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:
About point 2: I have yet to have a job interview, in which the interviewer has even taken a look at my website. Well, actually I don't know that, of course, but what I want to say is, that none so far showed any sign or indication of having taken a look, and as a consequence also no sign or indication of knowing anything about any of my showcased projects. In 95% of the cases it was just that they want to do their one thing, their one test, and not consider the candidate as a person at all. No time for that these days, I guess.
Also a hiring manager. I always do. For me a good personal site is a huge step towards a phone interview. I look for things people do not because anyone told them to do (college projects, internships, work), but because they were excited about it. That initiative and excitement is what will set you apart from the other 100 resumes that look exactly like yours.
I hope you can "infect" others with this kind of view, so that more people adopt 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.
Please no, I don’t want people making blogs just because they want to get a job from it at some point, they should be making blogs because they love to blog.
Imagine everyone having some cookie cutter blog, just a standard part of a resume.
At least pre AI it was easy to identify if a blog was done due to interest or for self advertisment.
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, ...
Just look how it goes with GitHub everyone has some BS repos and then also they spam projects to get contributions for CVs.
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.
That's wild. I first typically LinkedIn search someone, and then web search someone, even before I get too deep into the resume (they've already been filtered and ranked for me).
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.
Depends on the company type. Seems like FAANG and companies trying to act like FAANG just follow a strict formulaic process and your portfolio or blog is kinda irrelevant 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.
> 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.
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.
As a senior I'm doing tech part of interviews sometimes. If there is a link to blog/gh/whatever in CV - I always check it. I may not say anything during interview, but I'm looking there.
But… having (not so often updated) blog myself - I will try to change my behavior in future and mention it somehow during interview ;)
I'm involved in screening CVs and interviewing candidates. If there is so much as a email adress that indicates a personal domain, I look it up to see whether behind it there might be something like a personal website. When the CV is good and Github repositories etc. are mentioned I also take a brief glance there. But indeed, it is very rather rare that I make the content a part of the interview.
You likely are interviewing at big companies. I have worked across the industry and the smaller the team the more they look at my website work etc. some even asked about game reviews on my blog during the interview.
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.
Actually, no, I applied at small to medium sized companies and also some startups. But these days they are thinking they must use the same processes as the big players, it seems.
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.
Only question is, how long I can comfortably hold out, not doing a shitty job, until I see that signal flaring up, because they seem far and few between, so far. It might also just be a Germany thing, this kind of hiring, that is blind to the genuinely curious and creative people.
I like Point No. 4. By now, I have enough articles to point to when people ask the same questions over and over. I have been asked, “Do you always have a blog post for these questions?”
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.
I really like that. It's absolutely true, I constantly find older stuff on my blog that I had entirely forgotten about and it's always interesting to get back in touch with past-me.
Oh, absolutely true about finding stuff, and I go like, “Ah! I wrote about that.” I got my search working (abandoned for a long time) and a list of all post archives just so I can find them easier.
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. :-)
Past-me was so dumb. Asked a lot of rookie questions. It's the one little piece of evidence that maybe I have actually learned a little something in the past 10 years.
"[...] 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."
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.
Depends on the person, I suppose? I have some strong memories from decades ago, but most of my normal memories of events fade within 5 years or so. The memories I do have from a decade ago are certainly not lucid but a bit blurry and sparse on details. I often wish I remembered better.
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.
And it's very easy to start with something that is also "social":
- 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.
This is all true but I'm not sure about establishing credibility with a blog, especially when an LLM can help fudge the details.
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.
You are mostly right. But I suspect that a good writer will remain good [or even better] with LLM's. In my experience the bad ones are detected immediately.
Sites like this one really emphasize monetization. Natural I suppose since it's startup-focused. But people used to be fine with blogs not having a monetary element at all.
I suppose if I were younger that might be of interest. I'm not looking for opportunities at this point. I live in a small town, I have probably one of the best (local) tech jobs I've ever had, not strictly on pay but the pay is enough and the overall chill level and quality of life is something I would not give up.
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.
My blog is probably more detrimental to my “brand” than helpful. I also couldn’t care less about the self-promotion or monetization aspect or anything of that sort. I find writing and the act of creating to be a type of catharsis. I write exclusively for me.
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 :)
To have notable income from blogging requires a very different frequency and posts which attract a broader audience (unless I go really deep and paywall it for experts) That turns blogging from keeping notes and sharing experience to a Job in itself. A Job I for one wouldn't like.
I wonder how much of that mercenary approach to blogging today resulted ultimately from the 2008 crisis. It feels like there was less pressure to make ends meet, and consequently no pressure to hustle, before that. And maybe it is also the influencer self-branding culture of Instagram being seen as the default internet, so when people do alt-internet things they carry over those same values knowingly or unknowingly.
Additional factors that come to mind: the slow realization that you could be writing for an audience of one (yourself) after a brief surge of "famous bloggers"; and the rise of other forms of writing (social media, etc) that at least give you the illusion of an immediate audience. "Engagement metrics" and so on -- even if they represent the opposite of attention.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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 think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes elsewhere
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.
Social media might be getting less attractive for that, though. Compare Reddit now to ten years ago, and you can see that even on more serious subreddits, everyone’s comments have become very short, often little more than a single line. If one posts a couple of solid paragraphs as a reply, one looks like an autistic weirdo info-bombing.
>If one posts a couple of solid paragraphs as a reply, one looks like an autistic weirdo info-bombing.
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.
My point is that the primary content at the top of the page has a byline. It's already vouched for, somewhat, by the reputation of the domain, or publication, or author. We have an idea of whether to spend our time investigating further. By contrast my rando comment (or yours) has nothing to recommend it but some opaque username. That's why I (and I'm betting most people) will scroll right past the "autistic weirdo"'s wall of text. And why I personally choose to try not to write that text.
Two ordinary paragraphs like one would find in any serious publication, are now enough to make an “impenetrable wall of text”?
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's certainly a general trend towards shorter. At my last company, I was involved with our content folks (and created a fair bit myself). In the course of my time there, longer (say 3,000 word) whitepapers basically went away and most of the other content such as video almost universally got shorter based on monitoring what content people viewed/read and for how long.
That's a trend I've noticed as well over the past few years. It somehow feels like it's becoming increasingly “important” to make money from whatever you do on the internet. The idea that you can just create things because you enjoy it, or because you want to share what you've made with others in the hope that they might like it and offer interesting feedback, seems to be fading away.
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.
I have seen it said in hacker circles that people in their teens and twenties now are not just more reluctant to share stuff for free like FOSS, but they are even outright suspicious of such endeavors. To a generation who grew up on platforms and apps that maximize engagement for maximum profit, a community that doesn’t do that looks like a bunch of weirdos, maybe a cult.
I'm not sure I've seen that personally although most of the tech folk I know are at least somewhat older.
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.
This post really resonates with me, especially points 1, 3, and 5.
I started blogging in 2001. I have old articles lying around that are completely obsolete - about PEAR, Swing, GWT, Subversion, etc.
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.
>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.
>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.
My old blog posts come up in the first page of search results for niche topics a lot, and it is very satisfying when someone reaches out to say that they benefited from it.
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.
My biggest problem so far is with cost. I dont like recurring fees. I could pay a one-time fee for say 100 pages and last an eternality ( or 50 years or something ). I also dont like subscription, and it has nothing to do with subscription fatigue, it is just the way I manage my money since before Youtube or Netflix took off.
And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I use HN comments as more like a blog post.
MetaARPA tier membership (quarterly fee) is required to have HTTPS on your personal website - personal sites hosted on the main BSD cluster don’t have it.
I do this too (not the personal domain bit) but one thing to be aware of is that Google doesn't seem to index these sites unless you feed it each URL manually. Doesn't autodiscover, doesn't read a submitted sitemap.
Not a showstopper for me since I don't expect anyone to be interested anyway, but might be for some.
Given the tiny cost of running a blog, especially if you have a domain name, is it worth the saving? Its not even much work if you use a static site builder.
Reliability? It took me around 15 minutes to create a site with Claude Code using GitHub Pages with custom domain and somebody else is taking care that it is always running. What is the alternative?
My feeling about GitHub Pages is that it is not unreasonable just to forget about the site. For any cheap shared hosting I would psychologically feel the need to monitor the site somehow, periodically check that the credit card works etc.
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.
I recently setup a little blog on tilde.club. They had a built I blogging tool in the CLI, but I wasn’t a huge fan. It gives some hosting space as well and supports php, so I vibe coded a little something that lets me throw markdown files with a date as the file name into a folder. Once created, it posts to the blog. Right now it’s just one long running page (and individual posts can be viewed/linked). I’m debating between adding an archive or just only showing a certain number of posts and letting them age out (unless linking to the specific post). I also have php generating an RSS feed based on the markdown files, so they just works without any fuss.
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.
Believe it or not, Blogger still exists and is free. I did some research when I was looking to spin up a blog for professional purposes. I ended up just rolling it into my personal blog though, for various reasons, I haven't done a lot with it yet. Project for the new year.
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.
>Biggest downside I know of: Wordpress is too much learning curve & overhead for a simple personal blog.
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.
Thank You! This lead to me login and rediscover I actually had a blog 15 years ago.
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.
In Digital Ocean you can host up to 3 static sites for free, includes HTTPS, your own domain names and automatic deployment from GitHub repos. Look for their "app platform"
You could publish it as an onion service! Apart from keeping your computer running and an active internet connection, there isn't any other recurring cost.
GitHub Pages gives you a neat URL - yourname.github.io - and is free forever and even lets you run GitHub Actions for free to operate a static site builder.
I enjoy having a place to write that I can call my own, and it is a major flex when a topic comes up for a client like, say, migrating giant Subversion projects to Git, and I can whip out [1] and say "ah, I happen to know a thing or two about that".
> If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't been updated in five years
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
What are people using to edit entries - because while markdown is fine, a lot of the time I want to be able to drag in screenshots, snippets of other documents like rfcs and so on. So it ends up being easier to make those notes for myself rather than push them into anything publishable.
Struggle quite a bit to share hobby interest via anything including instagram. Might try this. Back to date of html 1.0 and gopher …
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.
The only time I used AI for writing was when I was cleaning up some reference architectures and needed some fairly boilerplate text for the intro background. But basically don't really use AI; maybe if I did more coding these days.
I started following your blog when you were like, 14. Cool to see you here. I've kept up my blog for 25 years, and you were an inspiration along the way.
The problem for me is, wordpress is a security disaster especially the plugins. I don't want to constantly worry about updating in time. One day too late and you can be screwed. I've seen it happen with other people.
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.
This is where static site generators can be a good option. I’m in the same boat. I don’t have any appetite for self hosting and maintaining some internet-facing application with a web server and a database and a million dependencies in between. So for my personal site, I generate it locally and stick the static files on S3. No database, no servers, no headache.
Agree, static HTML seems the only thing that is at all future-proof. Any hosted blog or platform will have the risk of shutting down or abandonment but if your source is HTML you can host that anywhere, with little setup. Even so I'd keep my posts in a text-based precursor format such as Markdown or Org-Mode. I don't think HTML is going away soon but it's not inconceivable.
Yeah, static site generators solve so many of these problems. There's a lot less that can go wrong if your hosting is entirely static files out of S3 or Cloudflare or nginx or similar.
I mainly use them as a thesaurus and proof reader, and occasionally let VS Code autocomplete finish a sentence for me when I'm writing longer form pieces.
Might be the numbered list of short points that keyed OP. And it's actually a great communication style! So much so that they overtrained LLMs to produce them. I wonder if we're all going to have to get idiosyncratically slightly worse to avoid the suspicion in the future.
There are just not enough ways to discover personal blogs.
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.
If you blog I think it's really important to develop a habit of linking to other people's blogs. That's how blog discovery used to work back in the 200xs and it can still work effectively today.
If you mean creating a blogroll to show other blogs you recommend, that is no longer so effective now that mobile phones are most of the world’s default interface to the internet. Themes for common blogging platforms like Wordpress generally hide the sidebar, blogrolls included, on mobile.
Agreed on this. Blogrolls are okay for people wandering the blogosphere but you only get so much from "check out this peer of mine". Topical links (here is another informative post about x) are much nicer for a reader who is already reading about x. And link blogs are great because they endorse specific content from someone.
Out of curiosity, I see my website not being well indexed and I wondered whether it is because I include
```
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
```
in my robots.txt. What should one add to allow Marginalia to crawl their website?
If you consider how huge the web is then 23887 websites is not covering a small but a tiny part. Also the approach of maintaining such a list manually seems fairly uninspired.
If you just go by the number of websites, most websites are promotional slop though. The top 23887 websites that are actually good probably covers a large part of the subset of the internet that's actually good.
Anyway, Kagi Small Web is not a list of websites but a list of RSS feeds.
I built Scour to help me sift through noisy sources like HN Newest. For each article in my Scour feed, I can click the Show Feeds button to find what other sources that post shows up in. I’ve found that to be quite a nice way of discovering people’s blogs that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
You can also scour all 14,000+ sources for posts that match your interests.
While we are here, may I ask what are some blogs you guys read regularly? (Regularly as in: going back to read new articles as opposed to a one-off link shared on some other platform.)
Cloudhiker is pretty healthy as a StumbleUpon revival. I've found lots of great personal blogs and sites across a lot of categories through it. https://cloudhiker.net/
I really wish someone came up with an reddit alternative - perhaps stick to STEM + lifestyle topics only to keep things free of national/international politics - and thus free of interference/censorship.
There are so many benefits around having a personal blog that I'm surprised about reading all these negative comments.
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.
I recall when I entered college. The first thing was mandatory, required, english classes.
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.
That's really interesting to me. I consider writing to be a "raw technical skill." Programming and writing are inextricably linked. The lexicon of software borrows heavily from writing: language, syntax, grammar, statement, and expression. Even the way we critique code heavily overlaps with how an editor critiques writing: consistent, readable, elegant, concise or verbose, and follows a style guide.
Social media referral traffic is also dead, mostly due to algorithms that really don’t want users to click out of their websites.
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.
The content will be discovered just fine. It'll get embedded in the LLMs on the next round of training. Won't be attributed to your blog of course, but an approximation to the information will still get out there.
The way things are going, I’m not sure if the mega corps will ever truly turn a profit off the blood sucking. Maybe suck some USA tax money for a bailout…
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.
I honestly can’t wrap my head around people getting excited about companies ingesting their work to munge up and sell without compensation or any attribution. I’m sure the feeling is mutual, but I really don’t get it.
Will an LLM purposefully change facts to incorrect information without fighting you the entire way? Seems like a blog platform could offer a feature where every posts has 3 or 4 factually wrong posts that would only be found by scrapers.
Substack to me seems to be 40% self-promotion or advertising a service, 40% long-form LinkedIn posts / AI slop, and the remaining 20% is behind a subscription with eventual freebies. Mostly professional writing. It’s far from being a new blogspot.
I agree. Substack feels more like Op Ed writers realised they could make more money by self publishing than by staying at a dying media company with multiple levels of editorial oversight.
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.
Decentralized and expensive. Maybe I’m looking at the wrong blogs but my impression so far is that a lot of subscriptions are around 5-10$ monthly for a single creator. I can get a ton of newspapers (ok not papers, websites) magazines etc for that price or better, and those have way more than one contributor. The video platform Nebula for example has 175 creators for 6$/month.
It does seem to work for a lot of people, though. Good for them.
The minimum price is enforced by Substack, unfortunately. You can make everything free but you can't charge, say, $1/month. It definitely pushes the platform toward writers who think "I want to make this my full-time job & income". It also definitely suffers from, to a lesser extent, the Medium problem of way too many people thinking it is some kind of get-rich-quick thing. Somehow the Reddit algorithm started showing me the substack reddit, which seemed to mostly be pretty new authors complaining that they aren't making much money from Substack.
That explains a lot. Thank you! What a weird business decision on their part. I would guess the minimum has something to with payment processing overhead, but Patreon handles 1-2$ monthly payments no problem and always has. Strange.
There was a brief moment where it felt like a really fresh take on blogging, but the number of big names that have come in make it feel a lot less "wild west, anyone could go big on this platform". The addition of Substack Notes (essentially, X / Twitter built in to Substack) also sort of brings it down to earth. It's hard to pretend your "longform reading" is more sophisticated than the low-attention-span Tiktok masses when you've got Twitter baked in.
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.
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.
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).
I'm sorry to be harsh, but honest question - What's the purpose of using AI to create toy software that already exists (eg. YouTube downloader)? Normally the purpose would be to learn how to create that type of software, but that's presumably being skipped.
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!
For me, it is about learning about what AI can and can’t do, how to progressively prompt, how to avoid problem, etc. once you understand that you can build more things quickly. I gained a pretty good understanding of what it can/cant do, how many prompt it will take to get there, and which model(s) are capable.
But then we've come back to the central point. The purpose of blogging is to organize your own thoughts, essentially. Why not write about what you've learned?
> the purpose of blogging is to organize your own thoughts
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.
Well actually you're right that blogs can have different purposes, however I think we're talking about basically the same purpose here, in "sharing something interesting to me", and what I meant is that I wasn't seeing how AI writing is actually doing that. But I'll leave you be, I'm not here to harass you and I think I've gotten the answers I was looking for.
Yes indeed, and also the title promise - I looked forward to read how the personal blogs are back, only to discover the author didnt provide any evidence, but not even examples. Maybe they are indeed back, if we count Substack newsletter archive as a "personal blog".
the problem I always have with starting a personal blog is that-I want to write about my projects, but I also want to write about introspective life things. And I'm always fearful that introspective life things would detract (perhaps significantly, if they are too revealing) from employers/etc looking at me as a potential hire. This is not so much about politics (I don't find a strident need to blog about my political opinions (yet?)), but just writing about friends, life events, what I thinka bout those, etc.
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.
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.
My two cents: if you're not doing anything too political or controversial, it's fine or even beneficial to mix in the occasional personal essay with the professional.
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.
> I could just choose to write completely pseudonymously instead.
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.
If you're working as an individual contributor, I'm sure it can matter, but usually doesn't. It's widely accepted that people have personal opinions and politics, and that it can even extend to not liking some of the decisions made by the company you're applying to. There are workplaces that might screen for ideological purity, but it's rare. Both because it's illegal and because hiring is hard even without additional self-imposed constraints.
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!
I feel similarly. Sometimes I feel like spinning up an anonymous account on bearblog.dev or matatora.blog where I can write freely without any hassle. For now, though, I have a microblog section as a secondary stream that mixes tech with low-stakes, personal, non-tech bits (music, pictures, showerthoughts, etc).
I have done the second way. I have split it up in categories, so people can subscribe to different categories rss feeds if they don't want the whole feed. I have ~1000 daily readers now. With all kinds of interests.
IMO blogs were killed by big tech and social media. By creating centralized ways to distribute information. They started by killing rss, was way too decentralized. Facebook, Twitter, every single platform are just gate keepers that have complete power on what you see. They all start in the same way, making it convenient to access information, by centralizing it. Once you change your habits, they make it in such a way that you get locked in, and they start inserting in the feed all kind of junk you don't want, until a point when you are sick of it and jump to the next place, which is still in phase one, convenient, enjoyable. Then the story repeat, you end up seeing 90% junk, just to be able to see some of the posts of the people you follow.
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"
IMO blogs were killed by big tech and social media
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.
I would partially disagree here regarding reddit/HN. They are closer to the old forums than to blogs. You do not follow people, you follow themes, concept, "ideas". They are constituted by a bunch of impersonal people with a common interest.
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.
> IMO blogs were killed by big tech and social media.
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.
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.
Two years ago I started a niche blog and tech site focused on hardware and software guides for Linux creatives. Even set up a forum because I was fed up with digging through scattered mailing lists and Discord servers for information. I like to think it has helped some people and it gives me a chance to practice writing human-readable documentation.
I've been indexing blogs and while I can't definitively say they are back, there are a lot of active bloggers. More than that, there are a lot of people wanting to have blogs to read since everything else has gone to shit.
I have been blogging since 2003. My reasons,learning, and rewards and why I still blog:
- 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.
My main advice for engineers is to write a blog. It isn't for anyone else it is to organize your thoughts. But should be presented in a way others can learn from.
For a year I published every Tuesday morning, and that schedule made me learn so much so fast.
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.
It's just, no one will read it, beside of some machines. Blogging was fun because you knows that someone is reading it. You had some comments under your articles. When this isn't there, you can just write your stuff in a paper book and put it in your drawer.
And today, there is absolutely no one who will read it, or react to it. Only AI inhales the information and shows it without giving credit to people that never will hear about you. You just fill their database with useful data for free. Thats all.
Yes, it is. I've blogged since 2006, and after the content-oriented-to-SEO boom, I totally lost hope in writing online again. Part of me wants to write for the sake of sharing, but the other part thinks being a free content farm for AI is quite depressing.
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.
Bloggers write because in their value system, the result of this effort is a net positive. LLMs show up and, as far as some bloggers are concerned, turn that net positive into a negative. Bloggers stop blogging. That's rational behavior, not nihilism?
Having everything you make stolen and fed into the AI machine absolutely is a good reason not to create anything useful. Or at least a good reason not to post it online
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.
> 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.
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.
You have more hope than I do. I view this as futile. I am more and more convinced the only way to combat this capitalist, AI-fueled dystopia being pushed on us is with violence, and I think that is the absolute worse possible thing
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
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
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)
No shade: you're very, very bullish on AI though, so naturally you wouldn't think AI should or could be a hinderence to well, anything? People creating content feeds the AI machine too, another reason to encourage blogging
I'm not sure of your age, but I'm old enough to remember the days of copyright protection. The argument was that without copyright protection, there would be insufficient incentive to create content.
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).
IDK, I just meant a service like that is now table stakes for self-hosting, thanks to these AI vultures. Even the GPL, once viewed as radioactive by proprietary software companies, offers no protection, since they can just launder the code through an LLM rewrite.
I am always delighted when I come across a good one, but finding good ones is the problem. Ross Wilkinson (CSIRO) many years ago said there were 3 ways to find things: browsing - from were you are, look about. If you're in the high street and hungry, walk and look. It is no use knowing what is 5km away or what was available there 6 months ago. Categories are another - think Dewey Decimal system. These are expensive to produce and get out dated, but you know when something is _not_ available. Third is tags attached to items and a search engine. Content words at good tags but the challenge is to stop vested interests gaming the system - telling you you can get it through Amazon tomorrow when you could get it from across the road today, or when The State doesn't want you to know what "the Russian Narrative" is (other than "it's bad"). A search engine specifically for blogs would be great if we knew how to make it work in the long term.
I took a MOOC course for teachers which advocated long form blogging for course assignments + social media short posts with appropriate tags to publicize/connect with classmates.
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.
I maintain a list of interesting personal websites. There's some link rot, but a good number of young people maintain personal sites, and some of them have blogs! (college CS/design grads, mostly.)
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.)
The issue with blogging is that now people are absolutely brutal about quality. I wouldn’t be comfortable sharing my understanding online on a blog, even if I’m an expert. I just know that what I write will be endlessly picked on, probably mocked in some cliquey discord channel
> I just know that what I write will be endlessly picked on, probably mocked in some cliquey discord channel
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.
Someone mentions bearblog, medium, substack, etc for hosting blogs but
my favorite web stack to run blogs or any content heavy websites nowadays is just
https://astro.build/ plus cloudflare pages, deno deploy, netlify, vercel or any cloud provider with edge caching.
I host both my gamedev tutorials and web game portal websites with cloudflare pages and so far they're pretty decent:
Yeah, when I got restarted, instead of trying to spin up the entire old Django platform I had built for my business a decade before, I just exported the posts to text and found a good static publishing engine and stuck it all on GitHub Pages. All of the network traffic problems solved, easy to maintain and update and port. Plus I can point a custom url at it.
I don't know about being back, but it certainly isn't dead. A few years back, I used to get at least 10k readers a day. That number went down to less than 100 a day at it's lowest, I was writing 10 entries a year at most. Last year, I wrote just 4.
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.
I hadn't looked at my feed subscriber stats in a while, turns out I had around 6,000 at the start of 2025 and I'm up to around 12,000 now - very healthy!
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:
Wow. A few questions:
- I recently added RSS to my blog. The URL works but I don't advertise it with the icon. Should I?
- What do you use to track traffic?
Do you also have something like <link rel=alternate href=/atom.xml type=application/atom+xml> in your <head> element?
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 don't use the icon, but at the end of every article I have the "Follow me via RSS Feed" as a direct link to the RSS. As far as tracking the rss traffic, this graph is generated from my server logs. It is literally cat apache logs | grep my feed url | awk daily traffic | sort.
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.
I'm a little skeptical of AEO. What's the point if AI users just ask the LLM to retrieve the information and never visit your blog? I almost never click the links ChatGPT gives me
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?
I genuinely feel that search engines, especially Google after 2020, played a major role in wiping out personal blogs.
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.
Never stopped publishing on mine (15+ years now).
My blog is definitely an important source of credibility for my work, an important part of my sales funnel, and also a way for me to share ideas and grow.
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.
The article goes back and forth between bloggers who "are doing well" (ie: making money) and efforts that are non-commercial. It comes across as asking humanity to put more effort into writing and publishing in a non-profitable space while the blogging incentives are profit. I still think the unexplored space for blogging (and the LLM-proof space) is _private_ blogging--for friends and family. But maybe Facebook killed that space off, who knows.
If you’re looking to put one up, try https://bearblog.dev (no connection, just appreciate Herman’s work).
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.
At that time, when Problogger started showing off the Google AdSense checks, many blogs also got “inspired,” and AdSense became the default for blogs. I still remember getting my first check all the way from Mountain View, which takes about 30-40 days to reach my home in India. I never encash that one, just like the few others that serve as nostalgia pieces for my Time Capsule: the first DCMA letter, the tiny dollar checks one gets from Apple settlement checks, etc. Of course, the check size grew pretty big, and with other ad revenue that my personal website brought in, it was enough for me to live a rather lavish life in Bombay (INDIA) in the mid-2000s.
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.
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.
I was around when the blog got invented and I never felt the need. Now I am starting to. Even if no one reads it, it is still a better way to organise my thoughts and at least celebrate my own achievements like I would want to without the suffering modern social media.
It’s interesting how you end up being a part of the current trends whether you know it or not.
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
Back in the day there was demand due to popularity.. in 2025, people are on various social media sites. I hardly read blogs myself, especially ever since X allowed paying customers to write long posts.
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..
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.
Something cool I noticed while living in South Korea is that Naver Blog is very popular and a large amount of people use it, either writing content or looking up content for recommendations, e.g. where to go when travelling.
I don't think personal blogs have made a comeback. Most modern blogs are ego-boosting camouflage, the same content you'd find on social media. This kind of content isn't intended to disseminate useful information, but rather to hijack your emotions and force you to react in a way you've been told. It's a form of psychic vampirism.
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.
I think the main point of a personal blog is to write consistently about things you think are neat, and allow the world to find it, assess it, and those who also find those things neat will stick around.
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 chose to make my personal site a blog. I guess they'd call it a nice blog, since I only write about technical writing. It's great for networking and your career. Personal brand and all that.
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.
I have been hearing that blogging died since I started my personal website. The spotlight changed since social networking sites. That is all. Blogging is still alive and well.
I recently started a blog to document some service migrations and other random musings as I adopt FreeBSD (after a decade-long hiatus). It's fun to write and think about this stuff in a shareable way, even though I expect no one[0] to ever read it. It's also been fun using a new-to-me SSG (Hugo).
[0] Correction: I have had three visitors, not including myself.
Good article. I build and run a new(ish) blogging app (Pagecord - https://pagecord.com) and I’m seeing all sorts of niche blogs pop up from cookery, photography, tech (of course!), gaming and science.
Great to see blogging making a resurgence - RSS next!
I guess mine is more blog-lite? It's a mix of microblogging (an embedded view of the rss feed for my mastodon) as well as some static-HTML blog articles below that.
Much of the value of platforms like X and Mastodon is in discovering and bookmarking long form articles and blogs to read.
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 have never been much info blogging, but I am in the habit of writing things down in small text files on my computer. It has almost the same benefits as a personal blog that has no outside readers, and a bit less stress about having to write something or worry about what I can say in public...
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.
I would love something that is close to phpBB but slightly more modern. Like, phpBB but with federation support and a clean API would be great. But most modern forum-like software is Reddit clones.
How I miss my script kiddie days of being 15, downloading "nulled" versions of vBulletin off of Limewire and throwing them up on pocket money paid cPanel web hosting account waiting for it to upload on my parents 56K.
If you’d like to dip your toe in the blogging pool for the first time (or again), I’d appreciate if you gave https://pika.page/ a look. It’s free for your first 50 posts (that’s a lot).
I sometimes think about the best way to create some kind of semi-offline local diary. Like a RPI with a public AP, disconnected from the greater internet and with a default gateway page eing the diary. Are there any standards or customs for such a thing?
I want to start one myself. More of a public journal, but all the same. I keep having fits and starts and things distract me from the habit. That, and I'm never satisfied with my implementation in the end and I always want to try new or different things.
I started mine a couple of weeks back and I was surprised how useful it was to write down your process, as each post gives you a clear goal and helps you consolidate whatever you are working on.
It seems like the primary "reader" of blogs in the future will be AI. Then some small sliver of readers will be people who clicked through from links shared in an chat with AI.
Reeder on iOS is great. Anything that's good for RSS should be enough. RSS and other syndication options remain excellent, thankfully we haven't lost these things.
Basic Auth
My blog: https://chalculator.com/blog
Use Credentials:
User: croquet
Pass: yadayadayada
Pain in the butt, links won't work without the creds, but they only need to be entered once.
Also, my blog comes complete with an IDE in the browser!
Just deep dive into the technology of your choice. Write clearly and comprehensively about your projects, the roadblocks you faced, and how you overcame them.
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.
The Gemini protocol, which has been posted here recently, is pretty good for reading personal and niche blogs. Yes, yes, I know you don't need Gemini for this, it is entirely possible from a technical perspective to host a minimalist personal blog over HTTP. But a great thing about Gemini is that there really isn't that much else on there, so the signal to noise ratio is higher. I check gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/ pretty regularly and find some interesting posts there.
I've been curating some of the last few personal blogs in one place for a couple years now (http://boredreading.com).
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.
Wow, I really wanted to like this site. The domain name is perfect. But it's a sad example of what's wrong with the web.
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.
Decentralisation for the win. Coincidentally, my project Gethly.com just recently added a new feature - paywall as a service. Which is perfect for personal blogs with some valuable content.
> 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.
Are personal blogs back? My personal blog ten years ago (even twenty years ago) received a lot of direct traffic on all sorts of things from the primary search engines and so on. Nowadays, the only search engine that delivers any traffic to my site is Kagi! Looking back, I haven't changed my style of writing very much, so I suspect the reality is that I've just fallen behind in a comparative sense. There are much better things nowadays to access.
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.
I assume that search engines these days don't care as much about showing results that won't make them money. Either you bought search ads, your site is showing ads from their network, or you're SOL.
I think they do. The problem is different. It used to be that if you had a blog about something like guitar maintenance or linear algebra, that was enough to show up in the results, because no one else was directly competing with you.
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.
I'm not sure whether we're disagreeing all that much. Your examples are of low-quality results. From a user's point of view, the one and only job of a search engine is to surface high-quality results, especially if it's hard for the engine 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.
You may not reach the masses, but there will be an audience.
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.
I haven’t noticed a huge upswing in traffic on my personal blog but efforts like mastodon have led to some nice interactions. I think there is more sense of community and people realizing that blogs need to be encouraged than there was a few years ago. Whether this is sustainable remains to be seen.
If you like this sort of thing, find a blog you like and contact the author to tell them you enjoy their work.
Huh, thank you for letting me know. What did you observe? It's running on a machine in my home office so it's entirely possible something happened for a short duration of time.
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! :)
Every blog is a niche blog because blogging is a niche. It never was and never will be mainstream. Social media began as an attempt to make the spirit of blogging a low lift for the noobs.
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.
I would argue that most people who had a blog were 15-25 in that time. Yes it was very common in that demo, but outside of it, it was definitely not. I don't know if that classifies as "mainstream".
The very active ecosystem of blogs I followed in the first decade of the new millennium, on arts themes (literature, cinema, non-popular music) and religious-denomination news, were mainly people above 30 blogging, sometimes much older. Wordpress had made it easy for any computer user, not just tech nerds, to set something up.
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.
> Everyone and their mother wasn’t online back then.
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!
It was good when we had social networking, and it got bad when that turned into social media.
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.
> Every blog is a niche blog because blogging is a niche. It never was and never will be mainstream.
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.
Heh, when you started talking about venturing outside I thought you were going to talk about in real life meat space.phones and tablets really freed us up but we still don’t leave our house to go on the internet for discussions. Funny with all that freedom the untethered life gets us.
Creating a blog is like a fart in the wind. You have to do everything. Marketing, dissemination etc etc. Good luck. Do not feed the AI overlords for nothing.
Here are some reasons to start a personal blog:
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
About point 2: I have yet to have a job interview, in which the interviewer has even taken a look at my website. Well, actually I don't know that, of course, but what I want to say is, that none so far showed any sign or indication of having taken a look, and as a consequence also no sign or indication of knowing anything about any of my showcased projects. In 95% of the cases it was just that they want to do their one thing, their one test, and not consider the candidate as a person at all. No time for that these days, I guess.
Also a hiring manager. I always do. For me a good personal site is a huge step towards a phone interview. I look for things people do not because anyone told them to do (college projects, internships, work), but because they were excited about it. That initiative and excitement is what will set you apart from the other 100 resumes that look exactly like yours.
I hope you can "infect" others with this kind of view, so that more people adopt 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.
Please no, I don’t want people making blogs just because they want to get a job from it at some point, they should be making blogs because they love to blog.
Imagine everyone having some cookie cutter blog, just a standard part of a resume.
At least pre AI it was easy to identify if a blog was done due to interest or for self advertisment.
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, ...
Just look how it goes with GitHub everyone has some BS repos and then also they spam projects to get contributions for CVs.
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.
If you have BS repos but no stars and no followers it doesn’t mean shit.
what kind of companies do you work for?
That's wild. I first typically LinkedIn search someone, and then web search someone, even before I get too deep into the resume (they've already been filtered and ranked for me).
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.
Depends on the company type. Seems like FAANG and companies trying to act like FAANG just follow a strict formulaic process and your portfolio or blog is kinda irrelevant 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.
> 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.
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.
As a senior I'm doing tech part of interviews sometimes. If there is a link to blog/gh/whatever in CV - I always check it. I may not say anything during interview, but I'm looking there.
But… having (not so often updated) blog myself - I will try to change my behavior in future and mention it somehow during interview ;)
I'm involved in screening CVs and interviewing candidates. If there is so much as a email adress that indicates a personal domain, I look it up to see whether behind it there might be something like a personal website. When the CV is good and Github repositories etc. are mentioned I also take a brief glance there. But indeed, it is very rather rare that I make the content a part of the interview.
I do. I find interviewing pretty awkward and am happier if I can find something interesting to talk about. I'm bad at maintaining my own blog though.
You likely are interviewing at big companies. I have worked across the industry and the smaller the team the more they look at my website work etc. some even asked about game reviews on my blog during the interview.
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.
Actually, no, I applied at small to medium sized companies and also some startups. But these days they are thinking they must use the same processes as the big players, it seems.
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.
That’s a good signal for you. When you find the person who did look you will know they stand out.
Only question is, how long I can comfortably hold out, not doing a shitty job, until I see that signal flaring up, because they seem far and few between, so far. It might also just be a Germany thing, this kind of hiring, that is blind to the genuinely curious and creative people.
or the job market is too crowded due to recent layoffs
I like Point No. 4. By now, I have enough articles to point to when people ask the same questions over and over. I have been asked, “Do you always have a blog post for these questions?”
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.
I really like that. It's absolutely true, I constantly find older stuff on my blog that I had entirely forgotten about and it's always interesting to get back in touch with past-me.
Oh, absolutely true about finding stuff, and I go like, “Ah! I wrote about that.” I got my search working (abandoned for a long time) and a list of all post archives just so I can find them easier.
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. :-)
Past-me was so dumb. Asked a lot of rookie questions. It's the one little piece of evidence that maybe I have actually learned a little something in the past 10 years.
"[...] 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."
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.
Depends on the person, I suppose? I have some strong memories from decades ago, but most of my normal memories of events fade within 5 years or so. The memories I do have from a decade ago are certainly not lucid but a bit blurry and sparse on details. I often wish I remembered better.
> Depends on the person, I suppose?
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.
And it's very easy to start with something that is also "social":
- 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.
This is all true but I'm not sure about establishing credibility with a blog, especially when an LLM can help fudge the details.
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.
You are mostly right. But I suspect that a good writer will remain good [or even better] with LLM's. In my experience the bad ones are detected immediately.
Sites like this one really emphasize monetization. Natural I suppose since it's startup-focused. But people used to be fine with blogs not having a monetary element at all.
I suppose if I were younger that might be of interest. I'm not looking for opportunities at this point. I live in a small town, I have probably one of the best (local) tech jobs I've ever had, not strictly on pay but the pay is enough and the overall chill level and quality of life is something I would not give up.
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.
My blog is probably more detrimental to my “brand” than helpful. I also couldn’t care less about the self-promotion or monetization aspect or anything of that sort. I find writing and the act of creating to be a type of catharsis. I write exclusively for me.
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 :)
To have notable income from blogging requires a very different frequency and posts which attract a broader audience (unless I go really deep and paywall it for experts) That turns blogging from keeping notes and sharing experience to a Job in itself. A Job I for one wouldn't like.
I wonder how much of that mercenary approach to blogging today resulted ultimately from the 2008 crisis. It feels like there was less pressure to make ends meet, and consequently no pressure to hustle, before that. And maybe it is also the influencer self-branding culture of Instagram being seen as the default internet, so when people do alt-internet things they carry over those same values knowingly or unknowingly.
Additional factors that come to mind: the slow realization that you could be writing for an audience of one (yourself) after a brief surge of "famous bloggers"; and the rise of other forms of writing (social media, etc) that at least give you the illusion of an immediate audience. "Engagement metrics" and so on -- even if they represent the opposite of attention.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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 think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes elsewhere
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.
Social media might be getting less attractive for that, though. Compare Reddit now to ten years ago, and you can see that even on more serious subreddits, everyone’s comments have become very short, often little more than a single line. If one posts a couple of solid paragraphs as a reply, one looks like an autistic weirdo info-bombing.
>If one posts a couple of solid paragraphs as a reply, one looks like an autistic weirdo info-bombing.
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.
> This is not primary content
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.
My point is that the primary content at the top of the page has a byline. It's already vouched for, somewhat, by the reputation of the domain, or publication, or author. We have an idea of whether to spend our time investigating further. By contrast my rando comment (or yours) has nothing to recommend it but some opaque username. That's why I (and I'm betting most people) will scroll right past the "autistic weirdo"'s wall of text. And why I personally choose to try not to write that text.
If I see a wall of text, I just read the first couple lines. It's usually not hard to tell whether it interests you or not.
> nothing to recommend it but some opaque username
Persistent usernames enable history of community contribution and reception.
Two ordinary paragraphs like one would find in any serious publication, are now enough to make an “impenetrable wall of text”?
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's certainly a general trend towards shorter. At my last company, I was involved with our content folks (and created a fair bit myself). In the course of my time there, longer (say 3,000 word) whitepapers basically went away and most of the other content such as video almost universally got shorter based on monitoring what content people viewed/read and for how long.
That's a trend I've noticed as well over the past few years. It somehow feels like it's becoming increasingly “important” to make money from whatever you do on the internet. The idea that you can just create things because you enjoy it, or because you want to share what you've made with others in the hope that they might like it and offer interesting feedback, seems to be fading away.
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.
I have seen it said in hacker circles that people in their teens and twenties now are not just more reluctant to share stuff for free like FOSS, but they are even outright suspicious of such endeavors. To a generation who grew up on platforms and apps that maximize engagement for maximum profit, a community that doesn’t do that looks like a bunch of weirdos, maybe a cult.
I'm not sure I've seen that personally although most of the tech folk I know are at least somewhat older.
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.
This post really resonates with me, especially points 1, 3, and 5. I started blogging in 2001. I have old articles lying around that are completely obsolete - about PEAR, Swing, GWT, Subversion, etc.
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.
>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.
>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.
My old blog posts come up in the first page of search results for niche topics a lot, and it is very satisfying when someone reaches out to say that they benefited from it.
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.
My biggest problem so far is with cost. I dont like recurring fees. I could pay a one-time fee for say 100 pages and last an eternality ( or 50 years or something ). I also dont like subscription, and it has nothing to do with subscription fatigue, it is just the way I manage my money since before Youtube or Netflix took off.
And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I use HN comments as more like a blog post.
Codeberg or GitHub pages are free. For static website hosting, NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is... well... nearly free.
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing
Netlify is also a good free option for non techies since you can just drag a directory to deploy it. I’ve also used Cloudfare Pages.
Likewise for GitLab, and a "nice" url <username>.gitlab.io
sdf is great! https://sdf.org/?faq?WEB
HTTPS ain’t cheap though.
What do you mean? I don't think HTTPS is a paying feature of sdf, and HTTPS is otherwise free thanks to let's encrypt.
MetaARPA tier membership (quarterly fee) is required to have HTTPS on your personal website - personal sites hosted on the main BSD cluster don’t have it.
I use GitHub Pages for personal blogs. Connect it with your personal domain name in case later you want to run it somewhere else.
I do this too (not the personal domain bit) but one thing to be aware of is that Google doesn't seem to index these sites unless you feed it each URL manually. Doesn't autodiscover, doesn't read a submitted sitemap.
Not a showstopper for me since I don't expect anyone to be interested anyway, but might be for some.
Given the tiny cost of running a blog, especially if you have a domain name, is it worth the saving? Its not even much work if you use a static site builder.
Reliability? It took me around 15 minutes to create a site with Claude Code using GitHub Pages with custom domain and somebody else is taking care that it is always running. What is the alternative?
Shared hosting still exists which means someone else will take care of a static site very cheap.
You could use Claude, or you could use one of many static site builders.
My feeling about GitHub Pages is that it is not unreasonable just to forget about the site. For any cheap shared hosting I would psychologically feel the need to monitor the site somehow, periodically check that the credit card works etc.
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.
I recently setup a little blog on tilde.club. They had a built I blogging tool in the CLI, but I wasn’t a huge fan. It gives some hosting space as well and supports php, so I vibe coded a little something that lets me throw markdown files with a date as the file name into a folder. Once created, it posts to the blog. Right now it’s just one long running page (and individual posts can be viewed/linked). I’m debating between adding an archive or just only showing a certain number of posts and letting them age out (unless linking to the specific post). I also have php generating an RSS feed based on the markdown files, so they just works without any fuss.
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.
Believe it or not, Blogger still exists and is free. I did some research when I was looking to spin up a blog for professional purposes. I ended up just rolling it into my personal blog though, for various reasons, I haven't done a lot with it yet. Project for the new year.
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.
Isn't Wordpress hosting still free, at [something_unique].wordpress.com?
Biggest downside I know of: Wordpress is too much learning curve & overhead for a simple personal blog.
>Biggest downside I know of: Wordpress is too much learning curve & overhead for a simple personal blog.
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.
Thank You! This lead to me login and rediscover I actually had a blog 15 years ago.
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.
In Digital Ocean you can host up to 3 static sites for free, includes HTTPS, your own domain names and automatic deployment from GitHub repos. Look for their "app platform"
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-depl...
I blog using 11ty and host with netlify. No cost. There are gitlab pages, github pages and so many different options to blog for free.
Or put a Mac mini in your living room: https://www.contraption.co/a-mini-data-center/
You could publish it as an onion service! Apart from keeping your computer running and an active internet connection, there isn't any other recurring cost.
GitHub Pages gives you a neat URL - yourname.github.io - and is free forever and even lets you run GitHub Actions for free to operate a static site builder.
“Free” is not free. The dependency on MS should be evaluated for you as user and for your visitors ..
There are always dependencies to various degrees.
I have supabase for data and cloudflare for hosting, its all free
neocities is free
neocities works well with static site generators, which can be run locally or elsewhere in the cloud
I enjoy having a place to write that I can call my own, and it is a major flex when a topic comes up for a client like, say, migrating giant Subversion projects to Git, and I can whip out [1] and say "ah, I happen to know a thing or two about that".
[1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/reposurgeon/
> If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't been updated in five years
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.
I know the cure for 68 blog drafts!
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.
Great comment! I was inspired by this article https://every.to/superorganizers/how-to-build-a-learning-mac... about Simon Eskildsen, which led me to his blog https://sirupsen.com/, which then led me to create https://juliusrobert.site for myself. It's not a traditional blog per se but it checks some boxes and I have the same quote as you do here as a reason to do this https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/#writing-abo...
6. It is good training for your communication skills.
But write it yourself, dont let LLMs do it. Otherwise forget the sixth reason.
Yes!
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.
> 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.
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.
The solution to that problem is to boost the people who write the most useful stuff. Blogging is a great way to do that!
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...
- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/11/scaling-hnsws/
What are people using to edit entries - because while markdown is fine, a lot of the time I want to be able to drag in screenshots, snippets of other documents like rfcs and so on. So it ends up being easier to make those notes for myself rather than push them into anything publishable.
You can use Obsidian to edit markdown. Obsidian allows easy paste of images.
Is there a Obsidian -> Hugo/Zola/Jekyll thing that's relatively robust?
Quartz might be that. https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/
https://typora.io/ allows pasting images into markdown. I use it for my Zola blog.
Struggle quite a bit to share hobby interest via anything including instagram. Might try this. Back to date of html 1.0 and gopher …
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.
Jesus - writing will do you good. Start out with reading back what you wrote.
Do you use AI to write content nowadays? Or to review and format it?
I don't let AI write for me. I have a "proof reader" which I use - it's a Claude project with these custom instructions:
> 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!
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I don't see the point in using AI to blog. If I want to read what AI has to say about a topic, I'll just ask the AI directly.
The only time I used AI for writing was when I was cleaning up some reference architectures and needed some fairly boilerplate text for the intro background. But basically don't really use AI; maybe if I did more coding these days.
I started following your blog when you were like, 14. Cool to see you here. I've kept up my blog for 25 years, and you were an inspiration along the way.
Seems like "you like to write and expect to enjoy it" should be high on the list.
The problem for me is, wordpress is a security disaster especially the plugins. I don't want to constantly worry about updating in time. One day too late and you can be screwed. I've seen it happen with other people.
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.
This is where static site generators can be a good option. I’m in the same boat. I don’t have any appetite for self hosting and maintaining some internet-facing application with a web server and a database and a million dependencies in between. So for my personal site, I generate it locally and stick the static files on S3. No database, no servers, no headache.
Agree, static HTML seems the only thing that is at all future-proof. Any hosted blog or platform will have the risk of shutting down or abandonment but if your source is HTML you can host that anywhere, with little setup. Even so I'd keep my posts in a text-based precursor format such as Markdown or Org-Mode. I don't think HTML is going away soon but it's not inconceivable.
Yeah, static site generators solve so many of these problems. There's a lot less that can go wrong if your hosting is entirely static files out of S3 or Cloudflare or nginx or similar.
Or as in my case, lighttpd, with all its CGI, user-input processing or dynamic execution modules not even loaded.
Makes for an attack surface that gets delightfully close to zero.
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It's not. I don't use LLMs to write for me.
I mainly use them as a thesaurus and proof reader, and occasionally let VS Code autocomplete finish a sentence for me when I'm writing longer form pieces.
That's a pretty hefty accusation to level at one of the most prolific Ai/LLM bloggers on HN lol
If it's not an LLM, I guess the author spent too much time around them, because it totally reads like an LLM. And that's not a good thing.
Which bits read like an LLM?
I didn't do any "it's not X, it's Y" or other classic LLM tropes as far as I can tell.
Might be the numbered list of short points that keyed OP. And it's actually a great communication style! So much so that they overtrained LLMs to produce them. I wonder if we're all going to have to get idiosyncratically slightly worse to avoid the suspicion in the future.
Spend more time with LLMs - it clearly isn't
There are just not enough ways to discover personal blogs.
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.
Try hcker.news' small web filter[0], which uses Kagi's small web list[1] to show a hacker news timeline that consists only of personal blogs.
It works really well if you're looking for a cozier timeline.
0: https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true
1: https://kagi.com/smallweb
This is really cool, thanks!
Glad you like it!
If you blog I think it's really important to develop a habit of linking to other people's blogs. That's how blog discovery used to work back in the 200xs and it can still work effectively today.
Everyday we get a little closer to web rings and I'm here for it
Next someone invent RSS and feed readers and the circle of life can continue!
If you mean creating a blogroll to show other blogs you recommend, that is no longer so effective now that mobile phones are most of the world’s default interface to the internet. Themes for common blogging platforms like Wordpress generally hide the sidebar, blogrolls included, on mobile.
No not a blog roll - more a link blog or a habit of linking back to pieces you found relevant or interesting.
Agreed on this. Blogrolls are okay for people wandering the blogosphere but you only get so much from "check out this peer of mine". Topical links (here is another informative post about x) are much nicer for a reader who is already reading about x. And link blogs are great because they endorse specific content from someone.
Like this page: https://www.immibis.com/outlinks/
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.
My search engine has some not-very-obvious tools for exploring the link graph, that will occasionally turn up interesting things.
Similarity navigation: https://marginalia-search.com/site/simonwillison.net
Backlinks: https://marginalia-search.com/site/simonwillison.net?view=li...
Out of curiosity, I see my website not being well indexed and I wondered whether it is because I include ``` User-agent: * Disallow: / ``` in my robots.txt. What should one add to allow Marginalia to crawl their website?
This should work
Yeah there could be better ways but I've found a handful of sites that are useful like https://indieblog.page/. I actually wrote up a list of my favorite personal blog discoverability sites here: https://nelson.cloud/how-i-discover-new-blogs/
> A list of all sites indexed by Kagi Small Web is on GitHub: https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/main/smallweb.tx...
As a Kagi customer I have to say that's a disappointingly short list and static approach :/
A a Kagi customer I have to say that finding the Small Web list "disappointingly short" is kinda hilarious
If you consider how huge the web is then 23887 websites is not covering a small but a tiny part. Also the approach of maintaining such a list manually seems fairly uninspired.
If you just go by the number of websites, most websites are promotional slop though. The top 23887 websites that are actually good probably covers a large part of the subset of the internet that's actually good.
Anyway, Kagi Small Web is not a list of websites but a list of RSS feeds.
I built Scour to help me sift through noisy sources like HN Newest. For each article in my Scour feed, I can click the Show Feeds button to find what other sources that post shows up in. I’ve found that to be quite a nice way of discovering people’s blogs that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
You can also scour all 14,000+ sources for posts that match your interests.
https://scour.ing
Marginalia is great. Also take a look at https://outerweb.org/explore
There’s https://kagi.com/smallweb
The animated basketball makes me dislike this page instantly. Amazing how much attention a 30px height can rob from the main content.
Noone uses Kagi.... compared to the big engines.
You don’t have to use Kagi’s search engine in order to use Small Web.
While we are here, may I ask what are some blogs you guys read regularly? (Regularly as in: going back to read new articles as opposed to a one-off link shared on some other platform.)
Someone has built a RSS feed aggregator specifically for personal websites: https://powrss.com/
Cloudhiker is pretty healthy as a StumbleUpon revival. I've found lots of great personal blogs and sites across a lot of categories through it. https://cloudhiker.net/
https://wiby.me
I really wish someone came up with an reddit alternative - perhaps stick to STEM + lifestyle topics only to keep things free of national/international politics - and thus free of interference/censorship.
I just follow people on Mastodon and read stuff they link.
What are your servers and or people to follow? My mastodon timeline is a wasteland
Bluesky isn't the Twitter of old but it's at least something. I gave Mastodon a spin for a while but it's pretty desolate in my experience.
I’m on a small boutique instance. I guess the trick is to follow somebody who reposts stuff from people around.
There are so many benefits around having a personal blog that I'm surprised about reading all these negative comments.
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.
I think there’s a lot of people out there who don’t want to believe written communication skills like these are as important as raw technical skill.
I recall when I entered college. The first thing was mandatory, required, english classes.
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.
That's really interesting to me. I consider writing to be a "raw technical skill." Programming and writing are inextricably linked. The lexicon of software borrows heavily from writing: language, syntax, grammar, statement, and expression. Even the way we critique code heavily overlaps with how an editor critiques writing: consistent, readable, elegant, concise or verbose, and follows a style guide.
> But with the revival of personal blogs well underway
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?
Social media referral traffic is also dead, mostly due to algorithms that really don’t want users to click out of their websites.
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.
The content will be discovered just fine. It'll get embedded in the LLMs on the next round of training. Won't be attributed to your blog of course, but an approximation to the information will still get out there.
Knowing mega corps will suck my blood thanklessly is of no solace.
You can also see it that way: big corps are funding the computing cost to ingest and propagate your ideas to millions of people, for free to you.
The alternative would be to setup yourself a system that could serve those people.
[dead]
The way things are going, I’m not sure if the mega corps will ever truly turn a profit off the blood sucking. Maybe suck some USA tax money for a bailout…
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.
I honestly can’t wrap my head around people getting excited about companies ingesting their work to munge up and sell without compensation or any attribution. I’m sure the feeling is mutual, but I really don’t get it.
Will an LLM purposefully change facts to incorrect information without fighting you the entire way? Seems like a blog platform could offer a feature where every posts has 3 or 4 factually wrong posts that would only be found by scrapers.
> an approximation to the information
Playing telephone has now been automated ...
I would argue personal blogs are back and Substack is the medium of choice this time around
Substack to me seems to be 40% self-promotion or advertising a service, 40% long-form LinkedIn posts / AI slop, and the remaining 20% is behind a subscription with eventual freebies. Mostly professional writing. It’s far from being a new blogspot.
I agree. Substack feels more like Op Ed writers realised they could make more money by self publishing than by staying at a dying media company with multiple levels of editorial oversight.
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.
Decentralized and expensive. Maybe I’m looking at the wrong blogs but my impression so far is that a lot of subscriptions are around 5-10$ monthly for a single creator. I can get a ton of newspapers (ok not papers, websites) magazines etc for that price or better, and those have way more than one contributor. The video platform Nebula for example has 175 creators for 6$/month.
It does seem to work for a lot of people, though. Good for them.
The minimum price is enforced by Substack, unfortunately. You can make everything free but you can't charge, say, $1/month. It definitely pushes the platform toward writers who think "I want to make this my full-time job & income". It also definitely suffers from, to a lesser extent, the Medium problem of way too many people thinking it is some kind of get-rich-quick thing. Somehow the Reddit algorithm started showing me the substack reddit, which seemed to mostly be pretty new authors complaining that they aren't making much money from Substack.
That explains a lot. Thank you! What a weird business decision on their part. I would guess the minimum has something to with payment processing overhead, but Patreon handles 1-2$ monthly payments no problem and always has. Strange.
Maybe a centralized Op Ed page?
There was a brief moment where it felt like a really fresh take on blogging, but the number of big names that have come in make it feel a lot less "wild west, anyone could go big on this platform". The addition of Substack Notes (essentially, X / Twitter built in to Substack) also sort of brings it down to earth. It's hard to pretend your "longform reading" is more sophisticated than the low-attention-span Tiktok masses when you've got Twitter baked in.
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.
Those aren't the same. Substack has distinct smell.
Substack has already started enshittifying.
We'll have to get the old (webrings)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring] back in fashion.
There's some here https://indieweb.org/webring
Exactly! Linkportals and webrings ...
We could always resurrect WAIS and Gopher.
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.
SharePoint was, as I remember it, one big unnormalised table. Everything else was views on that.
Here's a starting point https://peopleandblogs.com/
This looks very interesting, thanks for sharing
> nor kids of this generation.
(I fear) the blog of this generation's kids is called TikTok or whatever and the form is video instead of text.
Almost right. The blog of this generation is called YouTube, and there's millions of such videos, with the author mostly talking.
Why? YouTube pays creators, blogs don't.
TikTok is the exact opposite of blogging.
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).
That's exactly what TikTok is for ... to the T.
I had Gemini copy a bunch of text from a personal blog yesterday to answer a query so the content will definitely get read
OT: "
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
I restarted my blog after a 20 year break (https://jonathanclark.com) thanks to AI making taking out the drudgery.
You use AI to write your blog?
yes, for example this article including charts and summaries were generated by AI. https://jonathanclark.com/posts/ai-coding-million-lines-2025... Typically I act as an editor rather than a direct writer with cursor now replacing word
I'm sorry to be harsh, but honest question - What's the purpose of using AI to create toy software that already exists (eg. YouTube downloader)? Normally the purpose would be to learn how to create that type of software, but that's presumably being skipped.
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!
For me, it is about learning about what AI can and can’t do, how to progressively prompt, how to avoid problem, etc. once you understand that you can build more things quickly. I gained a pretty good understanding of what it can/cant do, how many prompt it will take to get there, and which model(s) are capable.
But then we've come back to the central point. The purpose of blogging is to organize your own thoughts, essentially. Why not write about what you've learned?
> the purpose of blogging is to organize your own thoughts
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.
Well actually you're right that blogs can have different purposes, however I think we're talking about basically the same purpose here, in "sharing something interesting to me", and what I meant is that I wasn't seeing how AI writing is actually doing that. But I'll leave you be, I'm not here to harass you and I think I've gotten the answers I was looking for.
See Simon's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46011877
Yes that's exactly what I had in mind asking these questions.
The premise of this article is 100% incorrect.
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.
Yes indeed, and also the title promise - I looked forward to read how the personal blogs are back, only to discover the author didnt provide any evidence, but not even examples. Maybe they are indeed back, if we count Substack newsletter archive as a "personal blog".
the problem I always have with starting a personal blog is that-I want to write about my projects, but I also want to write about introspective life things. And I'm always fearful that introspective life things would detract (perhaps significantly, if they are too revealing) from employers/etc looking at me as a potential hire. This is not so much about politics (I don't find a strident need to blog about my political opinions (yet?)), but just writing about friends, life events, what I thinka bout those, etc.
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.
Depends a lot on the context.
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.
My two cents: if you're not doing anything too political or controversial, it's fine or even beneficial to mix in the occasional personal essay with the professional.
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.
Start with two, you can always merge them later.
> 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.
> I could just choose to write completely pseudonymously instead.
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.
If you're working as an individual contributor, I'm sure it can matter, but usually doesn't. It's widely accepted that people have personal opinions and politics, and that it can even extend to not liking some of the decisions made by the company you're applying to. There are workplaces that might screen for ideological purity, but it's rare. Both because it's illegal and because hiring is hard even without additional self-imposed constraints.
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 have both types of blog post on my site - deeply personal like talking about my ADHD (https://www.jvt.me/posts/2022/10/04/adhd/) or salary history (https://www.jvt.me/posts/2022/09/21/year-later-salary-histor...) and weekly notes, but also a lot of tech stuff. And as an IndieWeb website, I use it as my social media too, so people can read posts/replies to social media all in one place!
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!
I feel similarly. Sometimes I feel like spinning up an anonymous account on bearblog.dev or matatora.blog where I can write freely without any hassle. For now, though, I have a microblog section as a secondary stream that mixes tech with low-stakes, personal, non-tech bits (music, pictures, showerthoughts, etc).
I have done the second way. I have split it up in categories, so people can subscribe to different categories rss feeds if they don't want the whole feed. I have ~1000 daily readers now. With all kinds of interests.
IMO blogs were killed by big tech and social media. By creating centralized ways to distribute information. They started by killing rss, was way too decentralized. Facebook, Twitter, every single platform are just gate keepers that have complete power on what you see. They all start in the same way, making it convenient to access information, by centralizing it. Once you change your habits, they make it in such a way that you get locked in, and they start inserting in the feed all kind of junk you don't want, until a point when you are sick of it and jump to the next place, which is still in phase one, convenient, enjoyable. Then the story repeat, you end up seeing 90% junk, just to be able to see some of the posts of the people you follow.
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"
IMO blogs were killed by big tech and social media
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.
I would partially disagree here regarding reddit/HN. They are closer to the old forums than to blogs. You do not follow people, you follow themes, concept, "ideas". They are constituted by a bunch of impersonal people with a common interest.
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.
> IMO blogs were killed by big tech and social media.
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.
I'm not sure about this.
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.
Personal blogs are completely different from a web-based business which relies on SEO to be profitable.
The idea of personal blogging is for your own growth and history.
> 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.
I think it's a combination of:
- Google no longer sending traffic
- Users staying on social media (facebook/x/instagram/youtube/tiktok) and not even clicking external links
Two years ago I started a niche blog and tech site focused on hardware and software guides for Linux creatives. Even set up a forum because I was fed up with digging through scattered mailing lists and Discord servers for information. I like to think it has helped some people and it gives me a chance to practice writing human-readable documentation.
how's it going?
Quite well, plenty of new skills to learn.
link?
https://interfacinglinux.com/
cool thanks
I have been blogging for decades, personal and work. I look at traffic patterns and see all the comments coming through.
I don't think personal blogs are back.
I've been indexing blogs and while I can't definitively say they are back, there are a lot of active bloggers. More than that, there are a lot of people wanting to have blogs to read since everything else has gone to shit.
I have been blogging since 2003. My reasons,learning, and rewards and why I still blog:
- 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 love the idea of a personal site/blog changelog!
My main advice for engineers is to write a blog. It isn't for anyone else it is to organize your thoughts. But should be presented in a way others can learn from. For a year I published every Tuesday morning, and that schedule made me learn so much so fast.
Back where?
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.
AI scrapes niche blogs, Google deranks or spam drowns them out. It's really not a good time to be starting niche blogs.
The most depressing thing about AI these days is seeing people cite it as a reason NOT to create useful content!
Feels very nihilistic.
It's just, no one will read it, beside of some machines. Blogging was fun because you knows that someone is reading it. You had some comments under your articles. When this isn't there, you can just write your stuff in a paper book and put it in your drawer. And today, there is absolutely no one who will read it, or react to it. Only AI inhales the information and shows it without giving credit to people that never will hear about you. You just fill their database with useful data for free. Thats all.
Yes, it is. I've blogged since 2006, and after the content-oriented-to-SEO boom, I totally lost hope in writing online again. Part of me wants to write for the sake of sharing, but the other part thinks being a free content farm for AI is quite depressing.
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.
Bloggers write because in their value system, the result of this effort is a net positive. LLMs show up and, as far as some bloggers are concerned, turn that net positive into a negative. Bloggers stop blogging. That's rational behavior, not nihilism?
Having everything you make stolen and fed into the AI machine absolutely is a good reason not to create anything useful. Or at least a good reason not to post it online
I don’t think it’s a good reason.
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.
> 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.
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.
The future certainly does look bleak. I think not giving up on normal human expression, connection, and creativity is a good way to combat that.
You have more hope than I do. I view this as futile. I am more and more convinced the only way to combat this capitalist, AI-fueled dystopia being pushed on us is with violence, and I think that is the absolute worse possible thing
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 agree!
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
The most depressing?
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)
No shade: you're very, very bullish on AI though, so naturally you wouldn't think AI should or could be a hinderence to well, anything? People creating content feeds the AI machine too, another reason to encourage blogging
I've written about ethical concerns with AI 232 times: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-ethics/
I'm not sure of your age, but I'm old enough to remember the days of copyright protection. The argument was that without copyright protection, there would be insufficient incentive to create content.
> AI scrapes niche blogs
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).
Is Kiwiflare available as a FOSS project?
IDK, I just meant a service like that is now table stakes for self-hosting, thanks to these AI vultures. Even the GPL, once viewed as radioactive by proprietary software companies, offers no protection, since they can just launder the code through an LLM rewrite.
I am always delighted when I come across a good one, but finding good ones is the problem. Ross Wilkinson (CSIRO) many years ago said there were 3 ways to find things: browsing - from were you are, look about. If you're in the high street and hungry, walk and look. It is no use knowing what is 5km away or what was available there 6 months ago. Categories are another - think Dewey Decimal system. These are expensive to produce and get out dated, but you know when something is _not_ available. Third is tags attached to items and a search engine. Content words at good tags but the challenge is to stop vested interests gaming the system - telling you you can get it through Amazon tomorrow when you could get it from across the road today, or when The State doesn't want you to know what "the Russian Narrative" is (other than "it's bad"). A search engine specifically for blogs would be great if we knew how to make it work in the long term.
I took a MOOC course for teachers which advocated long form blogging for course assignments + social media short posts with appropriate tags to publicize/connect with classmates.
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.
Thanks for sharing. I think that, today, Ross is wrong and there is another way.. much like (I think) you are describing.
blog softwares should facilitate the production of a feed river: what a specific author likes is sometimes as valuable, or more, as what they write
Yes. The challenge is to understand how the river comes about, and at the same time, preventing it being gamed by vested interests.
I maintain a list of interesting personal websites. There's some link rot, but a good number of young people maintain personal sites, and some of them have blogs! (college CS/design grads, mostly.)
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
The issue with blogging is that now people are absolutely brutal about quality. I wouldn’t be comfortable sharing my understanding online on a blog, even if I’m an expert. I just know that what I write will be endlessly picked on, probably mocked in some cliquey discord channel
Hello, as someone who does this for years, don't worry.
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.
> I just know that what I write will be endlessly picked on, probably mocked in some cliquey discord channel
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.
Could just disable comment
I was wondering what the definition of "niche" was going to be:
I think that's a good one to highlight as NOT niche, and niche is much more specific. Like I've had a librarian blog since 1999. Pretty much niche.Someone mentions bearblog, medium, substack, etc for hosting blogs but my favorite web stack to run blogs or any content heavy websites nowadays is just https://astro.build/ plus cloudflare pages, deno deploy, netlify, vercel or any cloud provider with edge caching.
I host both my gamedev tutorials and web game portal websites with cloudflare pages and so far they're pretty decent:
- https://raizensoft.com/tutorials/
- https://ookigame.com
Yeah, when I got restarted, instead of trying to spin up the entire old Django platform I had built for my business a decade before, I just exported the posts to text and found a good static publishing engine and stuck it all on GitHub Pages. All of the network traffic problems solved, easy to maintain and update and port. Plus I can point a custom url at it.
I don't know about being back, but it certainly isn't dead. A few years back, I used to get at least 10k readers a day. That number went down to less than 100 a day at it's lowest, I was writing 10 entries a year at most. Last year, I wrote just 4.
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.
[0]: https://imgur.com/a/RSVtD1W
I hadn't looked at my feed subscriber stats in a while, turns out I had around 6,000 at the start of 2025 and I'm up to around 12,000 now - very healthy!
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:
Here's my code for that: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/blob/main/feedst...Oof, mine says 68 for feedly. I got some catching up to do. I'll ask AI to draw a pelican reading RSS news.
Wow. A few questions: - I recently added RSS to my blog. The URL works but I don't advertise it with the icon. Should I? - What do you use to track traffic?
Do you also have something like <link rel=alternate href=/atom.xml type=application/atom+xml> in your <head> element?
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 don't use the icon, but at the end of every article I have the "Follow me via RSS Feed" as a direct link to the RSS. As far as tracking the rss traffic, this graph is generated from my server logs. It is literally cat apache logs | grep my feed url | awk daily traffic | sort.
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.
But how will they know what they like if they haven't read it?
I do have a fairly new personal blog, but I'm not sure how discoverability works.
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
I'm a little skeptical of AEO. What's the point if AI users just ask the LLM to retrieve the information and never visit your blog? I almost never click the links ChatGPT gives me
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?
I genuinely feel that search engines, especially Google after 2020, played a major role in wiping out personal blogs.
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.
While there are ~ millions of blog engines out there, what is the current state of commenting and trackbacks?
Fragmented.
Never stopped publishing on mine (15+ years now). My blog is definitely an important source of credibility for my work, an important part of my sales funnel, and also a way for me to share ideas and grow.
Why bother. When you publish something good, AI will fetch it in 0.01 seconds from you..
I don't read AI generated output.
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.
The article goes back and forth between bloggers who "are doing well" (ie: making money) and efforts that are non-commercial. It comes across as asking humanity to put more effort into writing and publishing in a non-profitable space while the blogging incentives are profit. I still think the unexplored space for blogging (and the LLM-proof space) is _private_ blogging--for friends and family. But maybe Facebook killed that space off, who knows.
Say, "personal" blogs being back wouldn't happen to have anything to do with being able to generate reams of text with little effort?
"Personal blogs are back", says article, without providing any data or evidence to substantiate this claim.
If you want to setup a super minimal blog checkout Neat CSS.
https://neat.joeldare.com
If you’re looking to put one up, try https://bearblog.dev (no connection, just appreciate Herman’s work).
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.
He needs to fix the "dd mm, yyyy" date format. It should be "dd mm yyyy" without a comma.
+1 Also, unlike search engines these days, it helps you get exposure.
At that time, when Problogger started showing off the Google AdSense checks, many blogs also got “inspired,” and AdSense became the default for blogs. I still remember getting my first check all the way from Mountain View, which takes about 30-40 days to reach my home in India. I never encash that one, just like the few others that serve as nostalgia pieces for my Time Capsule: the first DCMA letter, the tiny dollar checks one gets from Apple settlement checks, etc. Of course, the check size grew pretty big, and with other ad revenue that my personal website brought in, it was enough for me to live a rather lavish life in Bombay (INDIA) in the mid-2000s.
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.
I wrote about it when I started as well:
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.
I was around when the blog got invented and I never felt the need. Now I am starting to. Even if no one reads it, it is still a better way to organise my thoughts and at least celebrate my own achievements like I would want to without the suffering modern social media.
It’s interesting how you end up being a part of the current trends whether you know it or not.
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
Back in the day there was demand due to popularity.. in 2025, people are on various social media sites. I hardly read blogs myself, especially ever since X allowed paying customers to write long posts.
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..
> This is a largely non-commercial movement.
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.
Something cool I noticed while living in South Korea is that Naver Blog is very popular and a large amount of people use it, either writing content or looking up content for recommendations, e.g. where to go when travelling.
I don't think personal blogs have made a comeback. Most modern blogs are ego-boosting camouflage, the same content you'd find on social media. This kind of content isn't intended to disseminate useful information, but rather to hijack your emotions and force you to react in a way you've been told. It's a form of psychic vampirism.
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.
Camouflage in what sense?
in the sense that the supposed topic of the blog is not what it actually is about. it's about the emotion that it's selling.
just like the OP blog
I think the main point of a personal blog is to write consistently about things you think are neat, and allow the world to find it, assess it, and those who also find those things neat will stick around.
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 chose to make my personal site a blog. I guess they'd call it a nice blog, since I only write about technical writing. It's great for networking and your career. Personal brand and all that.
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.
I have been hearing that blogging died since I started my personal website. The spotlight changed since social networking sites. That is all. Blogging is still alive and well.
And I wrote about this after RibbonFarm's retiring post as well - https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2024/life-of-a-blog-b...
I recently started a blog to document some service migrations and other random musings as I adopt FreeBSD (after a decade-long hiatus). It's fun to write and think about this stuff in a shareable way, even though I expect no one[0] to ever read it. It's also been fun using a new-to-me SSG (Hugo).
[0] Correction: I have had three visitors, not including myself.
So two LLM scrapers and Google's indexer then? ;)
A lot of the sites on neocities have blogs on them: https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=random&tag=
nekoweb is another one: https://nekoweb.org/explore?page=1&sort=lastupd&by=tag&q=
Good article. I build and run a new(ish) blogging app (Pagecord - https://pagecord.com) and I’m seeing all sorts of niche blogs pop up from cookery, photography, tech (of course!), gaming and science.
Great to see blogging making a resurgence - RSS next!
There's a typo on your home page: "You focus on writing, we handle trhe rest."
Kagi small web is great for discovering stuff like this. I also follow a few things on Substack but overall that site seems a bit all over the place
I guess mine is more blog-lite? It's a mix of microblogging (an embedded view of the rss feed for my mastodon) as well as some static-HTML blog articles below that.
https://brynet.ca/
https://brynet.ca/article-x395.html
Much of the value of platforms like X and Mastodon is in discovering and bookmarking long form articles and blogs to read.
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.
How much more niche can you get than a personal blog? It’s literally about the smallest number of people you can get.
I have never been much info blogging, but I am in the habit of writing things down in small text files on my computer. It has almost the same benefits as a personal blog that has no outside readers, and a bit less stress about having to write something or worry about what I can say in public...
I didn’t know they ever went out
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.
Just head to https://problogger.com/
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.
Niche forums. Federated.
I would love something that is close to phpBB but slightly more modern. Like, phpBB but with federation support and a clean API would be great. But most modern forum-like software is Reddit clones.
Hopefully NodeBB hits that mark. Inspired by phpBB and similar, federating, clean API.
Does that actually exist? I know there are reddit type clones, but I'm yet to see anything that allows me to setup a niche server and only that.
Yeah, there quite a few. Like old-school phpBB is still around[1]. Or, take a look at the list on Wikipedia[2].
Not sure if you're looking for a hosted solution, though. A lot of those would involve you running your own server.
[1] https://www.phpbb.com/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_s...
How I miss my script kiddie days of being 15, downloading "nulled" versions of vBulletin off of Limewire and throwing them up on pocket money paid cPanel web hosting account waiting for it to upload on my parents 56K.
Exploit ridden PHPNuke & e107 CMS too.
We had similar childhoods - though I did phpBB. Never had an audience for the forum, but it was cool just having and styling it. Good times.
Discourse also has a (first-party) ActivityPub plugin now!
Indeed! NodeBB is exactly that, and federates over ActivityPub.
I can't wait till theres a good reddit federated clone.
Lemmy and Piefed are federated Reddit clones. I'm assuming you think they're not good.
What should they improve?
If you’d like to dip your toe in the blogging pool for the first time (or again), I’d appreciate if you gave https://pika.page/ a look. It’s free for your first 50 posts (that’s a lot).
I sometimes think about the best way to create some kind of semi-offline local diary. Like a RPI with a public AP, disconnected from the greater internet and with a default gateway page eing the diary. Are there any standards or customs for such a thing?
We are building https://fika.bar precisely for that. Niche experts that would love to write, but they don't know how, or don't have time to.
I maintain list of personal domains, together with many other things in a database
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
I want to start one myself. More of a public journal, but all the same. I keep having fits and starts and things distract me from the habit. That, and I'm never satisfied with my implementation in the end and I always want to try new or different things.
I standardized on pure HTML and CSS and wrote about why:
https://joeldare.com/why-im-writing-pure-html-and-css-in-202...
I also use pure HTML and CSS (and a touch of hand-written JavaScript)
I started mine a couple of weeks back and I was surprised how useful it was to write down your process, as each post gives you a clear goal and helps you consolidate whatever you are working on.
I wish your contact details were in your profile, because I'm the kinda guy who'd annoy you till you finally give up and publish the blog ;)
It seems like the primary "reader" of blogs in the future will be AI. Then some small sliver of readers will be people who clicked through from links shared in an chat with AI.
https://github.com/outcoldman/hackernews-personal-blogs
List of Public Blogs of Hacker News users
I still check https://www.swiss-miss.com/ to this day, more of this please!
What app can I use to aggregate all the blogs I want to follow?
Many blogs support RSS (even if they don't link to it - check the page source), so that's usually the best way to do it.
There are lots of different RSS readers out there depending on whether you want a web based or local one. Personally I use Thunderbird.
Reeder on iOS is great. Anything that's good for RSS should be enough. RSS and other syndication options remain excellent, thankfully we haven't lost these things.
I have nich'ed tech blog too. Mostly about self-developed things. Sadly this is the most valuable data source for LLM fuckers.
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.
Basic Auth My blog: https://chalculator.com/blog Use Credentials: User: croquet Pass: yadayadayada Pain in the butt, links won't work without the creds, but they only need to be entered once.
Also, my blog comes complete with an IDE in the browser!
Medium, Substack, Reddit and even X, are all evolutions of personal blogging. How do we over come the issue of promotion of independent blog pages?
Perhaps these options aren't mutually exclusive. POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) could also be an option:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35636052
I did return my personal blog but I adopted an model that is terrible for scraping data from
Not only because it sucks they do it, but because I host everything.
What I'd really like to see is blogrings back!
Here's mine (but barely incomplete drafts, I started it last week): blog.moralestapia.com
What are some great technical blogs that I should consider following? Many of my favorites have quit.
> Personal blogs are back
They didn’t go anywhere! Ask the folks who have consistently maintained them regardless of current fad
What do you mean back?
I am running my blog since 2018 and it has never been better :)
Any 101 tips for starting a blog that will stand the test of time?
Just deep dive into the technology of your choice. Write clearly and comprehensively about your projects, the roadblocks you faced, and how you overcame them.
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.
any particular platforms that one could host the blog?
Isn't there a cycle - blogs, aggregators, email lists, back to blogs...?
Blogs are back? You know, you need to present some evidence.
Don't call it a comeback. We've been here for years.
Ladies Love Cool Blogs
We are building https://fika.bar for that! Niche experts that like to write!
niche blogs feel like the natural next step — focused, resilient, and more trustworthy than generic feeds.
The Gemini protocol, which has been posted here recently, is pretty good for reading personal and niche blogs. Yes, yes, I know you don't need Gemini for this, it is entirely possible from a technical perspective to host a minimalist personal blog over HTTP. But a great thing about Gemini is that there really isn't that much else on there, so the signal to noise ratio is higher. I check gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/ pretty regularly and find some interesting posts there.
Lot of interresting blogs on gopher too.
Next bring back rss.
I've been curating some of the last few personal blogs in one place for a couple years now (http://boredreading.com).
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.
Wow, I really wanted to like this site. The domain name is perfect. But it's a sad example of what's wrong with the web.
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?!
sounds like something an llm crawler would say
Decentralisation for the win. Coincidentally, my project Gethly.com just recently added a new feature - paywall as a service. Which is perfect for personal blogs with some valuable content.
We have medium.com too. I hate that.
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.
> 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.
Are personal blogs back? My personal blog ten years ago (even twenty years ago) received a lot of direct traffic on all sorts of things from the primary search engines and so on. Nowadays, the only search engine that delivers any traffic to my site is Kagi! Looking back, I haven't changed my style of writing very much, so I suspect the reality is that I've just fallen behind in a comparative sense. There are much better things nowadays to access.
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.
I assume that search engines these days don't care as much about showing results that won't make them money. Either you bought search ads, your site is showing ads from their network, or you're SOL.
I think they do. The problem is different. It used to be that if you had a blog about something like guitar maintenance or linear algebra, that was enough to show up in the results, because no one else was directly competing with you.
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.
I'm not sure whether we're disagreeing all that much. Your examples are of low-quality results. From a user's point of view, the one and only job of a search engine is to surface high-quality results, especially if it's hard for the engine 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.
Hmm, that's pretty rough. It kind of sounds like a search engine should be considered public infrastructure.
(Perhaps also the browser, email, etc? ;)
You can install your own email server without much costs, so when everyone would do that we would have fewer problems.
You may not reach the masses, but there will be an audience.
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.
Hi! I'd like some quick feedback - I just implemented RSS on my blog. ie the URL works.
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 haven’t noticed a huge upswing in traffic on my personal blog but efforts like mastodon have led to some nice interactions. I think there is more sense of community and people realizing that blogs need to be encouraged than there was a few years ago. Whether this is sustainable remains to be seen.
If you like this sort of thing, find a blog you like and contact the author to tell them you enjoy their work.
Your blog seems to be broken.
Huh, thank you for letting me know. What did you observe? It's running on a machine in my home office so it's entirely possible something happened for a short duration of time.
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! :)
Hi there! I emailed you.
Thank you :)
Every blog is a niche blog because blogging is a niche. It never was and never will be mainstream. Social media began as an attempt to make the spirit of blogging a low lift for the noobs.
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.
> It never was and never will be mainstream.
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.
It's fun watching TV episodes from ~2005 to ~2015 and noting how common it was back then for a blog or blogger to be used as a plot point.
Probably because writers love writers being a plot point ;)
I would argue that most people who had a blog were 15-25 in that time. Yes it was very common in that demo, but outside of it, it was definitely not. I don't know if that classifies as "mainstream".
The very active ecosystem of blogs I followed in the first decade of the new millennium, on arts themes (literature, cinema, non-popular music) and religious-denomination news, were mainly people above 30 blogging, sometimes much older. Wordpress had made it easy for any computer user, not just tech nerds, to set something up.
That and both mum blogs and early food blogs were definitely driven by older people.
Ha, Julie and Julia is an excellent riposte.
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.
It was a great time. Social media’s reached beyond that though. Grandma wasn’t online back then.
> Everyone and their mother wasn’t online back then.
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!
It was good when we had social networking, and it got bad when that turned into social media.
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.
That grandma is dead. The online grandma is her daughter.
*You changed your post and now mine doesn't make sense anymore. I forgive you but don't do it again.
Fixed it for you.
Haha thanks ;)
> Every blog is a niche blog because blogging is a niche. It never was and never will be mainstream.
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.
Heh, when you started talking about venturing outside I thought you were going to talk about in real life meat space.phones and tablets really freed us up but we still don’t leave our house to go on the internet for discussions. Funny with all that freedom the untethered life gets us.
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Creating a blog is like a fart in the wind. You have to do everything. Marketing, dissemination etc etc. Good luck. Do not feed the AI overlords for nothing.