

Ask HN: What to do, blog post or HN post ? - jacquesm

I'm working on a fairly large posting, I expect it to be ~20K characters when it is done.<p>Is there a limit on HN post size that I should observe ?<p>Is the preferred method to post elsewhere then post a link on HN ? (that seems rather blog spammy)
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mooism2
Post it on your blog, then post the link on HN.

Whether you post it here or on your blog doesn't affect whether we will find
it interesting (you have already decided that some of us will), but it will
affect how easy it is for us to read: mid-grey on light grey is not that
legible in large quantities, and it is nice to be able to click on links.

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dsteinweg
Regarding the colors and un-linkability... why is that? To discourage lengthy
"Ask HN" posts?

While I appreciate the commenters who do it, I think it's kind of silly to
have to comment a "clickable link" for HN submissions that need it. Why not
just change that?

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mooism2
The unlinkability is to prevent people who post a link from essentially
posting a (biased) comment that can't be voted down.

The colours is just to discourage lengthy "Ask HN" posts I think, yes.

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cperciva
_that seems rather blog spammy_

Don't worry about that. This point has been raised on many occasions, and the
conclusion every time has always been the same: Submit interesting material,
and ignore where it comes from. If you've written something which you would
submit if it had been written by someone else, you should submit it anyway.

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mechanical_fish
_that seems rather blog spammy_

Only if you do it several times a day, or several times for the same post.

And you definitely shouldn't write something that long on HN itself.

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slater
i vote for blogging it, and NOT posting a link to that blog on HN.

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jacquesm
Why ?

The subject is a switch from the PHP environment to Django/python, after
asking a lot of questions here regarding this subject I figured I would give
something back for all the help I got (including unsolicited emails with great
advice).

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slater
wow, i got downvoted :) sorry i didn't reply earlier.

for some reason, i thought there was some (un)written rule of not linking to
your own stuff, like on metafilter and other sites. I checked the HN
guidelines again and didn't see any such rule. That mix-up was the reason for
my "and DON'T post it to HN" line. Sorry for the snark, and maybe just post it
with a small intro text in the HN post?

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kineticac
I don't think there's a rule, written or not... it's just the mob mentality
towards self promotion can be pretty brutal sometimes, and people on HN
generally don't like that. Get some traction on your blog post, and hope
someone else posts it around HN.

