster than I can read.
What does this mean? (Googling wasn't helpful.)
I agree but when I tried this a few weeks ago, it looked like a lot of work to publish on my own blog and then replicate everywhere else. I didn't find a good tool and got lost trying out fediverse stuff.
> POSSE is the way to go
Can you host your own blog, but replicate (in part) in dev.to?
Is it against their TOS to have a link to an original, or even only include teasers advertising the 'real' blog post?
It's kind of like having you main git repo somewhere, but cloning to GitHub for the community.
Deleted Comment
Write in markdown and serve directly, or export to HTML. Or write in LibreOffice Writer and export to HTML.
Upload HTML to a basic webserver. You don't need a fancy load balancer or denial-of-human-system or anything.
Just joking. Sort of. There's apparently a modern tool you can use to transpile SGML to HTML[0], and I'm itching to try it out.
--
[0] - https://sgmljs.net/docs/producing-html-tutorial/producing-ht... - yes, it's an NPM package, and yes, you can run it in the browser, but you can also use it on a server, or as a static site generator.
I love the idea of it in that it's just markdown files! `vim ~/blog/entries/some-random-thought.txt` end ups with $AUTHOR of `chown`, $DATE of the file modification time, tree of `mkdir -p ~/blog/entries/some/category` ... it's just trivial to backup, restore, and work with. You can even (probably) hook it up to a static regen which is probably safer: http://blosxom.com/documentation/users/install/static/
The link to datasette is if you're wanting to nerd around a bit more, as it's kindof a combo of sqlite and a web server for rendering data from within it. The linked github repo is how their main site is built/rendered and it definitely has aspects of "blogginess", and you can kindof see how it's done. The neat thing of `let tags = "SELECT DISTINCT tags FROM posts"` or transforming blogging into effectively updating/adding records in a database is an extension of the blosxom zen of "it's just files [records], yo! go forth and edit them..."
set plugins and themes to auto-update, add wordfence and change default settings.
use updraft or similar to pull full backups on a schedule.
I feel like this is what blogging is especially good for. You can clear out the awful stuff and then try to incrementally improve.
I would diametrically disagree with point #7—if you want to write well, you need to revise the hell out of it. I guess pick whose writing you like better, between me and the author, and take the corresponding advice.
My technique is Da Vinci method just collect / discover lot of shiny pieces. Then stitch them together later. Develop these pieces separately like colored glass pieces in a mosaic, sort of inversion of divide and conquer, collect and assemble.
I find that phrase very helpful, because usually when I write, the first draft is always a giant mess. But you're able to craft it and edit it the best way that you can. So you can push out what you think is good work, and continue to improve as you write more.
Dead Comment
What struck me back then was he said in an interview that you need to go through at least a thousand sheets of paper before you start producing anything good.
As a high schooler dreading to write a 4 page report on the guy, a thousand pages sounded ludicrous.
each sentence should make sense based on every prior sentence. each sentence should be able to stand alone on its own sheet of paper.
write each sentence on a single sheet of paper.
1) Blog for yourself and no-one else. Write things up because you find them interesting or you learned something. Trying to second-guess things like what will be popular or get engagement is not a fun time for what is likely to be a hobby.
2) Keep it low maintenance and simple publishing process. I use Github pages and Jekyll, but other similar options are available.
3) If you're doing technical content, try to have practical examples. I've had multiple times where I thought I knew how something worked and, in the process of writing a blog with practical examples, found out I was wrong about how it worked!
1) Main reason is that if I've spent time working something out, I can save other people the time doing that, by writing down the details in a searchable place.
2) If I want to explain something to someone, it's easy if I can just point them to a blog I've already written
3) (bit of an unintended consequence) It helped get me my last two jobs :D Being able to point to a long history of technical blog posting was relevant when I got a job in advocacy as that's one of the necessary skills.
Sometimes others want to express a (non trivial) idea to someone else, and your writing may be the best thing they know that gets the message across. Then they can send it.
Sometimes (or rather, always) your idea and writing is not the best or final thought you have on the subject. But it is not until someone has read and commented/replied (thoughtfully) that you understand what the next refinement is.
And then there is serendipity, just putting it out there to see what might (or might not) come of it.
Plus maybe one finds it motivating to have it actually accessible for others. As a clear goal and a standard to hold each piece to.
[1] https://branislavjenco.github.io/rabbit-holes/
I don't think that merciless editing and beauty are opposed. The author perhaps underestimates the extent to which artists mercilessly edit their own work. The author employs the metaphor of musical improvisation, but the best musical pieces are usually composed, not improvised. I like jazz, but... not for the songwriting. For stream of consciousness writing, you'd almost be better off posting on social media.
I've been blogging for over 15 years, and my advice, admittedly ironic, is to not take advice from anyone. Actually, that's my advice on many subjects. Everyone wants to impose their own little idiosyncrasies on you, but what works for them won't necessarily work for you. One's idiosyncrasies are not universal truths.
Makes me feel OK to be quirky and unpolished when the rest of the world is making reaction faces and pointing at text to feed an algo.
A picture and 3 sentences can be a blog post.
You can talk about a hobby, a trip, a vacation or random thoughts.
Sometimes people will find a how-to blog post through Google. Sometimes an old friend or former teacher will look you up.
In reality, you'll probably be happier if your blog never grows a steady following :)
No need to write a full-on 10k+ word novella on everything.
Many people get caught up in thinking the blog, YouTube, or podcast is the thing, when it’s just the thing that lets you share the real thing. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to really integrate this lesson.
I think putting more questions and uncertainty in the way of actually just writing/podcasting/youtubing is what stops a lot of people really building the habit in the first place.
all this conversion and optimization of texts for search engines turns bloggers into robots, and it is simply impossible to read the texts, they are not human, they are as if created by neural networks. who needs this hypocrisy?
Talking head with big microphone, with no editing.
Relevant Black Mirror episode: [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
you should blog, and by a blog definition that is going on the internet. to get more people to read it (often the goal) the easiest thing to do is utilize the tool people use to find things on the internet (search engines).
if there are issues with spam, keyword stuffing, forever run-on paragraphs of nothingness, well that is the search engine algorithm's job to fix. And they have a lot of money to fix it.
and if they don't fix it we should use a new search engine. it'll take time. but those seem like the dynamics at play in this scenario.
People started blogs for that? I thought that was more the realm of supermarket bulletin boards next to the firewood flyer.
Maybe I'm just from a previous previous generation.
How can "a friend" post something on a supermarket bulletin board now that they don't seem to exist?