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Ask HN: What's the best platform for technical writing in 2022?

68 points by rco8786 ↗ HN
Over the years I've been writing notes, documents, articles mainly for myself. But as I get older and further in my career I'm realizing there's probably value in sharing these with other folks...but I don't know the best avenue for doing this anymore. And selfishly wouldn't mind building up a bit of an audience for myself in the process.

Are personal blogs dead? Medium? Substack? Something else entirely?

53 comments

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kqr
I used to publish a personal blog solely in Emacs. Then I upgraded my Emacs version and some quirks I relied on got fixed, so I can't publish anymore. I also got children to take care of, so I can't spend much time taking care of a somewhat brittle configuration.

I'm thinking about either

- containerising an older Emacs version configured just for this,

- hosting something like WordPress on my own, or

- looking for a hosted alternative.

I heard Drutopia was run as a co-operative which seems like a great idea for a writing platform. However, it doesn't seem that way from their website.

If you know of a co-op in this space, let me know!

kreetx
pandoc can convert org-mode to html - perhaps that and github with netlify integration would be easiest (or just github pages)? If you only have static content then wordpress would be overkill.
sirodoht
* I make https://mataroa.blog/ It’s a simple blogging engine with an import functionality. One idea would be to just import everything there (assuming they are just text files). Eventually automate this process to keep everything up-to-date.

* Similar problem statement by Stavros in this website: https://notes.stavros.io/ He’s using Joplin [1] to write and then exports everything in an mdbook [2].

[1]: https://joplinapp.org/

[2]: https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook

wtmt
I’m probably not the target user for your platform, but it does look interesting.

Do you plan to offer other domain names? Mataroa may or may not be easy to communicate orally, depending on the user’s location.

Do you have any plans for multiple users (authors) on a single blog? I realize this may go against simplicity, but there is a segment for such blogs where posts are authored by different people.

sirodoht
I could host a second instance somewhere. Or maybe even other people could! That would also be good in terms of decentralisation as well. I need to find a cool domain name though that people like because mataroa wasn't so much a success given yours and many other people's feedback :D

Multiple authors might be too much for mataroa. But it could be inspiration for another project. Like a mataroa-style Notion alternative.

glacials
After a long journey jumping around I’ve recently started writing plain HTML files in GitHub Pages with a custom domain and I have been loving it.

I’ve been on WordPress, Blogger, Medium, a custom Vue site, a custom Go server, a Raspberry Pi, the works. Each was either a platform that could rot, or a hobby that could distract me from writing. Raw HTML on GitHub Pages has solved both these problems for me.

copperx
Which ones were the platforms that could rot and which ones were distracting to you?
umeshunni
I'm guessing building anything custom (Go server, Raspberry Pi etc) are distracting as compared to using an existing platform like Github.
taubek
I've switched recently from WordPress to Jekyll on GitHub.
vinner_roy
I'm building pagespace.app to address this need for myself as I was also looking for a place to share knowledge that spans multiple pages (with the option of selling via subscriptions or one-off purchases). Would love to hear what I can do to make the platform attractive for this use-case!
garyfirestorm
I don’t write but i have always been intrigued about a pipeline for efficiently writing and publishing. I came across https://hemingwayapp.com/ - you can buy the desktop version and it allows you to directly publish to Wordpress or other places. I have never tried it, but it’s supposed to be a minimalist editor. Give it a shot.

Edit - I did buy the app, I have not tried publishing thru it.

mooreds
If you just want to write, I'd go with wordpress and then syndicate to medium. I don't know if you can syndicate to substack.

Set up a mailchimp mailing list account and have the RSS feed publish a newsletter.

You didn't mention wanting to monetize your content, but if you do, then that's when I'd look at substack. In my experience, it's far easier to monetize your content by showing proof of authority for a better job or consulting than by selling access to knowledge. But your niche may be more monetizable than my experience.

dpwiese
I had a nice experience using Hugo for https://danielwiese.com and deployed with Github pages - I was really happy with the easy setup and writing process. The other alternative I considered Jekyll.
buscoquadnary
Doom Emacs + org-mode. Export as HTML upload to webpage, lasts forever, doesn't require a bunch of upkeep, and don't get distracted by all the other things.
leephillips
This is what I was going to suggest, except Vim. Use your favorite editor, learn basic HTML and CSS, get a domain, rent a VPS, set up Apache, rsync your HTML files to your server. You might already know how to do some or all of this, and none of it is difficult.

Personal “blogs” can never be “dead” unless the internet stops working.

Every canned solution, such as Medium, is inferior to this setup in some way: less control and a far worse experience for your readers, at least. And the suggestions here to use GitHub as a platform for publishing your articles? Good lord.

postpawl
This seems more difficult than pushing the static files to netlify via GitHub.
leephillips
I know that it seems so. When I started doing this I think the dominant browser was called “Mosaic”. In the intervening couple of decades I’ve seen many people, who relied on “simpler” solutions, suffer data loss, exploits, sites disappearing when some company disappeared, sites being disappeared because a company decided they violated a TOS or just didn’t like their content, discovering that their articles were being used to track and advertise to their readers, and so on.
postpawl
Most of what you said also applies to VPS providers.

There are more scalable ways to host static files without needing to maintain a VPS. You could also move to S3 + cloudfront if you had issues with netlify. I’ve had 0 issues with netlify for years though.

leephillips
I realize that, and there may be no rational reason for you to switch to a setup like mine. But, aside from avoiding such things as Wordpress exploits, my approach turned out to have other advantages. Over the years I added to my knowledge and taught myself how to provide things other than static files. Today my readers can use gnuplot in a Jupyter notebook, and interactive Pluto¹ notebooks backed by Julia running on a VPS. No canned solution exists for this, and in fact I had to work with the Pluto developers to iron out some kinks. This is only possible because I have total control over the servers. If you know will only ever want to serve static files, there are simpler options (with potential pitfalls). But those options are also limiting, in case one day you want to do something unusual.

[1] https://github.com/JuliaPluto/PlutoUI.jl

atmosx
How is that easier than writing markdown or any other language and export to static html using a generator?
leephillips
In fact that’s what I do, using a generator that I wrote that relies on Pandoc. But you still need to understand basic HTML and CSS.
joeman1000
More convenient. In doom emacs it’s a single keybinding for exporting. Bugger-all setup required. Org also has good support for re-ordering and structuring of headlines.
slowboat
I use iA Writer, it uses markdown. It's quite a minimalist experience, export to html and pdf is available.
ausbah
I use a minimalistic Jekyll build hosted on Github pages. definitely not self hosted, but takes maybe an hour to setup with a custom domain
GeneWilburn
If you’re doing technical writing for clients, they’ll frequently want your submission in Word format.

For blog writing Medium is decent. Wordpress isn’t bad either.

FelipeRM
It depends.

Self-publishing is not always the best option. Maybe you can start writing for a well established magazine/blog. This may help you to build your 'audience'.

If you want to go on your own, I think the best is first to define what are your goals, from that you can choose if your best option is a blog, a newsletter or a book.

Every platform has its advantages and big disadvantages but choosing one is a matter of your audience's preferred channel to stay in contact with your work.

simne
I think, now are strange times, looks like for really wide distribution, need to switch to video (podcast) format - youtube, tiktok, share podcasts through app stores (Apple/Google/Sony).

So, writing will become screenwriting, or make presentations.

Podcasts, are for people, who listen them while commute, or while waiting in queue, or while do gym exercises, or something like these.

For just text format, I think, just upload to github is good enough for many cases.

But if you want to see real value of your texts, mind about make small books for read on Amazon Kindle, or other reading platform (now Apple have such service, and Google, and many smaller companies). May be good fit Patreon. Mean, if people pay for your work, they really value your work.

softwarebeware
I feel you should instead look for paying jobs contributing to existing blogs that have high readership. Baeldung.com for one example.
k__
The most crucial part is a setup that lowers the barrier to publish.

Something that you like to use regularly.

egberts1
Still waiting for the last magical but portable CI/CO conversion step of dropping in a Markdown and getting the SSG website.

GitHub has one CI but is only output is to GitHub Pages (username.GitHub.io) and only with Pelican SSG.