[HN Gopher] Why I Blog
___________________________________________________________________
Why I Blog
Author : dguo
Score : 170 points
Date : 2023-04-06 12:21 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dannyguo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dannyguo.com)
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Love this. I'm writing less (public) but I have written a lot in
| the past couple of years -- in simple plaintext.
|
| I'm looking for a pattern/framework/system to settle down as the
| starting base for "Markdown + Pandoc + Make + [no-idea-yet]" for
| simple Static Websites. Can you please link me to some to
| kickstart and look at the templates/starter-kit. Thanks.
| adityaathalye wrote:
| Given this context, I feel like 50-odd lines of shell-fu will
| serve you well. Pandoc offers a pretty flexible templating
| system. So all told, you'll have just the one dependency. For
| example:
|
| Building a Website using Pandoc, Markdown, and Static HTML
|
| https://wstyler.ucsd.edu/posts/pandoc_website.html
| Herval_freire wrote:
| [flagged]
| boyter wrote:
| While some of the things mentioned are why I also blog, the main
| reason I do so is so I can remember what I was thinking. I write
| my blog for me first. If someone else finds it useful that's
| great. I guess you could stick that under clarify my thinking,
| although I tend to keep notes as I go and then reformed into a
| condensed post afterwards.
|
| I tend to go back a re-read some posts years after I published
| them. It's especially helpful when working on open source
| projects, as I tend to include warts and all so I can remember
| what not to do and why.
| dguo wrote:
| Author here. That's a great point, and it's true for me as
| well. I should have mentioned that under the "Be Able to
| Provide a Link" section since I reference my own posts
| sometimes.
| mk4p wrote:
| Danny! We worked together at BB :) I especially like,
| "I don't claim to actually know all that much, but everyone
| has something worth sharing."
|
| I've resisted blogging for a long time for fear of not having
| anything to talk about, but couching it as "sharing" feels
| like a much better (more generous, more motivating) POV.
|
| If you aren't currently using any "knowledge management"
| software, you may want to check out Obsidian or Roam
| Research. I bet you'd get a lot out of it.
| bachmeier wrote:
| These would apply equally well to "Why I have a website". The
| purpose of a blog is to capture the time dimension of the
| writing. That makes sense if you're commenting on news items. Not
| as much if you're writing reference information, or sharing other
| information where grouping is the natural method of presentation.
|
| In the pre-blog days, you could go to someone's site and navigate
| all the different parts. I prefer that to looking at a feed of
| hundreds of unrelated posts from the last ten years.
| jordanmorgan10 wrote:
| Re: Ads
|
| For me, I had some of the mentioned ad networks for a bit. But,
| they were all not to my liking in terms of UI and added unwanted
| cruft.
|
| I always wanted to run my own ads, but I thought "Hey, I don't
| have enough traffic."
|
| I think people underestimate (as I did) that if you write about a
| niche, even if it's a broad topic (for me, iOS) that you can do
| your own ads for a nice bit of money.
|
| I make about $12,000 from running my own sponsorships annually,
| and moving them to monthly only slots has been a revelation. I
| started with weekly, twice monthly and monthly but man - it was
| quite a bit of work.
|
| I've hit a very nice sweet spot where I now make money from doing
| something I love, it's manageable and it pays for my family
| vacations, kid's sports and travel teams and Christmas. It's
| great.
| night-rider wrote:
| I made some money from ADs on my blog, but it was short-lived.
| I made ~$50.00 after a post of mine got to the HN frontpage,
| and spread virally on other social networks as the word got out
| to more people and some well-connected people amplified it even
| more on Twitter, Facebook, etc
|
| After that, income was too low to do things like pay rent, go
| on vacation, etc It paid for the domain renewal and hosting,
| but that was it.
|
| ADs were not why I blogged though. The income from ADs was a
| bonus but not the main focus. Of course you get people like
| black-hat SEO types doing content farms and gaming Google whose
| sole purpose is to drive impressions and get clicks on ADs.
|
| Then there is your core visitors blocking ADs and browsing with
| JS disabled which further hampers income from ADs. Maybe they
| enjoy their privacy, and that's fine. I'm not certain the
| percentage of users who do that. I would guesstimate 20% are
| blocking, and that could increase over the years.
| bumblewax wrote:
| How do you run your own ads? Is there a tech stack for it or
| did you roll your own?
| jordanmorgan10 wrote:
| The ads are really "sponsorships" and are nothing more than
| an image tag, two sentences and a link the sponsor gives me.
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| What do you use for analytics? And what kind of analytics do
| you show your potential advertisers?
|
| I'd like to start a blog but I don't want any analytics on my
| page. I'm wondering if just parsing the access logs is enough.
| Curious to know what advertisers look for in your case.
|
| I like this idea of running your own ads, this means you
| circumvent ad blockers because you're loading the ad from the
| same domain and also you have full control over the ad
| deliverable and not allow JS, just image and links. Images can
| have malicious things in them too but maybe some pre-processing
| could help with that
| jordanmorgan10 wrote:
| > What do you use for analytics? And what kind of analytics
| do you show your potential advertisers?
|
| I use Plausible, and I don't do show them anything more
| analytics wise than what the Plausible dashboard shows
| (visits, territory, etc)
|
| I've heard of people doing sponsorships without analytics,
| definitely possible. My blog has been around a long-ish time,
| so that's helped. I've only started running sponsorships
| since 2022.
| igtztorrero wrote:
| Thanks for these words. I found lobsters. I thinking start a
| blog.
| raesene9 wrote:
| I've been blogging for some years now (~18) and I definitely
| agree with the points made.
|
| For me the combination of solidifying/challenging my own ideas in
| writing them down and recording things so I can come back to them
| (I regularly get technical details I've forgotten from my own
| posts) is very useful.
|
| On top of that, there's the benefit of (hopefully) helping some
| other people looking for the same information and having
| permanent links to thoughts.
|
| I would generally recommend keeping blogging tech. as simple as
| possible. I just use a Github pages site and all the posts are
| markdown.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| > "Be Able to Provide a Link"
|
| This is one thing I do a lot. I have links for popular memes that
| illustrates aspects of our culture. The one I use the most
| relates to oversimplification of things.
| https://rodolphoarruda.pro.br/como-desenhar-uma-coruja/
| 79a6ed87 wrote:
| I like the design of your blog, I might take some inspiration
| from it.
|
| Have a good weekend. Cheers from an Argentine :)
| janvdberg wrote:
| This is a great post and I strongly agree with almost everything
| the author says.
|
| But I noticed his previous post is almost a year old (June 22)?
| So is there another place he blogs?
| dguo wrote:
| Author here. Nope! Life has just been very busy in the last
| year. I'm going to try to write more consistently again,
| starting with this post.
| janvdberg wrote:
| Great! I've added your site to my RSS reader, looking forward
| to your posts.
| adityeah wrote:
| This is a great insight into pretty much any blogger's mind who
| has been blogging for a long time. I started blogging back in
| 2004 and I still blog but the reasons why I still do have
| changed.. When I started it was more journal based, then I
| started writing on social issues which eventually made me a
| better writer, good enough to get published in several literary
| publications and now l feel like going back to personal journal
| like writing again. The common thread, however, has always been
| that I have first written for myself and that it has given my
| thought process a certain clarity. Thanks for sharing this.
| bluetomcat wrote:
| > Writing lets me do that while also helping me avoid going
| around in circles. When thoughts are in my head, it's easy for
| them to get jumbled up. I miss things, and I keep coming back to
| the same thoughts, leading to the unproductive ruminating.
|
| Because text is ultimately a self-referential structure of
| claims, definitions and facts. When you are writing a new
| sentence, you have access to the complete accumulation of your
| previous thoughts in former sentences and paragraphs. The new
| sentence builds on and extends these connections, and doesn't
| stray in different directions like verbal speech.
| alxexperience wrote:
| I don't blog as much as I would like to, but I feel like writing
| is more of a necessity for me than something I love. I have this
| desire and want to communicate my thoughts, and writing just so
| happens to be the best way for me to communicate that. I also
| take the opportunity when I blog to improve my writing, and maybe
| try different methods of expressing my thoughts and analysis (I
| mostly blog about videogames).
| simonw wrote:
| I particularly resonated with "Be Able to Provide a Link"
|
| I wrote a thing about how ChatGPT can't access URLs but pretends
| that it can - https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/10/chatgpt-
| internet-acces... - and I've since sent people links to it dozens
| of times:
| https://twitter.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsimonwillison.net...
| adityaathalye wrote:
| Likewise, and also the inverse... Some of my posts are
| basically conversations I've had one too many times, or have
| been particularly roused by, e.g. that one time m'colleague
| stated he had nothing to speak about at a conference (also
| double-implying that he wasn't good enough to do it). Patently
| false! https://www.evalapply.org/posts/how-to-give-a-
| conference-tal...
|
| That post was me sending a link to him, after that
| conversation, so neither of us forget. And guess what, where
| there is one, there are others. I've sent it to several people
| since!
|
| (edit: add more context)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I liked "Learn How I'm Wrong".
|
| Losing my ego over the past several decades has been the best
| thing to happen to me. I think being wrong publicly has been
| the main cause of that.
|
| Although I should point out that being wrong publicly for me
| began before internet comments -- just making an uninformed
| comment in front of people smarter than me started that ball
| rolling. Perhaps it's one of those things where in the smaller
| circles when you are young you might be the most knowledgeable
| about a number of topics and so your ego believes you are an
| expert. But as you begin to move in circles of those with the
| same expertise you begin to see that there are many people much
| more knowledgeable and capable than you.
|
| Learning to be more humble has been transformative for me. I
| listen a lot more than I used to. I make less acerbic comments
| online.
|
| Nonetheless, like the blog post implies, if you offer no
| thoughts or opinions at all you will never get the chance to be
| proven wrong. If your ego is in check that can be an excellent
| _learnable moment_ for you.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Relevantly, (and I can't remember what the rule is called)
| there's an internet rule that goes something like "the best
| way to get the right answer on the internet is to leave the
| wrong one." Not that you _should_ intentionally provide false
| information, but just to your point that being wrong helps
| you to learn. Importantly, though, that 's only if you're
| willing to accept that you're wrong.
| sdrothrock wrote:
| The Clever Pork Theory
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I've had a blog now for nearly 23 years, though my posting
| frequency is far below what it once was. My main reason has
| always been the same: to share things.
|
| In the late 90s I maintained a mailing list of sorts that I used
| to share interesting or funny things I'd found online to a group
| of friends. Eventually that became my blog. The impetus for any
| given post is still "hey, I want other people to see this," but
| the problem today is that most of my very nontechnical pals don't
| really look online anymore beyond their social feeds.
|
| At one point, my blog would post to FB and Twitter when I wrote
| something new, but over time Meta disabled that behavior. I
| _think_ it still posts to my Twitter account, but I need to
| address that and shift it to my Mastodon account.
| adityaathalye wrote:
| +1 I relate strongly to the post. My blog literally says "Writing
| = Thinking" on the tin. And like Guo says in conclusion, _many_
| of my posts started life months or even years(!) before they got
| to see sunlight and fresh air. I tried to capture that sentiment
| in this post: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/hello-world/
|
| > Slyly (or so I thought), I fooled it by quietly typing into my
| Emacs. More days turned to weeks turned to months. Words accreted
| in my org-mode files. Wee notes. Snippets. Factoids squirreled
| away. Mostly harmless bits and bobs. Someone paying attention
| might have smelled trouble brewing and stopped right there. But,
| oh how little did I know.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _Words accreted in my org-mode files. Wee notes. Snippets.
| Factoids squirreled away._
|
| "Saving string" is what journalists call this practice (I read
| recently).
|
| https://www.poynter.org/newsletters/2015/save-string-and-9-o...
| adityaathalye wrote:
| Ah, such a nice term! "Saving string" is part of my approach
| to doing any sort of long term project. I'll usually start in
| "diffuse mode", during which everything that enters my brain
| gets insta-spooled into good old org-mode --- scripts, links,
| data, sql, todos, checklists, copious notes, the whole nine
| yards. Then at some point I copy over actually relevant stuff
| (which only is obvious post-facto) into a fresh "focus mode"
| variant and execute based on that.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| I enjoyed this post a lot. I recently started blogging again
| after a long hiatus and have been having a lot of fun doing so.
|
| If I'm being totally honest, I think reason #1 that I started
| back up was vanity. I have a pretty cool domain name that is a
| play on my real name, and my email is hosted at that domain, so
| the domain name gets some (small) amount of natural exposure from
| that. For about 7 years, all that you would find if you went
| there was a little Jekyll blog with three posts that I hadn't
| updated for years.
|
| That was kind of a lame thing to present to people who took the
| time to check out my domain, so a while back I set up a new site
| and have been making occasional posts there.
|
| One thing that jumped out to me as I started writing posts was
| that I was _already blogging_ to some extent in my notes. I write
| pretty extensively as I do my daily work or work on side
| projects, just to try to solidify my thinking. Those notes are
| loose and not suitable for publication, but they do provide a
| pretty good jumping off point for articles.
|
| Lastly, I feel this quote from Ted Chiang's story "The Truth Of
| Fact, The Truth Of Feeling" is apropos:
|
| > "As he practiced his writing, Jijingi came to understand what
| Moseby had meant: writing was not just a way to record what
| someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before
| you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they
| were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could
| grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into
| different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in
| a way you couldn't if you were just talking, and having seen
| them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more
| elaborate."
| quaintdev wrote:
| I request all bloggers to include RSS so that those of us who
| have ditched twitter and other social media could find you again.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| +1 and please make it an RSS with full content not just
| excerpts.
| Havoc wrote:
| Easy way to get your content stolen unfortunately
| jarebear6expepj wrote:
| If you're worried about that you aren't blogging for the
| public www, though, right?
| kevincox wrote:
| The content stealers will have no problem scraping your
| HTML if you just provide summaries in your feed.
|
| In fact my feed has full content and based on the
| differences in HTML in my feed and the direct page it seems
| like most often they scrape the page anyways.
| rchaud wrote:
| It's a blog, it's already public, what is there to steal?
| Havoc wrote:
| >what is there to steal?
|
| Monetizable traffic. People mirror sites wholesale, throw
| monetization on it and apply blackhat techniques to
| ensure they outrank origin site.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| I doubt anyone will do that on a personal blog.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Oh, they absolutely do. It's all automated bots. What
| people don't understand however is that you can report it
| to Google and/or file a DMCA on it yourself. That's all
| part and parcel to having any kind of public output.
| ghaff wrote:
| Or you just ignore it because unless you're (probably
| fruitlessly) trying to monetize it you'll just drive
| yourself crazy.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| And that in your opinion is a valid enough reason to make
| the experience of genuine users, worse?
|
| I'm genuinely asking because to me, who cares if someone
| steals my content. They can steal it anyway, people will
| scrap your site if they need.
|
| But I want the user experience for the users to be the best
| possible.
| jefftk wrote:
| This blog does have RSS, linked at the bottom of the page
| ("Follow me on Twitter or subscribe to my free newsletter or
| RSS feed for future posts.")
| https://www.dannyguo.com/blog/feed.xml
| adityaathalye wrote:
| Good point. My blog's feed link got buried due to a recent
| refactor of the site template (it's in the meta, and under each
| blog post, but not in the top nav).
|
| Fixed!
| vehemenz wrote:
| I hear this line a lot. Writing is not the same as thinking.
| Rather, it's a type of thinking that forces you to lay out your
| argument in a particular, static way. There are pros and cons
| with this style of thinking, just as there are with internal
| dialectic and Socratic-method style argumentation. If you have
| stable arguments that you've repeated over and over again to
| yourself or to other interlocutors, writing them down is just a
| formality.
| blueridge wrote:
| For another point of view:
|
| On Second Thought, I Actually Don't Like Blogging
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230319232333/https://kitab.ca/...
| motohagiography wrote:
| Great post. I also started writing mainly to clarify ideas, and
| there are a lot of ideas that when I complete them, I realize
| they aren't as good or useful as I suspected. Most of my writing
| on the internet has been an exercise in engaging directly with
| ideas, probably with only about an 80/20 distribution of weak to
| strong ones. I'm of the belief you only really understand as much
| as you can express clearly and communicate to others, and this
| means that to rationally disagree with someone, you need to be
| able to make their case with the depth and persuasiveness they
| have themselves.
|
| Emotional reactions are what happen when we run out of the
| ability to reason abstractly about an idea according to its
| principles. If you don't go down the road of physically writing
| them out and reasoning them through, all you have is a second
| hand opinion about them, imo.
| ethicalsmacker wrote:
| There are some good thoughts in there, but it fails to answer the
| actual question. Why publish a blog? Sure, writing has benefits.
| You don't need a blog to write. You don't need a blog to make
| your own content linkable.
|
| The only nuggets in there are "vanity", "monetization" and
| "possible opportunities" which are all pretty bad reasons to
| publish a blog.
| rchaud wrote:
| What about the "Clarifying my Thinking" and "Share Knowledge"
| portions?
| ethicalsmacker wrote:
| Neither require sharing publicly (ie, blog). Other than for
| the vanity/upvotes/etc.
| rchaud wrote:
| Sharing knowledge doesn't require sharing publicly? You
| seem to be looking at blogging exclusively as a
| vanity/recognition thing. Meanwhile, I've come across
| numerous blogs that have helped me solve a problem. I don't
| remember most of their names, but it's the kind of thing
| where I'll recognize the website if I need to search for
| the solution again.
| ethicalsmacker wrote:
| I used to blog and quit (pulled all of my content from the web).
| I still have a landing page, which serves as a general "This is
| who I am, I'm a real person" because I have a business and people
| Google my name.
|
| I couldn't find a good reason to continue publishing content for
| everyone to read. I also gave up on the open source community at
| the same time.
|
| The idea of "giving back" to the community is gone. The open
| source (and open knowledge) web is gone. People (and companies/ML
| models) take/pilfer/plagiarize/rehash/profit from your
| contributions and you get squat in return. I decided to no longer
| take part in it.
|
| I can write on my own, privately. I can share and link to content
| with private links. I don't need the vanity, opportunities or
| monetization (ie, peanuts).
| rchaud wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with un-publishing old stuff if it no
| longer reflects how you think, or if you feel it's not relevant
| anymore. You can always keep a private archive.
|
| I think a lot of people think of blogs as "production-quality
| writing", which is natural because for part of the 2000s,
| blogging = money/recognition. That era is over, no matter how
| many people start (and later abandon) Substacks.
| ghaff wrote:
| In general, writing/podcasting/making videos with the primary
| intent of directly monetizing them has pretty long odds. The
| recognition angle _may_ be useful if it 's connected to your
| day job and anyone cares if you have a public persona or not.
| It's been useful for me but you have to have the right
| expectations going in or you'll probably be disappointed.
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| I don't disagree--drive-by comment just to say that's
| unfortunate as there's often really brilliant, unique, esoteric
| and useful content scattered about individual blogs (as my
| bookmarks can attest), that is very difficult to find
| elsewhere, if at all.
| davemp wrote:
| Apparently this is a controversial opinion based on the
| position of the comment, but I feel like it's a painful truth.
|
| Spending double digit hours to polish up an insightful or
| useful article then posting it publicly to the internet feels
| like playing the lottery. There is a chance that you'll get
| "monetization", "opportunities", or "notoriety"; but you can be
| sure that the house is getting their cut. With the current web
| scraping models out there, it feels like the house's cut is
| only getting bigger and your upside is getting slimmer.
|
| Sure posting a tutorial that you wrote anyways to help yourself
| digest something has low personal downside, but you're
| basically just crowd sourcing away a technical writer's job at
| whatever entity is responsible for (or benefiting from) the
| tech you're researching.
|
| Maybe this is "pulling the ladder up behind you", but it feels
| more like "not being climbed on in a human pyramid". I would
| have no problems with "content" I spent time producing only
| benefited individuals with no compensation in return (probably
| still citations if warranted), but like OP said the reality is
| that your "content" will either be:
|
| - not generically valuable in the first place
|
| - iterated on without credit
|
| - digested into the beast (blog spam & ML models) with no
| compensation
|
| That's never what open source was about. It's the tragedy of
| the commons.
| ravenstine wrote:
| I was going to say something similar. Journaling has been way
| more valuable to me than I realized before. Among the many
| notes I jot down to myself every day, I write blog-like entries
| where I dump out my current thoughts, including very intimate
| ones. Surprisingly, I get about as much enjoyment as I got out
| of blogging but without the need to consider an audience
| besides myself, especially when it comes to making sure that I
| won't be misunderstood. The act of writing down my thoughts has
| been really helpful in processing them, coming up with new
| ideas, understanding my emotions, and planning for the future.
|
| People can get the same thing out of blogging, but I came to
| really dislike the nature of online content today, and all the
| considerations one has to take in order to make one's blog
| "readable" undermines the personal benefit one can get from the
| act of writing.
|
| It was one thing back in the early days of the web when a blog
| could be scrappy and written in a very personal way. Those days
| are long gone. If you want to write a public journal in a
| personal and informal way, _and_ interact with an audience,
| then be prepared to have some malcontents tell you to "cite
| your sources" about the most trivial shit, despite you never
| having made the promise of writing academically. If you're not
| making money, why bother listening to the peanut gallery? And
| let's say you want to make money off your blog; first off,
| blogs are not easy to monetize, and with money in the picture
| you now have to think about the voice you use, the structure of
| your writing, whether you're being too offensive, etc. In other
| words, you now have a shitty job on top of your day job!
|
| Yeah, count me out. I know some people get enjoyment and profit
| out of blogging, but the wild west of the blogging is in the
| past, and the current state of the internet is largely not for
| me as someone who might otherwise want to produce content. The
| only content I generate is here in HN comment sections.
|
| In case anyone reading this is interested in getting started
| journaling, what I do is use Apple Notes and encrypt all my
| notes. The nice thing about the encryption is that the notes
| aren't easily searchable, and the Notes app will lock the notes
| after a few minutes if you aren't interacting with them. The
| safety of the encryption allows me to write virtually anything
| to myself, which I've found to be a really good thing for my
| mental health. My more formal entries are just a title, a date,
| bullet points for what I've achieved that day, bullet points
| for things I still need to do, and a "debriefing" section where
| I can just write about whatever I'm thinking about the current
| or previous day.
| goldfeld wrote:
| I hope the open source communities can go back to their roots
| before the bubble crashed first. With the advent of auto code
| writers we could see a true open source renaissance. I'm trying
| to publish in this space[0] but I want to reach a better model
| than slapping sponsors on a newsletter.
|
| 0: https://generativereview.substack.com/p/tasks-open-source-
| em...
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(page generated 2023-04-07 23:01 UTC)