I see a lot of complaints, often justified, about the dominance of the big social media companies, but not nearly as many people deciding to go their own, off those sites.
I still highly recommend it though. Your social media account comes and goes, but your own little website will be there however long you want it to be, display whatever info about you you want it to display, and it can look however you want it to look.
Seems like this might depend on the objective. Spamming social media and aiming for search rank might be necessary for ad revenue, self-promotion, or other conversions, whatever those might be. But it is not strictly necessary. Doing your own thing and making something cool can be 100% the end in itself.
The issue I have leans the other way. I'm hesitant to self-publish anymore primarily because I don't want my work to get sucked up into the commercial machinery of the Big Tech Web. I have no interest and gain no benefit from feeding AI, scrapers, aggregators, or other "creators" who do surf around for other people's work they can mill into their own hash for their own purposes.
I'd love it if I could somehow publish only for other end-user humans, but I don't see how I can do that without paradoxically engaging with some aspect of the commercial apparatus. It's like a Foucaultian nightmare. There's no way not to be part of the system. Rejecting it requires first embracing it.
To wit: here I am on HN complaining about giving away my work for free
It also doesn't have to be self serving. I've thought of writing articles because I see a lot of misconceptions on various topics I've seen on certain language subreddits. But the roadblock is in the effort to make my "research" (toy projects) into these things suitable for public consumption, not any particular fear that it won't do something for me. If it helps even one person, awesome.
In books about writing, I like:
How Fiction Works
Reading Like a Writer
Writing With Style
There are many others of course. Perhaps the most important part is finding an editor. (I wound up marrying one, which is not uncommon.) I've seen recs for Sasha Chapin: https://www.sashachapin.com/
Famous last words of a blogger.
I didn't want to fall into that trap and started with a blogging service right away.
3 years after I started blogging as a new years resolution, it became my main source of income.
Wouldn't have thought that I, the dude who almost dropped out of HS because of his bad English, would work as a writer one day.
But for most it's just a time sink.
You want to do a cool software project over a longer time? Build your own blog!
You want to write? Write!
>Wouldn't have thought that I, the dude who almost dropped out of HS because of his bad English
Doesnt this just mean your income before was low?
I have a website/blog that gets 1-2 million people per year, if I monetized I could get 5-20k/yr... But I make 150k+/yr at my day job.
Really makes it hard to become a full time writer of technical stuff.
This depends on so many things. For one, there are various ways to monetize. Sure, if you just slapped Adsense on the sight, that may be your earnings. However, if you add in some of your own products, as well as direct affiliations, you could earn $10k+/month. I've heard of people making triple that in a single month.
But yeah, I don't make 150k a year by writing.
Well done mate! Love hearing underdog success stories. What was your secret to success in effective communication?
I don't really have secret.
But you should write for someone that really exists, or at least existed in the past. Like yourself (from a a few weeks ago).
20 years is a long time makes me wonder what the next 20 years of blogging/websites will look like.
As beginner in web development I'm jealous of the simplicity of web development described at the beginning of the post.
Finally I've held off on putting comments/a guestbook on my website for the same reasons. I don't think I have even close to enough traffic for it to be a issue but if it ends up being one I don't want to deal with it.
All the simple old stuff still works. I recently set up a blog [1] that is just:
* Each post is a plain HTML file, served as-is.
* I make new posts by copying a template HTML file which has a small amount of basic structure and includes an external CSS file.
* When I write a new post, I run a script that scans the HTML files and makes an index.
If at some point I want something fancier I can extend it, which I've done over the years for my main blog, but for now it does what I need it to do.
I've been blogging for 17 years, and gone through a number of iterations (started with Wordpress, then my own PHP blog, then Posterous, then Jekyll, and now Scroll). The language I use now, Scroll (https://scroll.pub/), is very simple, you might want to check it out. You can start small with something like this:
header.scroll
# My Blog
firstPost.scroll
import header.scroll
Hello *world*
<b>Its fine to use html too</b>
index.scroll
import header.scroll
snippetsIt can be a lot to deal with. I added a comment widget again just recently because I missed some of the feelings of conversation, but I probably picked one that won't likely get as much conversation as some of my past tools did because higher barrier to entry on first comment (but that also makes the spam floor higher and gives me a trade-off in data ownership versus tracking JS). We'll see how long I leave it in place this time.
I am still writing HTML (with some JavaScript) using a modified version of Crystal Edit, which has the ability open local files by following HTML links [2]. (So, it act like a kind of HTML source browser.) I am using a C program to check HTML and links [3], which also places all updated files in an upload directory.
(Over the years for blogging, I've bounced from handwritten HTML to custom PHP to Drupal to custom Python/Django to Jekyll.)
[1] https://worldmaker.net/wmo99/ among other bits
[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/emeraldeditor/
[2] https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/272/Crystal-Edit-syntax...
Hand-spun HTML on day one; cobbled-together scripts for the next many years; Jekyll once it hit 1.0; today, Astro.
It feels like a real "moment" where people are reconsidering blogging and personal domain names; I'm excited to see what comes of it.
This said, blogs feel like a nice sweet spot for Astro. The current version of my blog came together without much fuss. (I've studiously avoided using Astro DB, or using Astro to build an API backend, etc. and so can't comment on them.)
Overall I've found Astro to be highly reliable. I identified one unexpected behavior (I think a bug, related to when CSS is rendered) while building my blog and was able to work around it but, other than that, Astro behaved exactly as documented.
There were days I wished that astro components didn't exist and, instead, I could just use the client:* attributes in (say) my Preact components. That said, astro components are well thought out and the tooling in vscode is solid.
I don't have a lot of readers, but the blog opened some doors for me (and continues to).
Is there any advice you have in that regard? How do most people contact you?
But also, when I applied to my last job, I could show some samples from my blog where I referenced their products (that I had built add-ons to). That’s just writing stuff down about what you are doing.
Finally, I mostly write my thoughts — those get no SEO and aren’t as useful, but are good to send to clients when they ask for my thoughts on some subject.
I have a contact page and I point people to LinkedIn to connect.
It’s interesting how things have evolved over time. Started it in college, and it was random posts about activities, feelings, etc. A lot of more personal stuff.
Growing up, changing careers (and changing again and again), having kids… I find that my blog has gotten less personal and more just general knowledge sharing of things I find interesting.
[1] https://daveschumaker.net/should-i-join-the-masses-of-blogge...
Back in 2001, a chance encounter with Microsoft Personal Web Server (PWS) on a Windows 98 system introduced me to the client-server concepts essential for creating and hosting a website. I used PWS to serve my website for the first couple of years and then moved on to IIS. At first the web pages were just individual HTML pages loaded within an HTML frameset. The frameset presented common headers and sidebars for the website. Later I learnt to use ASP (the classic ASP) and add dynamic content such as quiz, guestbook, etc.
By the final year of my university days, I had gained sufficient Unix/Linux knowledge to confidently replace Windows with Linux, IIS with Apache, and ASP with PHP.
These days, I am serving my website using Nginx from a Linode VM running Debian stable. The website itself is generated statically using my own little Common Lisp program [2]. All of the content and layout is simple handwritten HTML. The Common Lisp program combines the content HTML with the layout HTML and writes the final HTML pages that are then served via Nginx.
Because I use a ton of 3rd-party JS libraries which don't work well with Turbo, I'm kind of stuck with Rails 6 with turbolinks disabled on my main project. I've been looking for some reason to get to grips with the new additions, and I think I just talked myself into it.
I'd be very interested in people's blog stacks or if they have recommendations similar to the above.
What am I missing? Getting Movable Type working was to FTP and dropping it in "cgi-bin" > making them executable > connecting to the DB you created. Every web host that runs Apache has that, doesn't it?
I've started and sold a few blogs - the Pagerank, Domain Authority, Domain Age, etc. I think I also sold an entire website with a pretty popular WordPress theme. The primary theme that started it all was acquired by Automattic, the WordPress company.
I have been blogging on my personal blog since 2001, so it's been about 24 years now. I think mine started as a Flash website, with a `/blog` serving up the first few articles from PHP (or was it ASP?). The host was in a suburb of Bombay, and I remember seeing my neighboring websites, which were pretty popular brands. Yes, I could see the files, but I could not edit them. Very secure stuff. ;-)
Here is a bit of the story I wrote on my website's 20th year https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/
Last month I migrated my Hugo setup to a hosted micro.blog account. It adds the missing bits I was too lazy or time-crunched to configure myself, like crossposting to other services, webmentions, and all the other indieweb goodness.
A big shout out to Matomo analytics that lets me look at anonymized visitor records on my self-hosted server. It lacks the detail of Google Analytics (although you can pay Matomo for plugins that bring it close) but my visitors' information never leaves my possession. I don't care about what _a_ visitor does on my site, but I enjoy seeing the aggregate patterns, how people came to find me, and things like that.
These days Github pages, Jekyll, and writing in Markdown have proven a good way to get things done. Means I don't have to worry about server hosting and all the content is accessible if I ever want to move it.
My blog's been very useful to me as a reference for things I've looked at in the past and has hopefully helped out some other people as well. These days I generally blog when it's taken me a little while and some digging to figure something out, hopefully saves other people a bit of time.
I've also written about some similar thoughts to those in your linked "Content is King" post.[2] Long may the individualist personal website live.
For example: https://kamaraju.xyz/dk/ is my wiki, https://www.kamaraju.xyz/dk/blog is my blog.
PHP is a great template language.
So far I think it already led to some interesting opportunities and good discussions. All of my articles got picked up by well-know newsletters so at least it’s good enough for other people.
You only get a discussion if you claim something outrageous, you’re completely wrong or you share something that can be read in less than a minute.
Ofc I blogged about the setup ;) https://blog.sapico.me/posts/setting-up-a-blog-on-cloudflare...
It's Hugo on Cloudflare pages fyi. Auto deployed after committing.
I have my own personal WEB Site, but I have been moving it to Gemini since I find maintenance of it is far easier with Gemini that html.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
And good luck with the next 20 :)