Ask HN: How Do You Blog?

My wiki (https://philosopher.life) started out as a non-linear letter. That seed grew into a vine and then a garden. I write every day, even when I don't want to. I talk to myself and those who matter to me (even those I've not yet met or never will). I write because the stories we tell and retell ourselves and others are objectively valuable. I consider it my moral obligation and vocation to read, think, and write.

Internet is an interesting medium because once it's out there, it's not really out there forever. You can change it as much as you want.

I started after reading that having a blog was beneficial. This was from a perspective of building a personal brand. At the beginning I was trying to do 1 per week, but I became burnt out on that, and noticed I wasn't really pursuing things I cared about.

I'm trying to get back into it this year, and only writing about stuff that actually catches my interest. This leads to having an irregular writing schedule. This is considered bad practice for building a brand, but I'm no longer worried about building a brand. I want to have a place to put my thoughts together, and put out there when I happen to have them.

Even with this change in perspective I've noticed my ability to write posts has gotten much better from when I started.

Simple: Gatsby.js, github, netlify stack at https://carlchesterlloyd.com/

Once I have my ideas a bit organized and some time to write I'll look through the list and pick one that still speaks to me. I'll start with an outline of the main points that I want to hit and from there it just feels natural to fill it out.

I think the most important thing to do when blogging is to actually decide to write, and not futz around with all the other technical things involved. Do what you need to do to get your blog up and running and compartmentalize the writing from that other stuff (hosting, plugins, analytics, etc.). You can spend weeks just messing with that stuff and not have a single article posted.

P.S. I'm using a Jekyll template hosted on Github pages to power my blog. it was the fastest, easiest and cheapest way to get up and running IMHO. I'm never going back to wordpress.

I have always been obsessed about the stock market so that's what I started writing about: https://playingfordoubles.substack.com/

It's been a fun journey. It's fun to go back in time and have a diary of what I was thinking re: investment ideas and investment philosophy, and how things played out.

To answer your questions more directly 1) Process -- i try to have a list of topics and a date I want to publish by. I try to do my writing in 2 or 3 sittings. I dont write everyday.

2) I think I answered above.

3) At first it was a personal commitment to myself, then i started telling a few people about it, and now i guess its a combination of seeing more people reading the articles and also not wanting to lose my habit of writing every week.

4) Struggles - it's been a big time commitment. Also, yes, it's a bit odd to put yourself out there but now I actually use it to my advantage - since I write about stocks, if I dont feel comfortable writing about something, I probably shouldn't be investing that way!

1. Get an idea, write it down in Notes, mull over it for 2-3 weeks, do research and create an outline, write the article

2. I had something to get out there, so I wrote something on Friday. Committed to myself that I'd do the same next week and I'm now 4 weeks in.

3. I think of it as sharpening my writing muscle, especially with regard to what topics I choose and how I tell that story. I'm willing to consider a lot of my current work as a "throwaway" until I get better at my craft. Eventually, I'll develop a proper audience and hopefully, something will go viral.

4. Perfectionism was a big one, previously I would always put things off until they're perfect. Now I have to ship every Friday so I'm less focused on getting it perfect. Another was that the story I want to tell shifts while writing it, hopefully, I get better at this over time.

One thing that I've found helps is to set aside a specific time of day or week for and to create associated habits with your writing habit.

Maybe that's writing after you take a shower in the morning or after you brush your teeth - or maybe even after brushing your teeth but before showering. Maybe it's to always eat a specific breakfast before or while you write. If you write better or more willingly while under the influence of something (i.e. caffeine, THC, CBD, alcohol) remember to do that to start a writing sesh. YMMV but any sort of Pavlovian push in the right direction can't hurt, right?

PS: A lot of my examples are morning-centric because many writers report that early morning writing is best for them.[1]

[1] https://jamesclear.com/daily-routines-writers

I usually write about things that interest me or things that I think will be useful to someone else. For example I have a series of articles that supplement an existing learning tool for a popular programming language. I wrote the articles as I worked my way through the tutorials as a way to solidify my own comprehension.

2. How I got started:

I used to write a pseudonym blog on a subject that was controversial at the time but no longer is. That was with Blogger. I haven't touched in a decade but it's still out there.

For my blog under my own name I set up a WordPress site with Bluehost initially because it was easy and inexpensive. The low cost hosting on Bluehost leaves a lot to be desired and I eventually migrated to my own self-hosted solution. My self-hosted solution works well, but every now and then there is an issue to troubleshoot. Most people will consider my self-hosted solution to be overkill and I can't really disagree. I used a small Kubernetes cluster on Digital Ocean. The setup was easy enough. But I already had a lot of Kubernetes ops experience so there wasn't much of a learning curve. I would not recommend this to others. My reason for doing this is that my blog is just one of the apps hosted in the cluster. I kind of use it as a show piece for my work.

The hard part is when things go wrong. It can be kind of stressful to know that you traffic is suffering because of an issue that you are trying to resolve. Luckily, I've never had a traffic interruption to my blog, but I've borked things up with other apps a time or two.

3. Staying Motivated:

I'll be honest this part is difficult. I really don't have that much content. I posted my 49th article yesterday and I've been at it since 2016. Some years I only published a couple of articles. So far I'm at 44,936 words total. I try to focus on quality over quantity. I write some short posts but usually my posts are 1500 words or more.

One thing I do is write down ideas for blog articles in a journal. Every now and then I actually write one of those. I have far more unwritten articles.

4. Struggles:

Since my blog is under my real name I find that I am much more self-conscious compared to writing under a pseudonym. I generally tend to be selective about what articles I share because I don't really care for getting lit up by rude comments on social media sites. I'll usually try to seek out feedback in niche areas and small groups before I share with a larger audience. I'm always surprised by when an article becomes popular and I've had it happen a couple of times. It's always nice.

I'm also generally selective about what topics I'll write about. I rarely write opinion pieces or about controversial subjects because I don't want a potential employer to get the wrong idea. When I do I am careful about the language and tone that I use.

2. I signed up on dev.to and wrote stuff about React/Webpack, because that was what I was working with at that time.

3. Success motivated me. I started in 2017 and since then I got a book deal and starting in 2020 my main income is from blogging.

4. Regularly finding new topics was my main problem.

https://kay.is

I soon found Digital Ocean's writing program. They were paying $200 for blog posts, which was a lot as a student in South Africa.

Money was fairly motivating, but soon the long and slow editing process got tiring, so I started freelance blogging for a few other sites instead.

Then I created GitHub page[0] with links to places that pay for writing and links to some resources I enjoyed for learning how to write better.

Now I'm convinced that the fact that more and more companies are paying amateur bloggers for content means that there's a nieche for more professionally written content, so (shameless plug) I launched Ritza[1] (I'm focussing on it full time from today only, so it's still very rough!)

[0] https://github.com/sixhobbits/technical-writing/blob/master/...

[1] https://ritza.co

1. I get fascinated by some idea, start dumping notes about it, and over time turn them into a text - often in burst sessions where I output a lot of text, and then it either goes immediately up, or (if I care more) I let it lie for a few days, and then review and edit it.

2. Back when I was a kid and was learning programming to make games, everyone in the local gamedev scene had a "dev blog", so I wanted to have one too.

3. I don't. Every now and then I feel I finally have something to write about (see point 4.), and when that feeling becomes overwhelming, I sit down and craft a post.

4. I didn't. The main struggle I have now: I feel I have nothing to write about that isn't already written much better by people much smarter than me. I don't feel the need to write for myself only - I have a folder named "mind-dumps" full of .org files, into which I stream my thoughts regularly. So if I want to publish something on my blog, I have to feel it's a contribution to the greater web of information. Curiously, I didn't have this problem as a kid - I'd just write down the things I've learned, mostly to show off to my friends who also had dev blogs and also wrote about things they've learned.

If I think it's interesting and/or would be helpful to share so others don't have to spend the time I did trying to figure out how to do the same thing (half the time yes, half no), I'll copy and paste the markdown into a new blog post on my Drupal-powered blog, jeffgeerling.com.

If I have the time, I'll spend 10 min to 1 hour cleaning up the text and getting it to 'publish'able form, and publish the post. Every so often, if I think it's a post worth sharing more widely, I'll hold off on publishing until mid-morning US Eastern time on a weekday as around that time seems to give my writing more traction if posted on HN/Reddit/Twitter/etc. Otherwise many articles just go into the void, but get picked up by random obscure Google searches.

2. I started writing in high school, just posting journal-style updates. In college I started posting some of these on a Xanga blog. Then I switched to a generated HTML blog, and for the past 8 years I've been using Drupal so I can easily edit on my phone as needed and have comments built in. The hardest part is writing, it's always hard to put down words that I'm okay with publishing. And choosing whether to actually publish what I write or not. It's also hard to keep comments from being horrible spam mess, which is why most people don't allow them. I think they provide a ton of benefit (especially for old content that would otherwise get stale and worthless) if you moderate them like I do, though, so I keep them.

3. I stay motivated by finding my own blog posts in Google Search after Google Search—so many times I have to solve the same problem over and over again. The blog is kind of my brain dump, over time, so I devote less of my memory trying to remember random complex processes and more time doing new things.

2. I just made a github page for my domain. Easy.

3. Going back to 1, it's all about my mood. If I've done something that I think others would benefit from, I'll probably do a quick write-up.

4. I've always been writing on the internets, probably because I'm deaf and have always turned to the internet for communication.

My blog albeit small is https://veb.co.nz

Whenever I come across something that I find especially interesting (for me!) at work, I just write an article. I actually have a backlog of interesting stuff I'd like to blog about, so the subjects are not in short supply :-)

2. How did you start? What was hard? What was easy?

Started 3/4 years ago. It's been always easy, although, I'm quite obsessive about the precision and depth of the subjects I write. In edge cases, I can pour dozens of hours into an article.

Also, sometimes it happens that research for an article leads to nowhere, for example because the article would end up being nothing interesting. Or because I'm not knowledgeable enough, and it's not practically possible to gather the knowledge required to write a consitently good article.

Some stats: almost 50 articles, around 74k words, currently 6k pageviews/month.

3. How do you stay motivated? Do you?

Generally speaking, I do enjoy writing, although I definitely need to handle: 1. the stress of writing subjects that take dozens of hours to research and write 2. the loss of attractiveness that happens to subjects over time.

My best strategy for 2., has been to write immediately about a subject, if I decide to write about it.

Definitely, rather than thinking "how to motivate myself to write an article", I think in terms of "how to remove the demotivating factors".

Regarding the external motivations, seeing the traffic growing is very satisfying, and it also brought me as a speaker to a famous conference, but it wouldn't motivate me if I wouldn't like to write.

4. What were the struggles you had to overcome to develop a regular writing habit (e.g. shyness, self-consciousness, poor time management skills, etc...)? How did you do it?

Wrote in this in point 3. Something that may be worth adding, is that I write an article more or less once a month. It's quite comfortable as a rhythm, although of course, spending 8+ hours on something, even once a month, may be too stressful in the long term for some.

A consideration worth pointing out, after a quick glance at other posts, is that there are different article styles. I can't write an article in an hour even when I fully know the subject, because when I write 1. I extend the breadth and depth of the subject, 2. I may experiment for the fun of it 3. but also because there's lots of "padding" due to creating a path for the reader to make them easy to fully understand the subject.

Since about half a year ago I blog semi-regularly on Medium. I know a lot of people on here don't like Medium links - although I had a few on the frontpage which was motivating.

To answer your questions:

1) I don't have a concrete one - I stumble something that peeks my interest, I try to understand the topic and then write down my thoughts on medium. Most of it is about Go.

2) I started in high school thinking my blogposts might help someone. I followed a lot of blogs myself and just liked the idea. It wasn't hard to start - as a teenager you always think you know everything so you're pretty careless. That didn't stay. :P

3) Honestly - I have no good answer to this because I regularly lose motivation. What I will say though - for all the dislike towards medium - seeing my stats does make me want to write more. A few of my blogposts are spontaniously shared on reddit / twitter, and are the first search result in google. So it generates daily traffic. I enjoy the idea that I'm actually helping people find an answer.

2. I had "Oh, this might be interesting for others!" moments too many times.

3. At the beginning it's easy (excitement). Then you need determination and consistency to keep doing it. I guess my list keeps growing, so I keep blogging.

4. Shyness. Imposter syndrome. Then I realised that it's fine to be wrong sometimes. Worst-case scenario is that someone will tell you it's wrong and you will learn something new.

My blog: https://www.rockandnull.com

2. It wasn't hard to start, you just need to stay motivated. I also highly recommend picking a stupidly simple stack for your blog. Do not let technology choices or rabbit holes get in the way of writing! We use Jekyll + Gitlab for CD, you can see it here at https://staysaasy.com/ and it's stupidly simple and free to maintain.

3. My engineering counterpart and I write our blog together. We're partners/counterparts at work and on our blog, and it's a huge motivator to have a partner in crime. I highly recommend this step!

4. In order to write more candidly about potentially sensitive management/leadership topics, we write anonymously as our company is reasonably well known in tech circles. Discipline is the key. Block time and take notes on what you want to write about so that you're never lacking in inspiration.

So I started my blog to document how I did it. This and work stories made it semi popular.

I added an email list last year and got a few thousand people signed up. Now I'm really concious about what to blog about or when I blog about something I am very hesitant to send the new post out to my subscribers. So that impacted me in a slightly negative way

https://blog.haschek.at

1. Process: I keep a task list (using google tools) with a list of topic ideas. When I think of something I want to write about, or find interesting links, I place them there. There's typically about two dozen ideas at any time incubating.

2. Start: I started the blog about a dozen years ago as a way to add depth to my website that was the front-end for my consulting business. I stopped consulting shortly after starting, and am now retired, but I keep the blog up on that site; I've built a following. It was easy to start. Ideas are easy; the hard part is finding the free time to write!

3. Motivation. I love doing it. I get pleasure from writing. When I was a kid, I loved reading the works of Martin Gardner. I hope my blog could be seen some way as an homage to his works.

4. No real struggles, but I made a conscious choice to not enable comments on my site. Comments will get you down. Everyone is a critic. Jerks will say "that's not special, I could have don that" (hmmm, but you didn't). My email address is not hard to find on the site if you want to get in contact with me. Don't fret too much about publishing; do what is right for you. There is a whole spectrum of 'advice' from people saying regular rapid cadence (even if you have nothing to say), through to only publish gems. I typically average about one post a week. Some of my posts are lightweight, others are heavyweights.

2. I started blogging a long time ago -- more than 20 years, really -- but I was highly scattershot for a long time, and I'm not proud of a lot of the material I put out until about a decade or so ago. Focusing on a few topics of deep personal interest helped.

3. See last sentence of #2.

4. My biggest struggle was not feeling like I had nothing to offer anyone in terms of insight or whatnot. Eventually, I decided whatever it was that was mine would be more than enough.

https://www.genjipress.com

Eventually I want to talk about my own gaming experiences, but mostly I wanted a place to log my thoughts about games I was playing, games that were coming out, and basically have a place that I could go to to trigger my own happy nostalgic thoughts experiences, but mostly I wanted a place to log my thoughts about games I was playing, games that were coming out, and basically have a place that I could go to to trigger my own happy nostalgic thoughts.

I’ll be honest, I really wish I had chosen a different name, but I bought the WordPress plan already so I settled on https://www.nostalgiatrigger.com. It doesn’t roll off the tongue nor would it be the average person’s cup of tea, but for the 5-6 people who comment and leave feedback, it’s a cool little community.

Anyway, this is just my experience and it doesn’t really answer the OPs original questions. If I go back and read my old material, it really comes off as pretentious and just overall atrocious, so to probably echo what everybody else is saying here, the trick is to just write as much as possible and don’t try to focus on things like length or flow on the first time through. In fact don’t even worry about editing anything, the editor will highlight any misspellings or grammatical errors, so let your mind go into stream of consciousness mode, just to get ideas down on paper.

Oh! And a recent tip for something that I’ve started doing a few months ago (typically while writing down initial thoughts while I’m playing a game for the first time), I leave Notes open on my phone so I can easily tap the microphone and speak sentences straight into a first draft. I realized that I spent the most time trying to figure out how to phrase certain things on the first draft, so by getting out actual well formed sentences as they came to me while I was playing a game, I was essentially removing the hardest part of writing from the equation.

I’ve been running this blog for about five or six years now, and also did some longform game review writing I’ve been running this blog for about five or six years now, and also did some longform game review writing on https://www.thewellredmage.com a few years back, and getting started on a blank canvas is always the hardest part. So whatever works for you, try taking YOUR “hardest part” out of the equation.

1. Fishing an idea, investigating the details, programming a sketch of interactive elements. Then writing, and fitting the explorables to the narrative. Then editing. Then editing. And then editing. Then publishing, and apologizing for all the typos, errors, and mistakes that slipped through the editing process.

2. I started writing for the university newspaper back in college and the habit stuck. The hardest part for me is writing in English. I don't have the fully developed sense of language so it's like cooking without the sense of smell. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it smells fish. I just can't tell. Programming and maintaining my own "platform" appeared to be much easier than it looks.

3. There are two great motivational powers: making people you like happy; and proving people that don't believe in you wrong.

4. In my case it was simple. When I was young, I couldn't stay doing anything regularly. Not only writing but exercising, learning, going to work, all that things. But people around me who were older didn't seem to have any trouble with that. So I just decided to get older. And I did. Eventually. Now writing and programming for the blog is just something that I do daily after work and on Saturdays.

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