Ask HN: Where do you post your writing?
I've started writing a blog post and was wondering how do the folks on HN host their blogs these days?
a) own website b) write on something like medium c) use in built article feature on LinkedIn
a) own website b) write on something like medium c) use in built article feature on LinkedIn
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadBut it seems that most HN'ers use a static site generator and push to Github Pages.
EDIT: might as well give the link: https://theandrewbailey.com/
Oh, and backups. I'm pretty solid on backing up the data and server software (I think), but I don't have spare hardware, so if something physically breaks, I'll be down for a week or so.
It's hosted on DreamHost. It's all custom, I glued it together with Markdown, CSS, and a little Python. I've been with them for years and I can still recommend them. I'm not sure the exact location matters though. Success comes not from the venue but bringing an audience.
Also the key to successful self-promotion is to spam your own stuff tirelessly until the heat death of the universe, so here we go:
http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/why-build/
So writing a simple paragraph about a link, idea or thing that I *really* believe I'll find interesting later has worked quite well.
My original thesis was https://lawler.io/scrivings/long-form-websites-and-typograph...
Tufte CSS + Pelican static Python generated, hosted on a ~$5~ $6 a month DO droplet. Easy to write in a JetBrains IDE in Markdown, preview in Firefox via running `make devserver` in the console, then publish with a simple `make rsync_upload`.
In the off-chance your writing becomes noticed, you'll have it there.
EDIT: https://socialism.tools/
Wordpress -> Static site generator -> Squarespace -> Static site generator
Over. And over again.
It's a constant battle between 1) wanting control over my data/customization 2) writing and publishing.
Never ending battle
If you want to have your website, GitHub Pages + a static site generator works well.
Facebook/LinkedIn etc are the most closed gardens, and I wouldn't recommend them unless it's where your audience is and your posts are not intended to be evergreen.
Regardless of the above, I think what is crucial:
- Just write. Where is secondary and can be changed later, don't agonize over that. Just pick the first which is "good enough" and see if it fulfills your needs over the course of your blog posts.
- Make sure to have some backups anywhere. Every server can change its ToS, shut down, or make its usage (and data export) cumbersome.
Blog is built with Jekyll. Treating GH as a CMS means I have a diff built-in to my platform. I also have a GH action that can schedule merges for post PRs. No one really cares to look through the blog source code but I have GH premium so that the pages repo can be private -- coupled with the merge scheduler this means no one can see the post before it goes live on my blog.
Other than that I have a static site landing page hosted on Netlify, also a private repo. Both sites are under the same domain:
https://ty-porter.dev/ https://blog.ty-porter.dev/
This led me to create my own tool [0] to make minimalist blogs with Markdown, no messy code or configuration needed. The end result is my site [1], which although barebones, I think looks decently good for now.
[https://pageful.is] [https://viktor.pageful.is]
I used to do very ~project-oriented blog stuff at tumblr, but I wanted to be able to consolidate things down to one site where I could have a ~main stream with all posts, while still being able to add new streams for big themes/topics/projects. (This works, though IIRC I haven't sorted out separate RSS feeds for each stream yet.)
I wrote my own static site generator[0] to suit my needs. It’s not especially fancy - just a series of JSON config files and then a notion of “posts” and “pages” that are in Markdown format.
The code gets pushed to sourcehut and uses a build stage to deploy the site.
None of this is especially novel - I wrote the static site generator mostly because I was frustrated with how complex some of the more flexible existing tooling is. Nothing wrong with those tools, just more complicated than I need.
[0]: https://git.sr.ht/~zacbrown/zsitegen
It's simple, fast, and I can move it easily if I want to.
Another key difference is discoverability of the blog/content. Something like LinkedIn leverages the platform so the post gets in front of people (however how that happens is outside your control). A self hosted website does not have any direct way to attract/retain the audience (you need a way to get inbound traffic, and then a way to get people to keep coming back). To me, this part seems like the more challenging bit relative to the tech stack and I'm curious what other perspectives folks have here.
I don't really care for discoverability and don't want to deal with comments anymore so I don't do anything. Maybe one day I'll restart my twitter account and tell people to tweet at me or something?
* https://pivic.blog: my new blog that runs on Mataroa. I write in English about anything here. SSG, extremely small load time.
* https://niklas.reviews: my book reviews in English. SSG, Jekyll/Netlify.
* https://niklas.rodeo: thoughts in Swedish (my mother tongue). SSG, Jekyll/Netlify.
I've also written on https://niklasblog.com for about 25 years; this is a WordPress blog that I might kill. I'll see about that.
It's definitely more complex than raw HTML purists would prefer. I'm using NextJS with static site generation to generate static HTML from my React code. I'm also using MDX to automatically compile my articles, which are written in Markdown but I can embed React components in them.
https://wcedmisten.fyi
Source is available at the bottom of the page. All feedback welcome!
If on the other hand, you want to make money off your writing, like Matt Taibbi, then Substack is the place for you. They give you most of the royalties. Ted Gioia explains it in his interview with Rick Beato.
Yeah, no. I have a friend who tried to make money off his writing, and every reader he got mistook themselves for his boss. He'd stopped publishing because it just wasn't worth the hassle to him anymore.
On the lightning itself: Some of the consulting offers I got in response to the post on dev hiring strategies were... interesting. I didn't pursue any of them, but they showed the world is a weirder place than our whitewashed walled gardens make it out to be.
I'd certainly agree that the most "professional" (polished? well-written? organized?) writing I read these days is on Substack. In five more years, that writing will inevitably be found on a new platform that displaced Substack which bumped Medium, which ate Blogger, etc. Any bets that Evan William's next business will also involve publishing people shaking their fist at clouds?
I don't know, but these are not independent trials. Maybe some of the people who saw your first post will come back for more. Good luck to you.
As for "in five more years": eventually, some of these polished, well-written pieces will be appearing under a single cover, all at one convenient price. We could call it a "magazine" (tm).
I don't mind because in my experience it improves readability (I'm non-native) but I guess it depends on which editor you get and in general how do you feel about it.
Moreover, Hackernoon is to share a story / something meaningful to others. It's not for a PR about you launching a new feature for your product. In these cases I still use medium.
For the first year or so I also published every new post on Medium and dev.to (with my site as the canonical URL on both) so that more than zero people would read my articles.
I was lucky enough to get a few of my code-heavy tutorial posts ranking well on Google for the niche I focus on and now that I have a couple hundred organic visitors to my own site each day, I've stopped bothering with Medium and dev.to.
https://fredlybrand.com/2021/10/28/better-writing-better-blo...
https://alessandrocuzzocrea.com