I don't think personal blogs are back.
Not sure if you're looking for a hosted solution, though. A lot of those would involve you running your own server.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_s...
Exploit ridden PHPNuke & e107 CMS too.
What should they improve?
Kottke is one of the better known blogs that does not have a specific speciality.
https://joeldare.com/why-im-writing-pure-html-and-css-in-202...
Today, you’re talking to an audience that is online, willing to venture outside social media, and opting to actively read content rather than passively listen or watch. That’s far from everyone and that’s okay.
We had the time around when blogspot was a thing when everyone and their dog had a blog. It was mainstream enough for "Julie and Julia". It was a different time.
*You changed your post and now mine doesn't make sense anymore. I forgive you but don't do it again.
The point should be connecting people to other people and their creativity, not just connecting people to content which may or may not be vomited out by generative AIs.
Yes, but - there were lots of people who got online in other to blog. Livejournal, blogspot and others were the reason some of their mothers did get online. It was that mainstream!
The previous poster might also consider all the high profile, independent, and influential publications across various subjects that grew out of blogging – e.g. HuffPo, Pitchfork, Jezebel, so many video gaming and entertainment sites... many of which were sadly bought up by rich idiots and/or existing media conglomerates.
Content creation is indeed something a minority of society practices, but that can still be mainstream. In the first decade of the new millennium, the Movable Type and Wordpress ecosystem was active enough among ordinary people, not just nerds, that it led to things like local politicians being ousted, religious denominations’ leadership being shook up. All the drama now associated with Twitter/X happened on blogs before that.
Watch the last episode of The Onion’s series Sex House from 2012. A joke about everyone focusing on blogging is used multiple times. Even after the rise of Web 2.0 social media platforms, social media and blogs still coexisted for a time. It wasn’t until just after this that Google began deranking niche sites, and social media platforms sought to keep people on their sites for maximum engagement.
I’ve maintained my own domain since 2010 and know plenty of others that still do as well
My page is one of my favorite places on the internet cause it’s in my opinion the original purpose of the internet which is to share your personal research and places to document and share personal ideas with infinite distribution.
It’s got just the features you need, is built by a solo dev, and it’s got a very fair split between free and paid features. I used it to put up my personal site and have been very happy with the experience.
Feels very nihilistic.
There's certainly a difference between making useful content for the love of it and making content because you think there's an opportunity to get something out of that (that could be money, but it could also just be appreciation or someone reading your work).
It's demoralising to not get any views on your hard work, and in this economic environment it sometimes feels more worth your time to do any other activity.
You may be the counter-proof to that and I enjoy your blog! But, also a lot of what makes your content useful is timing with depth and that's something that AI can't beat yet
I think it’s a reason. It’s certainly demoralizing. Plagiarism sucks and feels bad. If I were to google something and see the AI overview parroting my blog post, sort of almost kind of paraphrasing my words and shoving the link to my actual blog off the phone screen entirely, I think I would personally travel to google headquarters and start swinging a baseball bat.
But… For starters, plagiarism has always been an issue. Even before the internet. Look at Tesla, or Rosalind Franklin. It was an issue on the internet before LLMs showed up. It’s always been trivially easy to copy and paste digital information, and with a little bit of programming to do so at scale. Those weird SEO wordpress blogs with their aggregated/stolen content have been around forever. The web was choked full of plagiarized garbage years before chatgpt was an option or even an idea.
Also consider that the AI machine takes a lot more than your stolen creative output to run. It needs tons of electricity poured into expensive equipment. It’s not clear whether the “stolen data + expensive scientists + expensive graphics cards + metric shittons of electricity” side of the equation is ever going to equal “monthly rate people will pay for access to sort of ok almost sometimes accurate information (a service which has been on offer for free for roughly 2 years and is easy to find for free depending on the company/model/use case)” let alone be lower than it. The plagiarism is not profitable and hopefully unsustainable.
And let’s sit on “access to sort of ok almost accurate information” for a second here. Because I’m pretty sure people looking for this and people looking for a blog written by a real human person who they can build a (parasocial perhaps but still) relationship with and send emails to and follow for more related content are entirely separate demographics. Blog traffic has dropped off because Facebook, Instagram, etc. It was those massive sites, not LLMs, that gutted that part of the internet.
Going back to sustainability, legal challenges to the plagiarism machines do still exist and have traction. The more creators, more bloggers and artists and programmers and more of anyone sharing their stuff online, the more people we have with a very vested stake in ending the plagiarism free for all.
I say get in there, get creating, and get up to some lobbying on the side for good measure. Don’t sit back and let a handful of spoiled nerds and obscenely wealthy old people ruin the joy of creating and sharing things. Maybe drop in more references to baseball bats to make your output less palatable to the monster. I don’t know.
This is the only sensible reaction to the abuses that huge tech companies are dumping onto society.
I do agree half heartedly with what you are saying. Making our own stuff and seeking out human-made stuff is more important than ever
It's just demoralizing because it is now also more difficult than ever. It should be the norm, not the exception imo and to me the future looks bleak and soulless.
I'm not calling for revolution. I don't want violence. I just don't see any real way forward for humanity in a post AI world. I think this is one of the worst things that we could have ever invented
I don’t think violence is necessary. The common people have access to many levers of power, we only need to overcome lack of coordination and awareness.
But violence is an important part of our history. It is human nature and it serves a purpose. I won’t shy away from it.
On top of that, discoverability is dead, SEO indexing for attribution of original works does not exist, the culture of rehashing content for walled gardens like LinkedIn and Medium is out of control, and the substackzation of writing does not make things optimistic.
More depressing than the realization how few people are able to evaluate the quality of something?
More depressing than the number of people who proudly advocate for having pride in plagiarism?
More depressing than the number of people who unwittingly use genai as an excuse to DoS sites, individuals, organic content ranking? (Each being their own completely diff method)
And further, the LLMs will DDOS you in the process, completely disregarding robots.txt, so self-hosting is a pain-in-the-ass, forcing you to use (and trust) something like Cloudflare (or the Anubis, or Kiwiflare).
It's probably similar to the street-side musician. In old times, he may have been the only musician around you might hear. Nowadays, he's got to compete with a perfect recording of Hotel California by the Eagles.
(Perhaps also the browser, email, etc? ;)
Over time, a lot of companies figured out that if they start posting content-farmed articles on notionally non-commercial topics, this drives people to their website, so you ended up with billions of pages like this: thecleaningauthority . com/blog/how-to-clean/the-ultimate-guide-to-cleaning-pillows-and-pillo/ (remove spaces if you really want to).
And then LLMs brought down the marginal cost of cranking out content on any conceivable topic basically to zero, so you're all of sudden competing with 500 companies publishing spammy guitar maintenance advice. It's not that search engines want to show that stuff, but it's hard for them to tell.
But the incentive for search engines to pick profitable results over quality results has only gotten stronger over time.
Just imagine a world where your one-person, part-time, labor-of-love guitar-maintenance blog were the top search result, simply because it had the best content. Democratizing access to information was the original promise of the web. I don't think we're there anymore, and I don't think it's correct to let search engines off the hook because their lucrative job has gotten harder.
I have an RSS feed of personal blogs which I really enjoy.
I also refuse to go to LiveNation type concerts. I only go to local musicians charging $10 at the door.
I don't even do it on principle. Corporate entertainment (including blogs) often feels formulaic to me. I find that Medium sucks the life out of good writers for some reason.
Am I supposed to advertise it with the icon explicitly or is it enough if the URL works? What do you generally look for?
I just checked in incognito on my cellular network and it seems to be working now. If you get the chance, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know what went wrong when you visited it. Email in profile if you'd prefer that.
Also, I was just reading your blog and saw a reference to FutureMe.org. Man, that website really did survive. I searched my email for it and look at this!
> (The following is an e-mail from the past, composed on Wednesday, June 14, 2006, and sent via FutureMe.org)
And another where I say
> Hopefully, you have a child and everything is good and they are healthy. I wish you the best of luck, mate.
It worked out. Thanks for the good luck, past me! :)
If you like this sort of thing, find a blog you like and contact the author to tell them you enjoy their work.
Blogging kind of was better in the past.
I also remember geocities. It was kind of cool.
Neocities unfortunately does not really capture that old spirit. It's just ... different.
Geocities was used by slightly nerdy average joes while from a brief glance Neocities looks to be a place for Mastodon techies to roleplay an internet they never participated in.
It seems like you'd get traffic from search engines a few years back, but now the only traffic I've had is from a HN post.
Everything points to optimizing for "AEO" for LLMs now
Maybe it makes sense if you're selling a product or service, but I don't see the appeal of AEO as the new SEO. Maybe I'm missing something?
One thing I failed to notice was that RSS was still active. So this year, I started consistently contributing, over 150 so far, and I see RSS picking up right where it left off [0]. A lot of my blog post suck, but I write them as an observation and my current understanding of a subject. Readers have agency to skip what they don't like and only read what they like.
Note this shows me how many RSS readers have accessed my RSS daily. I can't actually track each person, although I have a report I'm working on for the end of the year.
Things like this let me just throw homepages (or blog pages) at feed readers and they can discover all the different feeds available and I can pick one (although you really don't need more than one, generally).
I use my own server-side tracking to count them - I look out for the user-agent from feed software like Feedly and pull the number out of it:
Feedly/1.0 (+https://feedly.com/poller.html; 694 subscribers; )
nekoweb is another one: https://nekoweb.org/explore?page=1&sort=lastupd&by=tag&q=
I don't think anyone's really optimizing for SEO. (it's not even really clear to me that that's very important any more.)
Submissions welcome ofc :) https://arc.net/folder/4A220E67-674A-456D-AEDB-796B5BE82034
Just like Problogger, India has its own — Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal at https://www.labnol.org
In fact, a VC hinted to me that I should, or if I have the balls to convert my personal blog to the “Techcrunch of India” and become Michael Arrington. I wasn’t made for that and never wanted to be a blogger. My blog should be a very personal space. Well, my personal blog became a cheesy mess of personal ramblings with no aim or ambition. :-)
I think Kiruba Shankar attempted the closest to that one in India at https://www.kiruba.com and did succeed to a degree.
Fortunately, my website still enjoys direct links from a few Patents in the USA that reference my articles as a source of truth, as well as a few links from Wikipedia, WordPress.org, Adobe, and a few other well-established websites here and there. Quite a few of the articles were translated into other languages, and I keep getting referenced. Google still sends me quite a handful of visits daily.
I don’t think niche blogs are coming back, because the moment a “niche blog” becomes sustainable and “profitable”, it is no longer a niche blog. It becomes another commercial website or a publication.
1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value.
2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they communicate well? If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't been updated in five years that's still a big boost over candidates with nothing like that at all. In a competitive market that could be the boost you need to make it from the resume review to the first round.
3. If you blog more frequently than that it can be a really valuable resource for your future self. I love being able to look back on what I was thinking and writing about ten years ago. Having a good tagging system helps with this too - I can review my tag of "scaling" or "postgresql" and see a timeline of how my understanding developed.
4. It's a great way to help establish credibility. If someone asks you about X and you have a blog entry about X from five years ago you can point them to that.
5. Building a blog is really fun! It used to be one of the classic starter projects for new web developers, I think that needs to come back. It's a fun project and one that's great to keep on hacking on long into the future.
Notably none of the above reasons require your blog to attract readers! There's a ton of value to be had even if nobody actually reads the thing.
As a general rule, assume nobody will read your blog unless you actively encourage them to. That's fine. What matters isn't the quantity of readers, it's their quality. I'd rather have a piece read by just a single person that leads to a new opportunity for me than 1,000 people who read it and never interact with me ever again.
If you DO start to get readers things get even more valuable. I've been blogging since 2002 and most of the opportunities in my career came from people I met via blogging. Today I get invited to all sorts of interesting events because I have a prominent blog covering stuff relating to AI and LLMs.
But I do honestly think that a blog is a powerful professional tool even if nobody else is reading it at all.
If you want to give it a go I've written a few things that might be useful:
- What to blog about: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/ - Today I learned and write about your projects
- My approach to running a link blog - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/ - aka write about stuff you've found
Another advice or a deduction that I learnt from reading biographies and many historical books is — write as if you are writing for a stranger, even on your own personal blog/diaries/memoir — when you get older, your younger self will become a stranger and you will have forgotten a lot of things in that life you lived.
Btw, I have had a to-do item for quite a while to copy your blog’s yearly archive link style in the footer. I haven’t figured out a way to make it simpler and I don’t have to deal with it for a long time. :-)
How bizarre. Well, memory spaces are just that, I suppose. I write diaries and letters since before I entered school and my younger self does feel anything but a stranger to me; many of my memories are as lucid to me as they were all those decades ago, both life-changing as well as trivial ones.
Probably. In my case long-term memory seems to be really strong down male side of my family so when I read my old stuff from 20+ years ago I remember it and know it was me, just a little different like 'damn, we don't wear clothes like that anymore' when you look at old pictures. The styles/culture/times change you are in and so you adapt to them, but you are still you. I hear this commonly though that some people don't feel like the old them is same person at all.
For me: I have felt a continual sense of self since around kindergarten, before that memory is a little episodic (my earliest is going to hospital to visit my mom and sister after she was born, when I was age 2) but I feel the same 'me' in memories from kindergarten til now over 30 years later. I also do stuff like pick up and start reading a book, put it down, and then go back and finish from where I left off 3-4 years later. I've met a few other people that do that as well, but it's a little uncommon I think?
On the flip side my working memory has always been really bad. My attachment to memory blanks under stress, some people will relate in things like public speaking. I remember in high school forgetting entire marching band drill one time and having to improvise because I stress blanked. The memory is there when this happens it's like it stops streaming to RAM, intuition takes over based on what it sees not what is known.
What is incredibly useful, and this I always felt is for personal writing only (diary/journal)... writing allows for capturing a state of your own thinking/feelings at a time. I would often write to myself when major events happened (good or bad) and then later on I could interpret from the strong feelings what I was going through and see if I handled them or could handle them better. You don't need editing passes for this, it should capture your raw state. Probably good to do this if your memories fade as well, but I don't know. I will probably burn some of my old writing, things that have served their purpose. Apparently it makes you feel relieved doing it and some cultures have this concept.
I think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes elsewhere, but doesn't necessarily stay bottled up in the mind of the would-have-been blogger. Even while pseudo-blogging platforms like Substack are having something of an upswing of esoteric low-audience content.
And I can say from experience that it's tough keeping a blog going when you have near-zero readership, even if you still consider the act of writing something and putting it out in public to be instrinsically valuable to you.
Just as a simple example, I have a once-in-a-while newsletter+blog on a niche topic, and I could get way more eyeballs if I'd just rephrase things as a Reddit post, but I'm nostalgic about it living its own life on the Free-ish Web. Or, I suppose, this comment right here, which could just as well be on a personal blog with a "backlink" to yours.
That's been true of me. A paragraph or three that I would once have done as a blog now slip neatly and easily into social media of various sorts. Going to try to do something about that next year but this year ended up crazy for various reasons.
As one should. The rando who spams a discussion thread with an impenetrable wall of text is like that guy who uses their "question" at the end of an in-person panel discussion to ramble incoherently for three minutes. Yes, here we can scroll past it, but it's still presumptious and annoying. This is not primary content (that's at the top). Here we're all nobodies to everyone else. For my part I try to remember that fact - and get to the point.
In a forum, the discussion IS primary content. That's the problem: Reddit has shifted away from being a discussion forum toward an endless-scroll content feed.
> Here we're all nobodies to everyone else. For my part I try to remember that fact - and get to the point.
Kind of an odd turn of logic. If being a nobody devalues your anecdotes or tangents, then it equally devalues your point. If, conversely, your point can be valuable in and of itself, then your anecdotes and tangents can be valuable in and of themselves too.
> Yes, here we can scroll past it, but [...] This is not primary content (that's at the top).
Incidentally, you don't have to scroll past anything to reach the content at the top of the page. It's at the top of the page.
Persistent usernames enable history of community contribution and reception.
You also overlook the fact that many Reddit posts are not links to content. For example, they could be text-post questions posed to a community in order for the OP to receive guidance. This recent culture discouraging substantial discussion about things that are complex and can’t be abbreviated, makes the site less useful that way.
There are other ways to monetize, which doesn't depend on a lot of eyeballs. If you write high quality niche content and sell related products or services, then each eye ball can be worth a lot.
I've been thinking lately about still posting things to various places like here and Reddit but compiling them later on and posting them to my website (likely with a link to where I posted them originally). That seems like a good middle ground for me and would enable me to build up a decent resource for myself and others, if I'm up for cleaning up the texts to provide or remove context as necessary.
Much of this idea of mine is from a desire to archive and pull together more of the stuff I've put effort into that's spread all over the web.
I mean, I get it: the economic situation is tough for many people, and earning money matters. But the focus on creating something simply for the sake of sharing it seems to be disappearing more and more.
In fairness, I do think "side hustles" and the like have become much more normalized as the default. And even if the odds are poor, there are least enough anecdotes of Substack authors, influencers, and the like making enough money to perk many people's interest.
I've sometimes thought about blogging but for what? I'm not interested in promoting myself or my "brand" and I can't write about anything that someone else with much deeper expertise hasn't already written about.
If you feel the occasional urge to blog - maybe just be self indulgent about it? I get a strange sense of satisfaction from twiddling with the CSS on a rainy afternoon. Just my random 2p that nobody asked for :)
I still sad about my favorite go to photography blog was gone dark because of the vendor is sort of gone I guess. Might be we have to live with Buddha worldview - nothing is permanent.
I like your idea of blogging about TILs. There are shallow posts about TILs(plenty on medium) and then there are posts that mention TILs along with specific gotchas they faced and workarounds on the topic. Those saved me hours of searching/debugging on couple of occasions and I'm glad that they did that.
And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I use HN comments as more like a blog post.
Of course my biggest issue is that I have started and deleted more blogs than I can count, so I don’t have any useful history, like I would if I would have stuck with one thing for the last 20 years.
Not a showstopper for me since I don't expect anyone to be interested anyway, but might be for some.
You could use Claude, or you could use one of many static site builders.
For me, there is a large relative (percentual) difference in the perceived cognitive load. Perhaps not a huge actual difference, but when you are running tens of projects, everything counts.
Now I am not talking about actual reality but the psychological effect. It might be that some shared hosting site is in fact more reliable than GitHub Pages.
Obviously, a blog that you just forget is not that useful, but last site I created using this method was an advertisement site for a book. I have several blogs where I write occasionally.
Biggest downside I know of: Wordpress is too much learning curve & overhead for a simple personal blog.
The thing that stopped me was much like what you said, learning curve and too much friction. Right now I have bearblog, mataroa.blog and nicheless, all with their own strength and flaws.
That was the conclusion I came to when I was muddling through various options last year. I had a Blogger blog already and decided to just roll in whatever professional content I wanted to add, which was the right solution for me. It helped that various folks I knew didn't bother having hard boundaries behind personal and professional content and that worked for me as well.
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-depl...
You can hate on Google all you like but it hasn't been killed by Google yet and has been a long time--and is simple, adequate, and free even if it doesn't handle all the more advanced use cases.
> You are a proof reader for posts about to be published.
> 1. Identify for spelling mistakes and typos
> 2. Identify grammar mistakes
> 3. Watch out for repeated terms like "It was interesting that X, and it was interesting that Y"
> 4. Spot any logical errors or factual mistakes
> 5. Highlight weak arguments that could be strengthened
> 6. Make sure there are no empty or placeholder links
I do occasionally use an LLM to reformat data - "turn this screenshot into a Markdown list" kind of thing.
I had it write me an HTML price comparison table for this post: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/18/gemini-3/#pricing - here's how: https://chatgpt.com/share/6921b10b-0124-8006-9356-8e32f6335b... - I carefully checked the numbers before I published it!
My CV currently also includes a link to my repositories and a page briefly describing some projects that got anywhere. Far from all of my 100 or so personal free time projects get finished, but some do, and those are described and linked in my CV and on my website.
At least I do get interviews, which must mean at least something, and sometimes it's just the role that is not fitting. Often it is their tech stack and they do not believe in engineers learning things on the job, looking for a perfect match. Sometimes it was some test that they do, that presumes some knowledge about some library or that is some specific leetcode thingy, that I wouldn't code that way anyway, if I had the choice.
Imagine everyone having some cookie cutter blog, just a standard part of a resume.
Hacktober was the worst but I think it went away because of BS spam contributions.
CVE and in general security issues reporting has this issue nowadays where everyone wants to get CVE on their name to have it for CV. It is worst stuff ever.
I haven't been recruiting recently but goes it's even simpler to identify blogs full of loveless AI slop and people who care about a topic. (Even if they use AI for language assistance etc)
Topics, which details being presented, frequency, ...
In the past I got a job I had for 8 years through my blog, a startup that eventually sold....
So, it's been pretty good for me, and doesn't actually take that much extra effort on top of the learning you do daily working in tech.
However, even at big companies it can be useful depending on context but you have to bring it up in relation to why you are a fit for the job. Genuine enthusiasm goes a long way especially in the dry corporate world.
I would actually prefer working in a startup again, where I can still influence technical implementation and guide things into good paths, compared to working as a tiny cog in a huge machinery of a big company. Of course, a lot depends on the team. It might be possible to be part of a great team in a big company, that is in charge of some aspect of the whole, and having more influence over how things are done there.
For startups and small companies I think it makes a huge difference.
At one job I was told explicitly I was hired mostly because the hiring manager liked my website - I wasn't the only one that passed the interview process and so my website was why I was chosen. He liked how minimalist it was.
At another, one of the engineers found a bug on my website and my interview was to pair program a fix with him.
When I'm in charge of hiring I strongly prefer candidates that have some kind of web presence that lets me structure the interview more towards what they've presented about themselves.
Also I have gotten clients that originally found me because they googled "how to rent a motorcycle in Taiwan" and I rank #1 for that search apparently.
I intentionally made my website very minimalistic, using only HTML and CSS. Also fully responsive using modern CSS layouts and even made everything composable, avoiding media queries for specific widths. Kind of an experiment, but very minimalistic. So what you write makes me think: "If only someone took a look at my website and had that mindset!!"
Well, I will keep my website, maybe one day it will amount to something.
But… having (not so often updated) blog myself - I will try to change my behavior in future and mention it somehow during interview ;)
- https://write.as - a https://writefreely.org instance that also syncs with Mastodon, so people can see/discover/subscribe/ comment on your posts without extra hassle of setting up comments or other privacy invading tools.
- https://bearblog.dev - just text, very simple and quick to get started.
But write it yourself, dont let LLMs do it. Otherwise forget the sixth reason.
Good written communication is one of the key skills needed at the senior / staff engineer level. Blogging is a great way to exercise those skills.
ugh, I hate this. Often when doing a search for how to do something I get 100 beginner blogs that cover the absolute basics but have no depth. People who know what they're doing are drowned out.
Here's a few of my recent link blog posts that exist purely to boost great writing about technology:
- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/21/dependency-cooldowns/
- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/13/nano-banana-can-be-pro...
I'm a huge fan of self hosting but internet facing stuff I don't want to run myself but all the commercial blogging services like medium have scummy tracking and analytics built in, or try to get my readers to subscribe to things.
Then I tried substack but they lean too heavily on the "newsletter" paradigm which I hate. Also they are starting to enshittify now too.
I don't mind paying for a service but they always want to double dip in tracking readers and selling subscriptions to them as well. Yuck.
Makes for an attack surface that gets delightfully close to zero.
I did it to share without having any idea who was reading or not. Probably nobody back then.
But it became a habit. Beyond tech topics, I started blogging about broader subjects: organization, hiring, salaries, company building.
And it's incredible how much I relied on it later as a sort of documentation, especially for everything related to company building. It's so valuable to re-read why we made certain decisions in the past. And it's also so valuable to be able to point new colleagues to that knowledge base.
And technically, I had fun. I went through Joomla, self-hosted WordPress, wordpress.com. I built my own plugins. Then I developed my own open source static blog generator (bloggrify.com) in the Nuxt ecosystem. That's when I created an English version of my blog.
Then I started feeling the need to share differently. I had the impression that blogging was becoming outdated, that younger generations weren't reading anymore. So I tried video format on YouTube.
I really enjoyed video production - there's still so much to learn: equipment, techniques, new tools.
But I realized that each format has its pros and cons. It's so much easier to update text when it becomes obsolete. It's also so much faster to produce. Video is so hard to make. So I got back into writing and even took it further by creating a blogging platform (writizzy.com).
In short, I learned a lot because I documented everything I did, which forced me to dig deeper into each topic to avoid saying nonsense. I also learned a lot because I wanted to test approaches, make videos, learn to build a static site generator and many other things, purely for the sake of learning.
Today, one piece of advice I give to every senior dev is to take the time to write. Doesn't matter if it's to publish somewhere or not. But to lay out your ideas, dig deeper into them, get perspective.
On a side note, after writing frequently for ~12 years, I didn't write anything for the next 6. This discussion came at the right time - it nudged me to publish two posts yesterday.
>3. If you blog more frequently than that it can be a really valuable resource for your future self. I love being able to look back on what I was thinking and writing about ten years ago. Having a good tagging system helps with this too - I can review my tag of "scaling" or "postgresql" and see a timeline of how my understanding developed.
These are generally why I blog. I write the articles with an audience in mind, because I don't know a concept if I can't explain it cogently. And also I actually tend to refer back to my blog for my own reference surprisingly regularly. For example, I wrote an article on installing Debian on a PC Engines APU over the serial interface, and then getting the Unifi Controller running. Every so often when I update the Debian install on that box, or decide to change OSes on a different APU I'll refer to that article.
You wouldn't think that that would be so difficult but it was a surprisingly baroque process.
Oh hey, that's me! This post might actually encourage me to get back on top of things. Not only do I have two articles (more recent than 5 years though), one of them has a glaring error that is somewhat foundational to what it's supposed to be about. I have to fix that, as well as my broken RSS feed, and get my git link re-directed to my self-hosted forge, and update all my remotes, remove some defunct links and menu options, and then decide which of my 68 (yes, 68!) blog drafts I want to focus on publishing next. Now that I've listed it out, I bet I can get all that done over the break.
You have to lower your standards.
I make a point of hitting "publish" when I'm still not entirely happy with what I've written, because I know that the alternative is a folder full of drafts and nothing published at all.
Nobody who reads your stuff will ever know how good it could have been if you kept on polishing it.
HN is a great source, but you'll notice over time there are always AskHN posts asking something like "What is a site like HN for..", and people trying to build HN clones.
Reddit was good for a while for this, but hasn't been for a long time.
I'm hoping people rediscover/reinvent slashdot.
It's just a list of hyperlinks to other sites with brief descriptions. I think it's a good idea and everyone should create one on their small website.
It works really well if you're looking for a cozier timeline.
You can also scour all 14,000+ sources for posts that match your interests.
As a Kagi customer I have to say that's a disappointingly short list and static approach :/
Anyway, Kagi Small Web is not a list of websites but a list of RSS feeds.
Similarity navigation: https://marginalia-search.com/site/simonwillison.net
Backlinks: https://marginalia-search.com/site/simonwillison.net?view=li...
User-agent: search.marginalia.nu
Allow: /Why do I host a website? - https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/11/2019/why-do-i-host-a-...
And state of blogging: https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2024/life-of-a-blog-b...
I started this journey from scratch. Despite not pushing for numbers and regular schedule, my website still have 20k viewers since I added analytics (didn't have analytics for 2 years in the beginning). That might be a small number for most, but it means that there are people who want to read what I write. That is all that matters. Atleast to me.
It always makes me happy to see more people bring back blogging. I hate that everything is on platforms like substack, and would much rather see a million wordpress or ghost installs.
The top 25% is the nav bar, ok, maybe that's reasonable? the next 25% is a "new here", please join upsell. The next 20% is another upsell, please give me your email so I can spam you. The bottom 35% is tags, and the bottom 25% is finally links... but they're mostly covered by another upsell. Holy shit!
And to top it all off, even with uBo enable there's a full sceen popup/modal add dimming the whole page, begging me to let them help me with my overwhelming debt.
WTF is wrong with people who do this stuff?!
Here's mine (but barely incomplete drafts, I started it last week): blog.moralestapia.com
- It is a personal blog = 1st audience is me. Best self-improvement investment I made - I blog for my present self: I blog about what I read, what I'm thinking about a topic, what I learned etc. But also I blog for my future self: the trends I'm noticing, how I should prepare and I am preparing - Since it is a personal blog, sometimes I blog about books I read, sermons I preach, technical notes. All mixed up. - This year got about 40k YTD traffic, which is not bad for a personal blog. Highest traffic came for my post on openwebui.
Benefits I've seen: - I am not selling anything or running ads. So there are no first order monetization - Since I blog about topics that matter to me (career, tech trends), I already have a clear thinking on those topics. So when they come up for discussions, I am able to speak clearly and with depth. That has landed me in promotions, faster career growth, coaching opportunities, and more - People share my blog post when certain topics come up for discussion. This has increased my influence and their respect towards me.
If you are interested to see how my blog has changed over time, I have kept a changelog: https://www.jjude.com/changelog/
I've thought about two potential ways of getting around this:
1. Maintain two separate blogs, one professional, one personal, make the personal blog pseudonymous, and put all the things I don't want employers to see over there. This seems fine, but also feels like too much work in practice? (perhaps the work is just of selecting where to put the post after I'm done writing it, though.) 2. Maintain one blog, and not care about market hire or anything like that. This...would work, but I'm not sure about potential bad effects because of this. I could just choose to write completely pseudonymously instead. I'm not sure.
> This seems fine, but also feels like too much work in practice?
Once you've finished procrastinating on your perfect stack to run/generate the blog, it's easy to set up a second.
After all, many of your readers are also human beings with lives, maybe even lives similar to yours based on your professional content. (The rest of your readers are LLMs.) Your readers might appreciate your perspectives on random life things or just getting to see what their favorite blogger is up to.
That's the route I decided to choose when I started my professional career. I already had a personal (pseudonymous) blog. And that's where I put the stuff around work.
I decided to go this way for many reasons.
First, because I don't want it to be a source of pressure. If I talk about work stuff and make a big mistake, then people can call me out on it and it would tarnish my reputation.
Second, because I want to share things for free and to help others first, not to help myself/my career.
Last and related, if I was using it as a self-promoting media, I would focus on things that would help my career, not on things that I find funny or that I think can help someone else. So it would BE work. And it would only take a few months before I would be tired of it.
Also since I've mostly worked on heavily regulated things, I'm quite limited about what I could publicly communicate.
Now, I have my own personal room on the Internet where I can discuss everything I want, without feeling any pressure about how or what or when I should write about anything.
I mostly post tech things, but at some point I wanted to share a few thoughts about a touchy subject like dating. I had the same dilemma - the last thing I wanted was for it to backfire professionally. At that time I was a consultant and freelancer, so looking for a job wasn’t something I did every few years, but more on a continuous basis.
My girlfriend back then encouraged me to post under my name, as long as I was comfortable being asked about it and defending my words (I was, so I did).
The reception from friends was positive. To my surprise, it had a neutral to mildly positive professional impact, "this is a tech guy, but he has soft skills".
And as you can see, there are quite a few posts like that (side ideas, physical and mental health, relationships).
---
Of course, your mileage may vary. Tech is one thing, but for many jobs (especially government, public service, primary education) it might be different.
It also depends on the general norms within a country—what’s taboo, and how far you’re willing to cross it.
At the same time, when I’ve heard of someone being rejected due to their online presence, it was mostly not about the views themselves, but about how they were expressed. Raging hate might be off-putting—even to those who share a similar bias.
I think the only thing that can derail a job application is if your personal blog makes you look patently unreasonable, either by supporting causes that are socially unacceptable ("it's OK to hit women") or getting way too angry over mundane stuff ("everyone working at Microsoft should be shot"). But if you just happen to have an opinion about a politician, whatever.
Where it gets dicey is if you're in a leadership position, especially director and above. Then, you're sort of paid to keep your opinions to yourself, because when you have an organization of 100 people or more, at least several will disagree with your politics and will then judge your actions through that prism, leading to drama and possible HR fights.
I don't feel like I've had any negative impact from that, or I'm very privileged to be able to say I don't care if I have had any impact from that - I've done fairly well for myself, and I can remind people I'm a full human being!
List of Public Blogs of Hacker News users
People out there are generally nice. People mostly don't care. And even if someone mocks your stuff in private - it says more about them than you.
So if you started creating content to teach other people, it would then live rent free in the heads of people who cant do it? If anything, that sounds like a reason to start blogging.
I don't mock people who write about stuff I already understand. https://xkcd.com/1053/ was kind enough to grant me immunity to that. I do mock people who write incorrectly from authority, without curiosity. Equally I look down on those who try to use their knowledge as a cudgel against people still learning. I would mock those trying to weaponize knowledge, but I try not to punch down.
If I wrote something, and found out it was being mocked in some discord channel, that would make me laugh, much more than worry or feel ashamed. In order for me to value some criticism, I would first have to value or desire their opinion. I can't imagine a single person who's feedback I would be interested in, if their version of humor is trying to dunk on someone who is learning, and sharing that learning. They're too stupid for me to waste my limited attention to care about what they ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶k̶ say.
Chances are, there is someone out there who would be grateful you explained something in a way they could understand, when everyone else failed. That's how the intersection of knowledge and shared context works.
You don't need to value the opinions of idiots. Let them be idiots. It's ok, and even desired to focus your attention on making something good with value to people who aren't stupid.
They didn’t go anywhere! Ask the folks who have consistently maintained them regardless of current fad
The ecosystem and interconnected-ness has completely vanished. If you look at the late 90s or early 2000s, people had RSS readers, and sites had feeds, blogrolls, trackbacks/pingbacks, a commenting system which worked, and social bookmarking sites (like del.icio.us) which were somewhat mainstream.
All of this is gone. Blogs are not going to survive in the current super-noisy consumption architecture.
For blogs to be back, you'd almost need a new internet.
Personal blogs are not "back". The article has zero evidence for this.
Ironically, Darren Rowse (the "problogger" person cited in the article) hasn't published a new blog post since 2024-07-24, more than a year ago.
There are lots of different RSS readers out there depending on whether you want a web based or local one. Personally I use Thunderbird.
Not only because it sucks they do it, but because I host everything.
I read and enjoy content from people who want to share something.
There is no chance I'll read anything within 0.01s of it being posted, but there is a chance I'll find it eventually. So if the first thing to read the content is all that matters, or if having complete exclusive control so that only the people you like can read it, and importantly only in the way that you decided they should read it.
Then don't bother?
But if you want to create something of value for someone else, and the exact time it takes them to find it, or the browser they use isn't actually important. Seems like it's still a good time to write stuff. Maybe even better, to resist AI content drowning out new stuff.
But honestly: without having an efficient way to fight them crawlers I'm not willed to write for it anymore.
Is there an efficient solution I can add? It lives on a Shared Web Hoster. For self-hosted stuff there's Anubis. Also willed not to use Cloudfare.
Also, my blog comes complete with an IDE in the browser!
I have written close to 3000 blog articles over the last 25 years (and many books) - primarily because I like writing, otherwise the top post here today nails it listing reasons to blog.
I started blogging 20+ years ago - and this was is still the number one go to reference after all.
He started as one of us, and started posting tipps - until... The story continues.
I started blogging about tech and security when I was 13/14 years old in my native language. Then, when I felt more mature, I switched to a new blog where English was the main language. I started improving my language skills, getting some donation from kind strangers for my blog posts and using it as a self-branding forever running-side project.
Now, 20 years later I still have my personal blog and I still write about tech, but only recently I created some "personal related" tabs, like the "/now" page, enriching it every month or having a more personal about page. Why? Because I like going to a blog a see that behind that address there is a real person with emotions and dreams, it's like entering in their home and have a look around.
1. Improve your language skills
2. Self-branding
3. Memorize better topics you care about
4. Share what you learned with others
About LLM, I don't care if they scrape my blog, I use LLMs every day, and if some stuff I write helps to enrich an LLM with a positive impact I would be more than happy to let it happens, the more we write, the less fake-news and low-quality content would ingest and used.
The logic was, if you cannot communicate, you cannot explain why your job, or what you're doing is important. If it has value. If you have value. You cannot hope to explain requirements to others. Or explain the logic or reasons, the "why" of a technical path.
You're likely correct that a lot of people think this unimportant. To them I'd say, they're severely limiting their career, if they don't think communicating is important.
I actually set up a blog on the 15th. No real content yet but I’ve almost written a first real post. Seeing this made me chuckle - I thought _I_ had an original thought around missing blogs but I’m obviously just a part of the hive mind. I truly hope this trend is here to stay.
I also want to share this video on the topic ”The reason no one has hobbies anymore”, it was shared by a podcast I was listening to the other day and I think it’s well worth watching. https://youtu.be/IUhGoNTF3FI
I've released a new post every week for 10 years straight.
My traffic in the last 2 years is worse than the first 2 years. At the blog's peak I was getting around 180k unique visitors a month for years.
I was able to build a whole business around selling tech courses and doing contract work for the last 10 years but now traffic is so little that this is no longer feasible (not even close).
Just looking at the numbers, it's very likely related to Google not sending as much traffic as they used to because they either inline my content on their search engine results or AI results are used now instead of people visiting individual sites.
I still do it because I enjoy the process and my main motivator was never money but at the same time you need to be able to sustain yourself too. It's a bummer to be honest.
On that note, a ton of great non-money related opportunities came my way due to posts I've written in the past so I won't be stopping. I hope these continue.
The idea of personal blogging is for your own growth and history.
That was why I started. Any business I got were byproducts of writing organically about the things I was working on. Courses were also a byproduct of doing the same type of contract work for many different clients.
- Google no longer sending traffic
- Users staying on social media (facebook/x/instagram/youtube/tiktok) and not even clicking external links
At the time they suggested using Twitter or Facebook. And while I had a twitter account, I rarely used it. Over the period of the course, I managed to cultivate a nice community out of a largely unused account, and connected with like minded individuals on programming and, due to the course’s target audience, teachers.
The course then taught you to analyze the social media posts using the Twitter API. Turtles all the way down. It was the best MOOC I ever participated in.
So this experience has become my prototype for blogging and publicity—blog+social media.
I’ve not continued the blogging (the class was in 2010?), but I have tried to cultivate, for example, on BlueSky a community of _only_ my personal and professional interests (not unlike HN content), but politics, entertainment and sports keep muddying the waters.
It’s impossible to control your feeds these days, so I don’t know if Blog+Social is a pattern that works _today_ with the current crop of social. Not sure if people who are NOT _in it for the money_ can achieve the personal engagement necessary to carry on.
Small aside, during COVID NYC Python community met on online. It continued for over a year and then fizzled out. But oh what a glorious year of weekly online meetups. And every one had the good taste to keep it to Python and their ruddy projects. Hehe.
Somehow there is a lot of truth in this fake quote: "Those who would give up essential liberty to decide whom to follow, for getting a little temporary convenience in exchange, deserve neither to chose what to read nor convenience"
The social media part is true, though in a way that is more user-benefitting than many bloggers (such as myself) appreciate or will acknowledge. And HN is one such "social media" site that invariably helped "kill" blogs, so there's an irony that this is being discussed here.
Before HN / Reddit (others will put Twitter / Bluesky / whatever else in here), I had a list of "must read" blogs that I would monitor to, essentially, keep up. My feed reader alerted me to their entries, I would pay attention to "must read" blog lists, and so on.
That process yields a lot of chaff for the wheat you yield. An enormous amount. Especially after many bloggers started thinking that they need to have daily content (bloggers like Atwood proselytized that the key to being successful was overwhelming quantity), however facile and useless, to hit some quota. I would rather have a feed that was quiet but then once a week a banger hits amongst dozens of authors, but instead it was just an enormous amount of filler.
Eventually I just stopped monitoring it. With sites like HN, and various Reddit subs, my (proven) hypothesis is that the good content will rise on social media, and the chaff will sit in obscurity. Kind of like torrent seeders, this relies upon the few who are willing to dig through the chaff, /new, etc, however I'm okay missing content if only the well thought out, high effort content rises to the top.
But those forums were also killed by social media. Reddit/hn along with a few other platforms are modern impersonations of those forums. Also the groups on social media are replacing those forums.
In m opinion "the good content will rise on social media", eventually. But you will have to see 9 junk promoted content for an eventually good one.
They were killed by search engines not indexing them anymore. Search engines are now curated guides that have nothing to do with the search engines of the past, which were basically just grep. Their purpose now is to direct you to revenue generating products, and they will simply change or ignore your query in order to do that. Individual people doing individual things are of no interest to the money machine.
There was a time when searching for anything online, say best running shoes or how to install a WordPress plugin, gave you a healthy mix of personal websites, hobby blogs, and commercial sites.
Then Google rolled out EEAT or whatever and the spotlight shifted almost entirely to big commercial websites. These companies hire professional writers for every niche. People with degrees, credentials, and polished resumes that an individual blogger simply cannot compete with. Naturally, Google’s algorithm began pushing those sites to the top over individual bloggers assuming better information and content due to more impressive writer's resume.
So now, if you search for the same things like running shoes, WordPress tutorials, anything remotely informational, the top results are all from big commerical websites and strangely total "unrelated" garbage after the 3rd page.
Sometimes it reaches an absurd point like search results showing Forbes or similar outlets giving you medical or legal advice right in the first page if not the first suggestion.
Google seems to forget that these articles often come with an inherent bias, a subtle (or not so subtle) push to sell something, regardless of how qualified the writer is.
I host both my gamedev tutorials and web game portal websites with cloudflare pages and so far they're pretty decent:
What is neat means different things to different people, for some it may be one nice narrow thing, for some it may be an erratic mix of topics tied together by the tiniest of strings. But what makes personal blogs different than marketing blogs for SEO is the wanton disregard for all things not-neat.
I have fond memories and miss profoundly the innocuous purity of 1994-2005 internet era. Back then, the content was created mostly by enthusiasts, not by attention seekers.
just like the OP blog
I would never return to personal blogging, though. That ship sailed around 2007, when social media appeared and trolls killed the last remaining personal blogs. The GeoCities safe haven vibe died then.
And I wrote about this after RibbonFarm's retiring post as well - https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2024/life-of-a-blog-b...
[0] Correction: I have had three visitors, not including myself.
That's strange, because literally the only place I see blogs being back is on Substack. And the only way to get people to visit Substack is through social media; twitter, really. You start a Substack when you get good at twitter, then you start doing podcasts and cross-promotion after your Substack starts doing well.
I actually like this, except that the platforms are all pretty much monopolies in their spaces. But it's very commercial. 10000 people paying $2 a month, and you can make a nice living.
Another recommendation is to blog on a collaborative project. Could be with just one other person. That way you're reaching a wider social network.
What's very satisfying is googling on some technical problem and finding in the top search results my own blog article from several years back.
Blog early; blog often.
Great to see blogging making a resurgence - RSS next!
I am running my blog since 2018 and it has never been better :)
Even if you wanted to go back to blogging, you'd have to do it on substack, medium or some such platform with social built in.
My money is blogging being mostly for SEO. I don't know who's on the other end of the clicks, but they aren't reading for readings sake..
ricardobeat•2mo ago
Is it? I haven't seen anyone in my circle return to blogging, nor kids of this generation.
Discoverability is going to be a massive problem, since search engines are dead. Maybe word-of-mouth through social media is enough?
minimaxir•2mo ago
The only exception is Bluesky because it does not have algorithmic feeds, but technical content does not do well as most technical people did not migrate.
gerdesj•2mo ago
I sometimes compare Mediawiki vs SharePoint to Web x.0 vs WAIS n Gopher.
One is light on resources, storing just the information with some formatting hints, leaving presentation to standards and the other is SharePoint. The comparison is really about bloat, not functionality, but the two are intertwined.
throwaway5465•2mo ago
JonChesterfield•2mo ago
bji9jhff•2mo ago
baconbrand•2mo ago
In the meantime, there are lots of actual humans trying to do things who will benefit from your knowledge being repackaged and delivered by the blood suckers.
DrewADesign•2mo ago
wiether•2mo ago
The alternative would be to setup yourself a system that could serve those people.
B1FF_PSUVM•2mo ago
Playing telephone has now been automated ...
Larrikin•2mo ago
AstroBen•2mo ago
VP2262•2mo ago
flpm•2mo ago
dogline•2mo ago
VP2262•2mo ago
smetj•2mo ago
FrasiertheLion•2mo ago
ricardobeat•2mo ago
freddie_mercury•2mo ago
To do well on Substack you need to publish pretty regularly, several times a week to keep and build an audience, and the only thing anyone can generate that fast are opinions. So Substack has really just become a decentralised Op Ed page.
baconbrand•2mo ago
It does seem to work for a lot of people, though. Good for them.
freddie_mercury•2mo ago
baconbrand•2mo ago
raudette•2mo ago
epiccoleman•2mo ago
I still like Substack overall, there is a vibe over there that I certainly like more than Twitter or Instagram. But it also has that air of snooty elitist nerdism that characterized the middle days of Twitter - and it seems like the level of get rich quick self promotion is at least in line with the rest of the net.
chickensong•2mo ago
nicbou•2mo ago
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soiltype•2mo ago
Similarly... what's the point of blogging if you're not writing it yourself? This post is very long, but seems to basically just be riffing on the title over and over, at least by the 3rd graph. If you're not explaining anything and readers aren't receiving anything - what's it for?
I really am asking with curiosity even though it's probably clear I have an opinion on this endeavor. There must be a reason you've paid money to do all this!
wiether•2mo ago
soiltype•2mo ago
jclarkcom•2mo ago
soiltype•2mo ago
jclarkcom•2mo ago
I don't get this comment. People can create content for any number of reasons and those reason will vary widely by the author. I like to use it to share something interesting to me that is too long for a Linkedin post.
soiltype•2mo ago
raffael_de•2mo ago
(I fear) the blog of this generation's kids is called TikTok or whatever and the form is video instead of text.
ricardobeat•2mo ago
It was about sharing bits of your daily life and personal thoughts and feelings, while building a small community. Having more than 50-100 readers was a major event (and not a thing people aimed for).
raffael_de•2mo ago
carlosjobim•2mo ago
Why? YouTube pays creators, blogs don't.
foodriver•2mo ago
My hunger-self does feel so memories are as lucid made with others in hope
"
...say, "People making a name of 'themselfes' for profit (boinboing IIRC), cos it has to be a (1994) profit ?
And to say something, that: it is only "the complexity of big-tech-companys", in terms of content" ?
Asking, cos i tryed...
I do it for um... "politikum" (if that is the correct term) maybe while keeping to give someone an excuse to laugh about...
...try, but remember mostly after a day or two, maybe one week... often before i lost a (often needed) password or email-adress, i delete it.
Did it for fun, get lost...than => doing something other...
> //deviantart.com/journalseducatethink/gallery
regards, ...
PS: rewritten while listening to: > //youtu.be/dzw7u9KOOBM?t=66