

Ask HN: Why did you begin writing a personal blog? - tejbirwason

I recently made my first feeble attempt at writing a personal blog. I am interested to learn from people who have already published blogs with ~15+ posts, what expectations did you have from your blog and how have these expectations change over time?
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ctb_mg
I started my blog as a personal journal more than anything else... so I didn't
expect anything in terms of hits, comments or trackbacks. It was literally my
own small space to record my life events, ramblings on technology and so on.

Over time I realized I might have some useful content in terms of technology
commentary, so I make those public, and personal posts are still hidden. It
remains mostly private/hidden and my extremely close friends know how to
access it.

I suppose that it could make some hits/miniscule amount of ad revenue, but I
don't update it more than a few times per year.

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lauradhamilton
I started my blog about a year ago. Traffic has grown steadily over the course
of the year.

I've found it useful for: 1\. Connecting with other folks in startup / tech
2\. Documenting how to solve a particular tech problem, which I often end up
referencing later 3\. Clarifying my own understanding of a topic I'm learning
-- I've found that the exercise of writing it down helps solidify my
understanding.

I post on average probably once a week.

Link: [http://www.lauradhamilton.com/](http://www.lauradhamilton.com/)

~~~
m_ram
I've been planning to start a blog for the same reasons you listed. I'll
probably use a static site generator like Pelican [1]. A lot of people use
Disqus for comments on static blogs, but I'd rather not rely on external
services when I don't need to. Do you find linking to Twitter to be an
adequate replacement for comments?

[1] [http://blog.getpelican.com/](http://blog.getpelican.com/)

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tylerpachal
I started a blog today to keep track of my upcoming honours project. My plan
is to post things for non-technical people (aka all of my friends) to try and
give them some more insight into what a computer science degree is all about.

I'm hosting my blog using github pages, and using octopress, which makes it
more fun to work on imo.

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dsschnau
I just kind of write what I want - personal anecdotes or programming problems.
My only expectations from my personal blog is that if I apply for a job or a
freelance contract, the employer can look at my blog and say 'okay this person
sounds reasonably smart.'

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fsk
I had problems getting shouted down or censored by trolls in forums. I wanted
a place to write and collect my ideas without worrying about getting drowned
out by others.

Sometimes, you learn just by writing about something.

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tejbirwason
I asked the original question. Here is my first blog post describing some of
my expectations: [http://tejbirwason.com/hello-
world.html](http://tejbirwason.com/hello-world.html)

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BrindsleyQuives
I blog because I'm forever being killed in killed in unfortunate ways:
[http://matulevicz.net](http://matulevicz.net)

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Mz
I wrote nearly 600 posts over a period of about 3 years for a blog that I
recently dismantled. One of my goals was just to try to post something daily.
I sometimes had streaks of writing daily and sometimes had long gaps, but I
did get more consistent over time. I wrote about whatever the heck I felt like
and there was no real consistency. When I dismantled it, I saved a the posts
in draft form to seed a few other websites which may or may not ever get
really developed. That original blog never had significant traffic. Occasional
spurts of a few hundred page views was as good as it got and some days there
were zero page views.

I found that writing out what I thought was personally useful to me for
thinking through things. My current personal blog now has a bit of a traffic
and I sometimes get comments and sometimes get discussion of it elsewhere.
That is a new development stage for me and I am trying to use it to improve on
what I am doing so the writing is more aimed at an audience and less just me
talking to myself. All that writing also taught me a lot about creating stubs,
adding links and supporting stuff over time and developing the writing instead
of simply writing off the cuff so much. Prior to that, I had websites that had
grown out of "popular" emails on a small email list and I spent years baffled
as to how one figures out what to write if it isn't part of an email
discussion. So that personal blog helped me get past that, at least for some
topics. There are still topics that I still don't know how to talk about
publicly in a way that is really effective.

