Ask HN: What Is Your Blog?
Hello HN, I've been considering starting a blog, but realized I didn't know where to start. Wanted some inspiration so I thought I'd ask ya'll:
1. What is your blog about?
2. How often do you write on it?
3. Where do you host it (medium, substack, self-hosted, etc.) and why?
4. Link?
36 comments
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3. Self-hosted, since I have full control over it, and it might draw attention to the items I'm selling.
4. https://www.anyleaf.org/blog
2. Whenever I find the time, somewhere between a few times a week and twice a year, depending on lots of other circumstances.
3. Self-hosted (via azure & cloudflare) HTML generated from markdown files using a fun little utility I built as a learning project (all the generator code, markdown, & HTML is stashed on GH: https://github.com/mplanchard/speedy). For whatever reason I'm more motivated to maintain something I've built myself as compared to previous attempts with medium and such. The freedom to do whatever I want, however I want is nice. I can present things simply, with little to no adornment, avoid pushing trackers and ads on people, explicitly release my content under whatever copyright I want, etc. So far I've yet to incur any costs beyond Azure's free plan, but while it's been free so far, I'd gladly pay a bit of money to continue to keep it under my control.
4. https://blog.mplanchard.com/
Totally agree. For my blog (https://faical.dev) I have a very similar setup (S3 & Cloudflare) with HTML generated from Markdown using a small command line tool I built (https://github.com/ftchirou/article). For publishing, I push a Markdown file to a repo and a Bitrise workflow takes care of generating the HTML and uploading to S3.
2. Haven't updated it in a while but used to be every week
3. Self-hosted, because I wanted custom features (community)
4. https://www.productizedstartups.com
2. I would say we average once a month or so.
3. Self-hosted WordPress. It's what we're familiar with and we can customize it easily if needed.
4. https://alphaparticle.com/blog/
2. I am averaging about 1 post per 2 months :(
3. GitHub, because it is free and I can use markdown. Currently using a jekyll theme, but I'm planning to switch to static-site generator like https://github.com/getzola/zola
4. https://learnbyexample.github.io/
2. I’m writing a book about career advice for programmers that will be published through Holloway early next year, so I don’t post on my blog very often. I’m trying to write in the open at least once a month though.
3. It’s hosted on netlify because it’s free. I use Hugo to generate the static site.
4. https://www.exponentialbackoff.com/
2. I post twice a month.
3. It's hosted on Netlify and built with Gatsby. All of my articles are just markdown files.
4. https://alexkondov.com/
2. Sporadically, 1x a month on average
3. AWS S3 + Cloudfront, to control recurring costs and support spikey traffic
4. https://maxmautner.com
2. I just recently started.
3. Hosted on Netlify, built with Hugo.
4. https://ivarsblog.com
1. Personal development and life updates, but I'm working towards writing market commentary. Took a step in that direction with my latest post.
2. Once a week. It's a fairly tough publishing schedule though and longer essays take more than a week to write. I may rethink it in the future.
3. Wordpress on Bluehost because it was easy when I started. I wouldn't recommend it though. Load times aren't great and changes are unwieldy.
4. https://jonathanliu.me
2. I commit to the source code a couple times a week, but keep updating posts whenever I find time.
3. I host the source code on Github and deploy on Netlify.
4. https://im.perhapsbay.es
2. I have a reminder for every friday so yes, mostly 1 post weekly which is what I try to keep up to.
3. Github, because I wanted to learn github pages and also design a simple blog myself.
4. http://codingbbq.github.io
2. Around 1 post every 1 to 2 weeks.
3. A self-hosted static-site generator I made myself 15 years ago.
4. https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/
2. Maybe once a month
3. Self hosted. Got a server anyway, so I can as well host it myself.
4. https://stefanschick.eu
Some of my posts are detailed articles which, in my next life will evolve to journal papers, but most are just interesting things I have stumbled upon and explored, and then shared because I thought others might find them helpful and/or interesting, too.
2. Sporadically, but about once a month.
3. Wordpress. Why? I just downloaded some themes and a handful of plugins, and voila! I had a blog that is: well designed; has a responsive layout; elegantly displays math equations, and although 99% of the time has miniscule traffic, it copes well with occasional HN-induced traffic spikes. This means I can then set it and forget it, and focus more on writing.
4. http://extremelearning.com.au/
I started recently. So just once a week, I publish. Writing happens whenever I find a topic worth organising or sharing
Netlify. It’s free. I use gatsby theme borrowed from Victor Zhou
2. Not enough.
3. Gastby.js and Netlify because it was easy to get started with.
4. http://carlchesterlloyd.com/
The goal is to enable my readers leverage these ideas for practical applications.
I currently release once a week on Sundays at 9am BST.
My newsletter is https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/
Check it out and please subscribe. It's growing and exciting.
2. Aiming for twice-weekly.
3. Regular web host w/WP. In the interest of 'stop playing around with tools/static sites and just write'.
4. https://jamesgill.net/articles/
2. Only a handful of times, over the past year. The time needed to write and edit can be long. I'm also trying to write a novel.
3. Medium. I'm a writer for a publication called Nightingale.
4. https://medium.com/@PhilHawkinsDC, my top article is this one: https://medium.com/nightingale/draw-the-rest-of-the-chart-88...
2. Anywhere from once a month to three times a week.
3. GitHub pages (i.e. a static Jekyll blog) with a domain purchased through Google. Mostly because it's free (except for the $12/year for the domain) but also because it gives me a lot of control over the actual HTML.
4. https://www.joehxblog.com/
2. Once a week at the moment. It's a lot of effort but I hope to monetize eventually (similar to railscasts or Laracasts).
3.Self-hosted (to avoid platform risk) plus YouTube (for organic inbound)
4. https://www.semicolonandsons.com/l/rails
2. From a couple times a week to every other month.
3. Self-hosted because of development-ease and customizability.
4. https://www.eivindarvesen.com