Not GP, but he is right; the behavior of your website is semantically incorrect. Looks like you redirect the users to your blog posts by using <button /> instead of <a />.
I also agree that your website should absolutely not require JavaScript to work. Clicking on links is something that is possible with 0 lines of JavaScript.
> I don't have a RSS feed but I have a newsletter with a subscribe button.
This is also not very hacker-friendly behavior. Why should users give you their email addresses when a RSS feed is much easier to implement and use?
> Not GP, but he is right; the behavior of your website is semantically incorrect. Looks like you redirect the users to your blog posts by using <button /> instead of <a />.
I'll fix this. Thanks.
> This is also not very hacker-friendly behavior. Why should users give you their email addresses when a RSS feed is much easier to implement and use?
I'm glad you took it nicely. You should definitely post here when you write a new article.
There's always something to learn! Just remember to do things the easiest way possible; <a> allows you to "redirect" users using HTML-only, while <button> needs an event attached to it using JavaScript. There are many things that people use JavaScript for but that are 100% possible using HTML. We should favor those.
Also, writing a static website removes a plethora of vulnerabilities. Collecting email addresses comes with its legal burden, too (do you delete people's email addresses if they ask you to and are in the EU?).
> If I write it, they will come. They won’t. There are billions of blog posts out there. The internet is an infinite void, and your blog is a whisper in a hurricane.
This has not proven to be true over a long enough window.
I've kept a blog of some kind since 2005 and I'm always surprised looking at the traffic what posts get picked up by Google and end up driving traffic for one reason or another. One of my posts is prominent enough that I recently started to notice inbound traffic from ChatGPT (I assume it is being cited as authoritative on the subject).
A few years back, I started on Medium with 0 readers and just started writing. 100 ticked by and it was a small milestone. Then 500, then 1000. Just write in your authentic voice; don't think about an audience.
There are literally thousands of videos on recipes for omelettes (example) on YT, yet more are published every day. The thing is, there's a video and a voice for every audience.
The market for TODO list apps is 1 for every person in the world, everyone has a slightly different subjectivity and therefore has a slightly different optimal experience when it comes to TODO lists. Subjectivity is formed over time and through the course of events, therefore the market for TODO list apps is 1 for every person in the world for a given timeframe.
It's an obvious hyperbole but I think it stands to show that, in a similiar fashion, there is a reader (and by some aggregation readers plural) for everything you might think of writing.
How to get started with web development in 2025? What is ray-casting? How to emulate a piece of hardware in <language>? What I had for dinner tonight!
It may not be that everything is viral or a hit but you should find that most of the content you right will resonate with _someone_ and potentially help multiple _someones_.
Sometimes being satisfied with that 10-100 readers is all there is to it.
>
Remember when maintaining a blog was THE way to build your developer brand?
Jeff Atwood's (co-founder of Stack Exchange) Coding Horror comes to mind, and how the teenage me was amazed at how someone got offered such a good job with such an amazing office [0] because of blogging.
The smaller, more intimate internet was truly something else.
I document technical things on my blog and hardly anyone reads it.
But later on when I need that thing again, I just go there and I have the perfect documentation available for the topic (it's perfect since I wrote it hahaha).
This happens to me all the time. I could make notes about how I did something and lose them, or I could spend an hour or two extra and convert it into a blog post, and I'll be able to refer to it over and over again.
Same. I keep a couple of blogs on different topics and try to write up any challenge I come across. Not only does it help to cement ideas in my head and expose areas I'm foggy about, but I've referred back to my previous experience this way countless times.
I don't know. I stopped bothering to look, since it's never going to drive income or anything. It's worth it to me because 1) I get to help others, which brings satisfaction and 2) I can read what I wrote from anywhere and send someone a link if necessary.
Your intention is still to pass on the knowledge though regardless of traffic otherwise why even publish if it’s just for you? What is the difference from the Documents dir at that point?
I can stay in my browser and use Google, DuckDuckGo, or even my on-site search (I use Apache Solr, I'm a little weird compared to the typical hosted blog) and don't have to go into some webapp or search on some local notes app.
I can also add permalinks to any of the posts from anywhere, and share them in public documentation or bug reports and such, a handy feature.
I do not understand the need to never-leave-the-browser especially with modern window tiling, but I respect it as a preference that other people have. As for syncing I just use file sharing (Syncthing), I hardly live collaborate on documents and if I did everyone else in the group ended up doing the typing. Otherwise it’s write then get reviewed then reiterate. So unfortunately nothing about the online text editors really strike my fancy. I also find the browser almost too distracting and often get sidetracked while using it for research during writing time.
If you nominally have an audience (if you feel like you do, regardless of the reality), you'll perform differently, same as with speaking. This may be a good thing.
Same, I created https://softuts.com exactly for this, to write fixes to technical issues I encounter, when I can't find another solution via a Google search.
There starts to be some traffic, I am happy to assume that any person visits my blog for a fix will probably save a good amount of debugging time.
I used to do that, now I just keep a OneNote with the things that would have been blog entries once upon a time - it's available across all my devices and I can export it to PDF when I do need to share something with someone - and I don't have to worry about someone defacing or hacking the site hosting it.
Writing helps me think. Posting a thought in public forces me to commit to an idea and clean up how I communicate it. I learn more about the subject and myself along the way.
I journal daily about a topic I pull off a backlog of ideas. After the end of my allotted journaling time, if I think “there are more threads here to uncover,” I spend more time on it. If I feel confident, I clean it up into a blog post.
You laugh, but Chat-GPT "Deep Research" cites my technical blog very frequently. With attribution, no less. Within the next ~2 years, I expect that most of the people who read my blog will find it via LLM.
And never attribute anything to you, but I’m sure ChatGPT will be cited. If OpenAI campaigns that DeepSeek is stealing their IP, is DeepSeek stealing your IP or is OpenAI?
I remember when something similar first happened to me, where an LLM (Perplexity) cited my recent (within a few days) wikipedia edit ("transistor density").
This helped me realize how powerful the legacy of wikipedia is/will be. When I first started editing (2006), people still didn't trust open source encyclopediae. Same thing with bitcoin, just a few years later.
Obviously facetious, but I'd hope most people would want their blog post read by LLMs.
I suspect (hope) a lot of blog posts are written to share knowledge. In that regard having that knowledge trained in to LLMs (ideally open ones, but even closed ones) could further that goal.
I pretty much hate the mindset of don't do something if it might make someone else money even if you otherwise want to do it. One of several issues I have with the non-commercial creative commons license.
I didn’t say don’t do something. I said do something and understand a modern consequence. Go ahead publish but don’t be surprised when your work isn’t attributed correctly in the future and empowers people you may not agree with.
Blogs aren’t the only form of publishing and sharing.
Maybe after the AI winter subsides it might make sense again. A world where people were encouraged to publish to share knowledge ended up being publish to support Google’s hold on the net, now evolved to publish so people can read 5% of what you wrote distilled through statistical summation.
It makes all long form content look bad, not just the bad long form content. It continues to enable the societal trend of only consuming short form content. Which in turn enables reactionary and low information behavior instead of critical thought.
Writing on a blog is a very inexpensive way to establish your credibility about different subjects. This pays off later down the line when you can link people to things you've written in the past.
Credibility is a very valuable commodity. It's worth investing in ways to build more of it.
Don't assume people will stumble across your content (though they will eventually via Google). Actively send links to people who you are already engaged in conversation with.
It's not the number of readers you have that matters: it's their quality. I'll take a dozen people reading my stuff who might engage with me usefully or lead to future opportunities over a thousand readers who don't match that criteria.
Agreed, after a year or two, blogs become your experience logs to prove experience and credibility once the landscape is killed by GenAI slops and SEO scams.
Anyone can generate a big portfolio of projects these days(be it graphics, video, software, writing etc) but blog posts from 2023 and before are proof and undeniable.
I've been treating public Git repository commits in the same vein - a receipt of incremental changes that show that an individual can do some programming. Granted this is not fool-proof - like all things that are complex, it needs to be evaluated with a suite of other factors and conditions to be determined valid. A website written in a personal voice is one of these factors.
> Anyone can generate a big portfolio of projects these days(be it graphics, video, software, writing etc) but blog posts from 2023 and before are proof and undeniable.
I always read blogs if people include them in resumes.
It’s really cool when an applicant has a blog with unique and interesting content, but I can’t remember this happening without us already having been very impressed by the candidate’s resume.
More commonly, blog content was ambiguous about the applicant’s skills. For example, when someone applies to an embedded job but has a blog of beginner level Arduino projects, is that because they’re an expert creating tutorials for beginners, or because they are a beginner and these entry-level projects represent their skill level?
I also think people greatly overestimate the idea that someone will LLM their way into a great blog, and they greatly underestimate the difficulty of forging timestamps. Even git timestamps are easy to fake. Your interviewers aren’t going to scrutinize the Wayback machine for evidence, but not being indexed isn’t proof that it wasn’t there anyway.
Maybe it’s different in embedded, but as a mech e: any moderately complex hardware project will likely cost orders of magnitude more than a software project to prototype and manufacture. Off the self electronic parts have become much cheaper, but if you need more than some plastic, 3D parts it’s still expensive.
This isn’t true at all. Even custom PCBs are so trivially cheap that you can get 4-layer boards from China shipped for under $10. An ESP32 module is a couple bucks.
Electronic projects are extraordinarily cheap right now. I’ve built moderately complex PCBs for less than the price of a nice dinner.
A four layer board is not “moderately complex”, it’s child’s play. IMO moderately complex is in the 10-20 layer range with controlled impedance, buried vias, etc. or a mechanical assembly with hundreds of parts.
Everything definitely has gotten significantly cheaper than when I started working in mechanical/electronic engineering 15 years ago but a moderately complex board with assembly is still hundreds or thousands per board on short (1-2 week) notice. That’s what the GP means when they say that hardware prototypes are orders of magnitude more expensive (sans NRE) and I’m pretty sure they’re talking about the much more expensive mechanical side too, which also had gotten cheaper but not overwhelmingly so.
> is that because they’re an expert creating tutorials for beginners, or because they are a beginner and these entry-level projects represent their skill level?
You can tell by reading one of them though, right? For a subject I'm an expert at, I can tell the difference between an expert talking about the basics, and a beginner doing the same.
But in my experience reading a lot of applicants’ blogs, it’s rare to even find a recent post. The most common scenario I see is that the most recent posts are 3-10 years old. Even if you can get enough information out of their blog, you’re getting at best a snapshot of where they were a long time ago. The truth is that often people blog the most when they are beginners in a subject.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the ideal optimal blog that people imagine writing is an extreme rarity. I’ve seen so many people start blogs with high ambitions but then the farthest they get is a couple posts that are now so old that it barely corresponds to their current resume level of skills.
So you’re left doing a lot of guessing and extrapolating.
A dark pattern on your self hosted blogging website is to backdate blog posts and make yourself seem very good at predicting future trends.
There is no reason why you have to write a blog over a long period of time, you could quickly pump out several blog posts and link to them to establish credibility quickly.
I guess you can use a third party like archive.org, if the blog is crawled by it, the owner doesn't get them to delete it, and there is no politically motivated revisionism going on based on the archive.org maintainers.
I would be suspicious of a reasonably popular blog claiming to have predicted stuff and not being able to back that up with an archive.org capture (or raw scraper data), though I guess it is somewhere where storing a hash on a blockchain may offer some benefits for edge cases.
If I were to write a dozen blog posts today, and then straight up dump them on my blog, dating each of them so they're spaced roughly evenly since Jan 2021 to today, and start each of them with a preamble saying "I wrote this in my journal around [backdated timestmap]; publishing it now ([real timestamp]) as part of my 2025 blog revival commitment" - what would you say then? This little preamble explains both the sudden appearance and lack of any prior traces on the Internet corresponding to claimed creation dates. Are you going to call me a liar?
No, if someone with even half a brain wants to fake expertise this way, you won't be able to tell. If anything, what will give them away is anachronisms in text. Like idk. an off-hand remark about ChatGPT in a post dated 2021 could make you wonder.
If I find 10 backdated articles appear out of thin air in Waybackmachine I'm not going to ask the author to explain it. It just lowers their credibility in my mind and I move on. I'm not interested in proving to them or in a court of law that they backdated articles.
>"Anyone can generate a big portfolio of projects these days"
LOL. I could easily do it "back in those days". The difference is that in my particular case (I specialize in developing new software products for clients) I also have long list of names with actual phone numbers, emails, addresses etc. So anyone can call and verify.
Many people wrote about why it is important to blog, but I never heard of what you just stated about credibility.
That's the best and most convincing thing I ever heard.
Thank you very much for having shared it here.
That trivializes it, I think. A ton of what people do related to their jobs is marketing at some level. A lot of people here probably resent marketing and self-promotion (to a certain level) but that's the way the world works. If no one has any idea what you do, either directly or through your manager, guess who is getting the chop if the company cuts back even a little.
I regularly have conversations with people that end up with some form of "Let's not belabor this over beers but I'll send you a link to something I wrote. It may be a little bit stale but let me know what you think and we can follow up."
Blogging has internal benefits of organizing thoughts or even just being a fun hobby. But it's external validation as well. Sure, writing a book is even more but that's probably 100s of times more work.
> "Let's not belabor this over beers but I'll send you a link to something I wrote. It may be a little bit stale but let me know what you think and we can follow up."
How is it being received by those people? I can't help but imagine the response being:
"Okay but then what's the point of us sitting here with beers?"
EDIT:
If I was hanging out talking with someone, and have them terminate an interesting conversation topic by plugging their blog article, I'd feel cut off, and might even start to wonder if they're really seeing me as a friend or colleague, or is this networking for them?
It's not the blog reference itself, but rather cutting off a conversation topic this way, that would irk me in such situation.
Yeah I agree, someone saying they don't want to talk anymore because they've already written about something stops it being a discussion and makes it into some sort of lecture but without the notes. If you're insisting on telling someone you wrote about the current topic of conversation, you can just mention it and carry on with it. Like authors who go on podcasts, they'll say "Like I wrote in chapter X, I think that..." - the conversation shouldn't be killed off. Comes off as a bit arrogant.
I agree. Mentioning blog in the end is probably a better way. Finish the conversation, chain of thoughts and then before switching over to next topic or when saying byes or even a day or two later send them your post. But not in the middle of a conversation.
Maybe I didn't get the nuance in the best way. I think it would be more in the vein of we've probably explored this topic as much as we feel like it at the moment but maybe we can continue the conversation via some more deeply-thought sources.
Whether or not someone has written up or is willing to write up their opinion is a good way to determine how seriously to take that opinion.
Using that as a first pass has led to more time engaging with thoughtful people about well considered ideas, and less time listening to the noise that shows up when you solicit opinions.
I was starting https://golfcourse.wiki and I read a bunch by Jimmy Wales, and he focused on his own credibility and openness being a linchpin to wikipedia.
I thought I might as well start a blog then, because in a world of golf media, with few exceptions is mostly a just corporate funded advertisement-as-entertainment slop. I figured I could at least stand out by openly talking about golf in a very different way, by just writing for me, with my target demo being my best golf friend, who sadly passed about the same time I started the blog.
I've got myself a small audience (a few hundred subscribers, and maybe a fourth of that read regularly. I'm more than happy with that. My ideas are almost diametrically opposed to much of the golf world, but I spend a ton of time on almost all of the articles, and I'm very proud of them. I think it lets people who might use the wiki know how serious I am about the wiki as something good for golf not as some way to get rich. I think it does a good job, and it's a good way to waste a few hours/days/weeks.
I ran a personal blog ~2007-2013, retiring it after one-too-many'a THC-infused evening of personal expression.
Several of my posts received 100k+ views, one with 1M+, typically exploring minor technical hacks. A couple posts resulted in minor sales of bespoke hardware adapters, which was a nice "side hustle" for a few years. None of this would ever had made me rich, but it was a neat introduction to information sharing.
My resumé still lists several articles written about my blogposts, in publications including Wired, Hack-A-Day, &c... although the links obviously haven't worked for over a decade.
I've recently registered a new domain for my next blog attempt, which will mostly just be a record of things I find interesting on that particular day. If you ever read Whole Earth Catalogue, my hope is for my own modern-day version of the excellent WEC-inspired https://kk.org/cooltools/ [not me/mine].
The initial reason behind my blog was sharing fun solutions from my work. If I get it approved in a blog post then I can talk about it publicly. Working in game development that's a fairly rare opportunity. I usually share my posts on Reddit for just a handful of nods and a random question or two.
However, I recently had an interview where the interviewers had read my blog and used it as a basis to steer their questions. At that point having put such thought and effort into it felt well worth it. I do believe it's a part of what got me the job.
This is precisely why I am suspicious of most "free" online resources out there. When one writes to establish themselves as a credible source or as authority on a subject, they are flipping the target of the writing. They are making it all about the author, and not the reader/student. This is similar to what happens with academic writing, where using an approachable tone of voice can be seen as hurtful to the author's image of authority. Unfortunately, by the time someone actually tries to learn from this type of resource, a lot of damage is already done.
Academic papers are supposed to be about the author... They're meant to be an author's work put forth to an intended community of "colleagues", not students or general public. No one should think that a general learner is supposed to turn to academic research papers as their main vector of learning content.
I personally never thought academic papers were about the author. They might have turned into an ego game, but I always assumed that the goal of academic writing was to effectively communicate complex ideas and research findings to the reader. If not, then it's no wonder our voices are the first ones the public ignores in a time of crisis.
> Writing on a blog is a very inexpensive way to establish your credibility about different subjects. This pays off later down the line when you can link people to things you've written in the past.
Unfortunately, these days writing a publicly-available blog is also a great way to train AI to replace you at the very job you're establishing credibility in.
Alas, that ship has sailed. So keep writing blogs.
In this age of LLMs and hallucinations/deceptions, a personal blog is a best testament of one’s knowledge and musing on various topics. Once AI gets prominent, there will be a time when you can refer to your nice blog and say that, this is you giving untainted opinion on a topic when people can no longer trust anything anymore being original.
If I see someone’s blog today with posts from last few years of longer, regardless of their current situation, I appreciate that they are fairly intellectual person.
Now I will show myself out and try to start my own blog which I have been procrastinating over for decades.
I am often writing stuff anyways on various open-group or closed-group social media, which is where the interactions are (at least for my case). The blog however becomes a way to collect all those in a single place and where I have more control.
Definitely! I see social media, in part, as a place to write initial drafts. If I write a comment somewhere and end up with something I think is decent at explaining something, I will often expand it into a blog post.
There's a point to writing, but is there a point to publishing your diary on the internet? You could just keep it under your pillow, or on your own computer.
I blog so that other people read my writing, and fortunately they do, at least sometimes. I don't think I'd continue if there was no public interest.
Valid point, wonder why it was down voted.
I was thinking that question myself, yes write down your thoughts in a journal digital or analog and you can always refer back to that time and place but what benefit do you get by giving it away for all to ignore or consume?
I disagree. I write differently when I anticipate an audience (even if they never come).
Maybe parallel: I notice when, for example, I edit videos in my own world I have a very different take on the edit when I am showing it to someone for the first time.
Thinking to myself: "Now as I watch someone else watching it, I am become aware that this scene goes on a bit too long. This cut is a little abrupt, disorienting."
I know what you mean. I'm not very reserved (is that the word I want?) though and don't mind speaking my mind — public or otherwise. Perhaps having left the job market, having passed 60 years of age makes me give less of a shit.
That said though, "publishing" keeps me honest. (In the same way I find using my actual name on the internet "keeps me honest". I'm disinclined to shit-post.)
I am more inclined to, if not fact-check all points I make, just drop indefensible things I might have said altogether. (And sometimes I learn just why a thought of mine is indefensible, ha ha.)
Usually it's a good thing, yes. Because you are forced to communicate clearly, cut the jargon and not dump your stream of consciousness. Instead you pay attention to whether what you're saying is of any value to another person.
> Because you are forced to communicate clearly, cut the jargon and not dump your stream of consciousness. Instead you pay attention to whether what you're saying is of any value to another person.
Why is that good, though, if you're the only reader?
I don't think I am really "anticipating" an audience. Or it might be my greatest grandkids after I am long dead that I are my audience. It doesn't really matter to me. It's more of a mindset.
I don't have social media so my blogs are often the only ways my family and friends connect with me. I think this original article is misguided and the big tech brainwashing has us forget that we blog all the time on their social media apps. Those blog posts on TikTok, Instagram, or X are always there. It's a little insidious that there's no mention of that.
Social media posts are not really writing though. You do not write down detailed thoughts on social media it’s often more likely brain farts than anything.
Blogging is like all other content creation: the vast majority of the viewership goes to the top 0.1% of creators. This is the same whether you're talking about YouTube, Twitter, podcasts, OnlyFans, scientific papers, traditional books, etc etc.
> Future you. Your posts become a time capsule of your evolving mind.
Sometimes, I am the main beneficiary of my blog posts. But there is a much more practical point than bookmarking my progress — it is a polished resource with carefully selected references.
> One right person. Maybe one day, someone stumbles across your words at exactly the right moment. And that changes something for them.
Sometimes one. Sometimes a few.
In general, I have found that blog posts have a larger impact than my conference talks. At a conference, say, with 100 people in the audience, perhaps only 20 find it relevant. With a blog post, we may feel disappointed that only 1,000 people read it — which is small by blogging standards, but still way more than one would reach at a conference.
This is not an original observation, but it took me too long to realize so I think it bears repeating: your personal website is also the one place where you have control over how much to write, how it looks to the reader and how long it stays up. Even though I'm a proponent of strict moderation on social media, it's ultimately a bad thing to hand over that kind of agency to the platforms.
Sure, nobody may be reading it today, but eventually something you wrote becomes essential to someone else. Document what works and what doesn't. That helps us all learn.
This is all true. The only part that is potentially misleading is that the target doesn't need to be a blog. A blog is a fine target, however. The key activity is spending time to articulate a message with enough clarity that another person will understand what you meant and that they will conclude there is some value in it. There are lots of avenues for this.
It's not limited to this, but in the workplace I think of this as "write it down culture". People who write things down often have the most tested and credible ideas, with the first and most important judge being themselves.
One important aspect I learned about blogging is that a post effectively "ships" a side project, deeming it complete. A blog post allows me to move onto the next thing. It is closure of sorts (glouw.com if anyone is interested in the style).
I have a personal rule that the cost of doing a side project is I have to blog about it. No regrets on that at all, it's a small thing that can greatly increase the value you derive from the project.
I do the exact same thing! I think this pairs well with OP's point.
In the moment, writing a blog is a nice way to indicate to myself that something is done. But the process of writing the blog forces me to find some lessons and takeaways, and that makes my next project better.
Over a decade, I've learnt to blog as if no one will ever read my blog posts. With social referral traffic now completely dead, the only traffic I get to my blog is when my posts appear on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=minimaxir.com), and even that is going down year-over-year.
However, the process of writing a blog post forces me to invent new workflows and is in itself very educational, so it's not a waste of time or a mistake even if no one reads it.
> With social referral traffic now completely dead, the only traffic I get to my blog is when my posts appear on Hacker News
Not being a blog writer, that seems rather crazy to hear with how "social" the WWW has supposedly gotten. WP claims, there's 33 sites "with at least 100 million (monthly) active users". [1]
Top sites are up at multi-1000 million / month. Sure, some of the top sites (Youtube, Instagram, TikTok) are very heavily video based. Yet, it still seems amazing that with that many users there's so little "sharing" in terms of long form written essays or blogs. That the situation was actually better in terms of referrals before there was all the sharing? Now there's actually less organic referral traffic, and Hacker News is apparently one of the best. Walled garden issues? Better fit of the subject matter to readers? Completely videos everywhere? Decline of reading in general?
Compared to somewhere like Facebook that supposedly have 3070M monthly uniques, yet apparently produce almost no referral traffic whatsoever, that's a wildly disproportionate ratio of effectiveness for the audience size.
Edit: Taken another way, in what seems like a pessimistic view. If only 1% of Facebook still read long form writing. And only 1% of those actually decided a post was worthy of clicking on. That would still amount to 300,000 views. That seems like a lot.
I think we have seen a general trend towards centralized platforms on the internet. Where you had many individual niche sites before, now you have a few all-encompassing platforms. There are some exceptions, but I generally find that many of those platforms want to maximize your time on the platform itself. As a consequence, they do what they can to keep you from leaving the platform via a link to some other website.
From my anecdotal experience, of what my close friends share with me via DM these days, sadly it is indeed 95% video, and it is indeed 95% Instagram / TikTok / Facebook / Twitter / YouTube (in descending order). I continue to share with them 75% long-form articles, and 75% personal web sites / mainstream media web sites.
I actually looked a bit yesterday, and checked FB particularly to see what the situation was, and maybe have my own anecdotal take.
At least part of what I found was that there did not seem to be much actual discussion. It didn't really even matter whether it was a video, a text article (like making food), or an event. A huge percentage of "conversations" ended up being nothing more than notification references after the first 20-50 comments. It was really rather surreal to look at. I hadn't logged on in a while.
Initially, I couldn't even tell what was going on. Comment after comment where people just stated someone's name and then someone replied with someone else's name. In most cases, once the back-and-forth name reffing started, all actual conversation died quickly.
It's technically "sharing", since they're notifying FB members of being mentioned somewhere. Yet it doesn't really go anywhere externally, and very quickly kills off all further discussion in thread.
Yes, I see that all the time on Facebook too, top-most 10% of a thread is actual comments, bottom-most 90% is "Friend McFriendface" name reffing. It's quite annoying.
I agree with the detachment part but when I write about technology, books, ideas/ thoughts, etc. I generally find it 'easier' to imagine as if I am talking to someone in front of me and write in a conversational style. I liked that a couple of my favorite fiction writers used this style and sort of followed it.
Writing is incredibly fun and rewarding for me. It also makes you think harder about things that you’re generally already interested in. And it gives you huge leverage: instead of trying to explain your thoughts to one or two people at a time, you do it once and potentially many thousands of people can read it. It’s also a useful resource years later to look back on, like an intellectual history of your own interests. And the more you do it, the better you get at it.
> "If it’s finished, the applause, the thanks, the gratitude are something else. Something extra and not part of what you created. If you play a beautiful song for two people or a thousand, it’s the same song, and the amount of thanks you receive isn’t part of that song." (Seth Godin, The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly?)
A big reason I blog is that I find writing something down is essential to clarifying my thoughts.
Once it's written down, I might as well put it online, and it has the added advantages that I can simply link to the material rather than having to explain it over and over again e.g. in emails.
> You’re not just writing for today’s invisible audience. You’re writing for:
> Future you. Your posts become a time capsule of your evolving mind.
Fully agree with that one. My own blog has become a public diary of my hobby and it's great to see what I've been up to and how wrong I was about certain predictions and assumptions, especially about the ones that say that I'm done reworking my home server setup, multiple times.
372 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 288 ms ] threadCheck out my personal blog
https://rxjourney.com.ng
If you like it and you're feeling extra generous, you can leave a donation.
Last but not least, your blog is unusable without JS. The posts are not links for some reason, why would you make such a paywall?
https://buymeacoffee.com/chistev12
I don't have a RSS feed but I have a newsletter with a subscribe button.
What do you mean by posts are not links? You mean you can't click on them to get to the detail page?
Edit: What's wrong with my Twitter account?
Not GP, but he is right; the behavior of your website is semantically incorrect. Looks like you redirect the users to your blog posts by using <button /> instead of <a />.
I also agree that your website should absolutely not require JavaScript to work. Clicking on links is something that is possible with 0 lines of JavaScript.
> I don't have a RSS feed but I have a newsletter with a subscribe button.
This is also not very hacker-friendly behavior. Why should users give you their email addresses when a RSS feed is much easier to implement and use?
I'll fix this. Thanks.
> This is also not very hacker-friendly behavior. Why should users give you their email addresses when a RSS feed is much easier to implement and use?
I'll do this too. Thanks.
There's always something to learn! Just remember to do things the easiest way possible; <a> allows you to "redirect" users using HTML-only, while <button> needs an event attached to it using JavaScript. There are many things that people use JavaScript for but that are 100% possible using HTML. We should favor those.
Also, writing a static website removes a plethora of vulnerabilities. Collecting email addresses comes with its legal burden, too (do you delete people's email addresses if they ask you to and are in the EU?).
https://rxjourneyserver.pythonanywhere.com/rss_feed/rss/
I have fixed the javascript issue with the links
I've kept a blog of some kind since 2005 and I'm always surprised looking at the traffic what posts get picked up by Google and end up driving traffic for one reason or another. One of my posts is prominent enough that I recently started to notice inbound traffic from ChatGPT (I assume it is being cited as authoritative on the subject).
A few years back, I started on Medium with 0 readers and just started writing. 100 ticked by and it was a small milestone. Then 500, then 1000. Just write in your authentic voice; don't think about an audience.
There are literally thousands of videos on recipes for omelettes (example) on YT, yet more are published every day. The thing is, there's a video and a voice for every audience.
It's an obvious hyperbole but I think it stands to show that, in a similiar fashion, there is a reader (and by some aggregation readers plural) for everything you might think of writing.
How to get started with web development in 2025? What is ray-casting? How to emulate a piece of hardware in <language>? What I had for dinner tonight!
It may not be that everything is viral or a hit but you should find that most of the content you right will resonate with _someone_ and potentially help multiple _someones_.
Sometimes being satisfied with that 10-100 readers is all there is to it.
Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42685534
Why I still blog after 15 years
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41646531
Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42872276
Jeff Atwood's (co-founder of Stack Exchange) Coding Horror comes to mind, and how the teenage me was amazed at how someone got offered such a good job with such an amazing office [0] because of blogging.
The smaller, more intimate internet was truly something else.
[0]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/five-things-you-didnt-know-abo...
I can also add permalinks to any of the posts from anywhere, and share them in public documentation or bug reports and such, a handy feature.
There starts to be some traffic, I am happy to assume that any person visits my blog for a fix will probably save a good amount of debugging time.
I searched high and low and found Obsidian. Now the idea of using OneNote sends shivers down my spine.
It happened to me a few times that I forgot I wrote something down, only to find it via google search.
Henrik Karlsson has a good series of posts on this subject: https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/writing-to-think
I journal daily about a topic I pull off a backlog of ideas. After the end of my allotted journaling time, if I think “there are more threads here to uncover,” I spend more time on it. If I feel confident, I clean it up into a blog post.
Obligatory link to my own blog: https://www.seanmcloughl.in
This helped me realize how powerful the legacy of wikipedia is/will be. When I first started editing (2006), people still didn't trust open source encyclopediae. Same thing with bitcoin, just a few years later.
I suspect (hope) a lot of blog posts are written to share knowledge. In that regard having that knowledge trained in to LLMs (ideally open ones, but even closed ones) could further that goal.
Blogs aren’t the only form of publishing and sharing.
Maybe after the AI winter subsides it might make sense again. A world where people were encouraged to publish to share knowledge ended up being publish to support Google’s hold on the net, now evolved to publish so people can read 5% of what you wrote distilled through statistical summation.
It makes all long form content look bad, not just the bad long form content. It continues to enable the societal trend of only consuming short form content. Which in turn enables reactionary and low information behavior instead of critical thought.
Why would I be surprised when this has already been occurring for a very long time? What exactly is the part here that is modern?
Credibility is a very valuable commodity. It's worth investing in ways to build more of it.
Don't assume people will stumble across your content (though they will eventually via Google). Actively send links to people who you are already engaged in conversation with.
It's not the number of readers you have that matters: it's their quality. I'll take a dozen people reading my stuff who might engage with me usefully or lead to future opportunities over a thousand readers who don't match that criteria.
Anyone can generate a big portfolio of projects these days(be it graphics, video, software, writing etc) but blog posts from 2023 and before are proof and undeniable.
I always read blogs if people include them in resumes.
It’s really cool when an applicant has a blog with unique and interesting content, but I can’t remember this happening without us already having been very impressed by the candidate’s resume.
More commonly, blog content was ambiguous about the applicant’s skills. For example, when someone applies to an embedded job but has a blog of beginner level Arduino projects, is that because they’re an expert creating tutorials for beginners, or because they are a beginner and these entry-level projects represent their skill level?
I also think people greatly overestimate the idea that someone will LLM their way into a great blog, and they greatly underestimate the difficulty of forging timestamps. Even git timestamps are easy to fake. Your interviewers aren’t going to scrutinize the Wayback machine for evidence, but not being indexed isn’t proof that it wasn’t there anyway.
Electronic projects are extraordinarily cheap right now. I’ve built moderately complex PCBs for less than the price of a nice dinner.
Everything definitely has gotten significantly cheaper than when I started working in mechanical/electronic engineering 15 years ago but a moderately complex board with assembly is still hundreds or thousands per board on short (1-2 week) notice. That’s what the GP means when they say that hardware prototypes are orders of magnitude more expensive (sans NRE) and I’m pretty sure they’re talking about the much more expensive mechanical side too, which also had gotten cheaper but not overwhelmingly so.
You can tell by reading one of them though, right? For a subject I'm an expert at, I can tell the difference between an expert talking about the basics, and a beginner doing the same.
But in my experience reading a lot of applicants’ blogs, it’s rare to even find a recent post. The most common scenario I see is that the most recent posts are 3-10 years old. Even if you can get enough information out of their blog, you’re getting at best a snapshot of where they were a long time ago. The truth is that often people blog the most when they are beginners in a subject.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the ideal optimal blog that people imagine writing is an extreme rarity. I’ve seen so many people start blogs with high ambitions but then the farthest they get is a couple posts that are now so old that it barely corresponds to their current resume level of skills.
So you’re left doing a lot of guessing and extrapolating.
There is no reason why you have to write a blog over a long period of time, you could quickly pump out several blog posts and link to them to establish credibility quickly.
I tried to write out an initial spec here, but I haven’t been able to write any implementations yet: https://github.com/sebmellen/proof-of-origination.
I would be suspicious of a reasonably popular blog claiming to have predicted stuff and not being able to back that up with an archive.org capture (or raw scraper data), though I guess it is somewhere where storing a hash on a blockchain may offer some benefits for edge cases.
If I were to write a dozen blog posts today, and then straight up dump them on my blog, dating each of them so they're spaced roughly evenly since Jan 2021 to today, and start each of them with a preamble saying "I wrote this in my journal around [backdated timestmap]; publishing it now ([real timestamp]) as part of my 2025 blog revival commitment" - what would you say then? This little preamble explains both the sudden appearance and lack of any prior traces on the Internet corresponding to claimed creation dates. Are you going to call me a liar?
No, if someone with even half a brain wants to fake expertise this way, you won't be able to tell. If anything, what will give them away is anachronisms in text. Like idk. an off-hand remark about ChatGPT in a post dated 2021 could make you wonder.
since one cannot backdate timestamps on Reddit and HN. Hmm but you can still rewrite the content a bit
LOL. I could easily do it "back in those days". The difference is that in my particular case (I specialize in developing new software products for clients) I also have long list of names with actual phone numbers, emails, addresses etc. So anyone can call and verify.
Never blogged. Have no time / desire
I would also argue self-marketing is important when you have lazy or bad managers.
Blogging has internal benefits of organizing thoughts or even just being a fun hobby. But it's external validation as well. Sure, writing a book is even more but that's probably 100s of times more work.
How is it being received by those people? I can't help but imagine the response being:
"Okay but then what's the point of us sitting here with beers?"
EDIT:
If I was hanging out talking with someone, and have them terminate an interesting conversation topic by plugging their blog article, I'd feel cut off, and might even start to wonder if they're really seeing me as a friend or colleague, or is this networking for them?
It's not the blog reference itself, but rather cutting off a conversation topic this way, that would irk me in such situation.
Using that as a first pass has led to more time engaging with thoughtful people about well considered ideas, and less time listening to the noise that shows up when you solicit opinions.
Or the other way around
I was starting https://golfcourse.wiki and I read a bunch by Jimmy Wales, and he focused on his own credibility and openness being a linchpin to wikipedia.
I thought I might as well start a blog then, because in a world of golf media, with few exceptions is mostly a just corporate funded advertisement-as-entertainment slop. I figured I could at least stand out by openly talking about golf in a very different way, by just writing for me, with my target demo being my best golf friend, who sadly passed about the same time I started the blog.
I've got myself a small audience (a few hundred subscribers, and maybe a fourth of that read regularly. I'm more than happy with that. My ideas are almost diametrically opposed to much of the golf world, but I spend a ton of time on almost all of the articles, and I'm very proud of them. I think it lets people who might use the wiki know how serious I am about the wiki as something good for golf not as some way to get rich. I think it does a good job, and it's a good way to waste a few hours/days/weeks.
Several of my posts received 100k+ views, one with 1M+, typically exploring minor technical hacks. A couple posts resulted in minor sales of bespoke hardware adapters, which was a nice "side hustle" for a few years. None of this would ever had made me rich, but it was a neat introduction to information sharing.
My resumé still lists several articles written about my blogposts, in publications including Wired, Hack-A-Day, &c... although the links obviously haven't worked for over a decade.
I've recently registered a new domain for my next blog attempt, which will mostly just be a record of things I find interesting on that particular day. If you ever read Whole Earth Catalogue, my hope is for my own modern-day version of the excellent WEC-inspired https://kk.org/cooltools/ [not me/mine].
1M+ is definitely no one
The initial reason behind my blog was sharing fun solutions from my work. If I get it approved in a blog post then I can talk about it publicly. Working in game development that's a fairly rare opportunity. I usually share my posts on Reddit for just a handful of nods and a random question or two.
However, I recently had an interview where the interviewers had read my blog and used it as a basis to steer their questions. At that point having put such thought and effort into it felt well worth it. I do believe it's a part of what got me the job.
There is a reason Andrej Karpathy has such a great reputation. His credentials are impressive, but the quality of his teaching content is spectacular.
Unfortunately, these days writing a publicly-available blog is also a great way to train AI to replace you at the very job you're establishing credibility in.
Alas, that ship has sailed. So keep writing blogs.
If I see someone’s blog today with posts from last few years of longer, regardless of their current situation, I appreciate that they are fairly intellectual person.
Now I will show myself out and try to start my own blog which I have been procrastinating over for decades.
* I can link people to my carefully considered thoughts on a subject instead of needing to write something up each time.
* While most people don't read what I write, some do, and I've had good conversations and friendships come out of it.
* It makes me a better writer. In my professional life I can write things much faster and better than if I wasn't also blogging for fun.
* LLMs learn from it. Our future may be run by machines, and if so I want my perspective to be one they consider.
Adding one more point:
I am often writing stuff anyways on various open-group or closed-group social media, which is where the interactions are (at least for my case). The blog however becomes a way to collect all those in a single place and where I have more control.
I blog so that other people read my writing, and fortunately they do, at least sometimes. I don't think I'd continue if there was no public interest.
Maybe parallel: I notice when, for example, I edit videos in my own world I have a very different take on the edit when I am showing it to someone for the first time.
Thinking to myself: "Now as I watch someone else watching it, I am become aware that this scene goes on a bit too long. This cut is a little abrupt, disorienting."
I didn't "see" those until I had an audience.
Is that good, though? If the product is purely for self-consumption, is the audience-anticipating version necessarily the better version?
And at what point, after how many unread blog posts, do you rationally stop anticipating an audience?
That said though, "publishing" keeps me honest. (In the same way I find using my actual name on the internet "keeps me honest". I'm disinclined to shit-post.)
I am more inclined to, if not fact-check all points I make, just drop indefensible things I might have said altogether. (And sometimes I learn just why a thought of mine is indefensible, ha ha.)
Why is that good, though, if you're the only reader?
Do people read them ? I doubt it, maybe 1 or two once in a while. But as the article said there are other reasons to maintain a blog.
Sometimes, I am the main beneficiary of my blog posts. But there is a much more practical point than bookmarking my progress — it is a polished resource with carefully selected references.
> One right person. Maybe one day, someone stumbles across your words at exactly the right moment. And that changes something for them.
Sometimes one. Sometimes a few.
In general, I have found that blog posts have a larger impact than my conference talks. At a conference, say, with 100 people in the audience, perhaps only 20 find it relevant. With a blog post, we may feel disappointed that only 1,000 people read it — which is small by blogging standards, but still way more than one would reach at a conference.
It's not limited to this, but in the workplace I think of this as "write it down culture". People who write things down often have the most tested and credible ideas, with the first and most important judge being themselves.
I have a personal rule that the cost of doing a side project is I have to blog about it. No regrets on that at all, it's a small thing that can greatly increase the value you derive from the project.
In the moment, writing a blog is a nice way to indicate to myself that something is done. But the process of writing the blog forces me to find some lessons and takeaways, and that makes my next project better.
However, the process of writing a blog post forces me to invent new workflows and is in itself very educational, so it's not a waste of time or a mistake even if no one reads it.
Not being a blog writer, that seems rather crazy to hear with how "social" the WWW has supposedly gotten. WP claims, there's 33 sites "with at least 100 million (monthly) active users". [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_...
Top sites are up at multi-1000 million / month. Sure, some of the top sites (Youtube, Instagram, TikTok) are very heavily video based. Yet, it still seems amazing that with that many users there's so little "sharing" in terms of long form written essays or blogs. That the situation was actually better in terms of referrals before there was all the sharing? Now there's actually less organic referral traffic, and Hacker News is apparently one of the best. Walled garden issues? Better fit of the subject matter to readers? Completely videos everywhere? Decline of reading in general?
Last stats I could find from dang have:
2022, Nov 3, 5M monthly unique, 10M page views a day, 1300 submissions a day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140
2015, Mar 17: 3-3.5M monthly unique, 2.6M page views a day, 300K uniques a day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220098
Compared to somewhere like Facebook that supposedly have 3070M monthly uniques, yet apparently produce almost no referral traffic whatsoever, that's a wildly disproportionate ratio of effectiveness for the audience size.
Edit: Taken another way, in what seems like a pessimistic view. If only 1% of Facebook still read long form writing. And only 1% of those actually decided a post was worthy of clicking on. That would still amount to 300,000 views. That seems like a lot.
At least part of what I found was that there did not seem to be much actual discussion. It didn't really even matter whether it was a video, a text article (like making food), or an event. A huge percentage of "conversations" ended up being nothing more than notification references after the first 20-50 comments. It was really rather surreal to look at. I hadn't logged on in a while.
Initially, I couldn't even tell what was going on. Comment after comment where people just stated someone's name and then someone replied with someone else's name. In most cases, once the back-and-forth name reffing started, all actual conversation died quickly.
It's technically "sharing", since they're notifying FB members of being mentioned somewhere. Yet it doesn't really go anywhere externally, and very quickly kills off all further discussion in thread.
I agree with the detachment part but when I write about technology, books, ideas/ thoughts, etc. I generally find it 'easier' to imagine as if I am talking to someone in front of me and write in a conversational style. I liked that a couple of my favorite fiction writers used this style and sort of followed it.
Once it's written down, I might as well put it online, and it has the added advantages that I can simply link to the material rather than having to explain it over and over again e.g. in emails.
> Future you. Your posts become a time capsule of your evolving mind.
Fully agree with that one. My own blog has become a public diary of my hobby and it's great to see what I've been up to and how wrong I was about certain predictions and assumptions, especially about the ones that say that I'm done reworking my home server setup, multiple times.