I wrote more than 500 posts on my current blog[1], and much more on other blogs I've had. The first advice I give to anyone who wants to blog is to just use wordpress, don't focus on the presentation, just on the content. Once you're like 10 blog posts in, then feel free to move the content elsewhere, but not before. Anything that prevents you from writing content is friction at this point.
Other advice I also give: write short posts and write unfinished posts. If you wanted to write perfect 10/10 content again and again, you should write a book instead. A blog is about low friction to write. People are interested in your thoughts, get them out there.
Actually even writing on wordpress.com is a bit too much, sometimes I just can't help but do the text decoration (font size, bold, underline). Nowadays, I write the blogs on the evernote first, it just makes your mind of writing more fluent. (Notepad also works, but you may lose the content accidentally.) Once you got the content, move it to a blog site and put down some cosmetics are just easiest tasks to do.
This really hit me — I spent a long time (several iterations) designing my perfect blogging static site generator, and wrote a few posts about my journey of creating the tool. After those few posts, I’ve had lots of ideas for new ones but haven’t pushed any to completion.
So I mostly just have a blog about creating the static site generator used to generate the blog...
Very nice! Seems easy enough to use. I went overboard with the config.yml and custom templates on my side [0]. My goal is a Jekyll drop-in replacement. Btw, I love how your Contributing section resembles what I wrote in my Readme. :)
I wrote my own static site generator for by blog, and it turned out to be enormously useful for a number of different client projects, so I don't regret spending many months of part time effort building the generator at all.
With web dev and marketing — and probably in many other areas — there is something equivalent of productivity porn that I don’t know what to call. It manifests in lengthy discussions with multiple stakeholders, endless iterations, and many thousands spent on tools that in the end mean nothing on their own. Like, cool, you shaved half a millisecond off your build time and your smartfridge sounds a ding at every successful deploy... What has that done for the bottom line?
People pay good money for books too. I had a co-worker who wrote a sci-fi serial and self-published on Amazon, and now that's all he does. He says he's made more money with this than his whole life coding.
Every day I think more and more I should do the same.
But being a dev, I always had the feeling coding is the way.
I'm not saying I still believe that stuff, but I did when I was a young coder right out of university and I guess that's one of the reasons why people build their own blog setup.
Blogging had been around for long enough at that point that my first blog post was essentially "sigh I guess I should start doing this thing everyone else is doing".
Started with a home-built system in bash, moved to hosted Movable Type, then switched to Blosxom, and I've been running Blosxom in static mode since 2007.
The average blog I find from HN has about 4 posts with the 1st being "First post!" and the 3rd or 4th being an apology for the lack of updates.
To be honest I think part of the problem is people are stuck thinking that pages have to be in the blog format. If it's just a webpage then it's normal to just update it like a wiki and you don't get the worry of whether it's ready to publish.
I feel the opposite way. I have a section on my website for blog posts, and other sections of my web page that get updated continuously (in theory). The blog section gets by far more updates.
For me, blogging means "just get it out there" and express your ideas clearly, relate your experiences, as you have them.
Yep. Wordpress is desperately uncool, you will be using a tool old enough to vote, you will be using old, proven technologies, but it fucking works and once you have set up your blog you can just keep coming back to it and actually making posts about whatever you want to share with the world, instead of abandoning it, then coming back a while later to check out a new blog setup built on whatever this month's hot language/framework is.
And you can get plugins to make that Wordpress blog auto-post to whatever the hell people use nowadays. Own your own data, be immune to having it all vanish when something happens to your account on Hot Social Site, or to the entire site.
I write less on my site(1) than I used to, twitter/mastodon has eaten a lot of that energy, but it is still where I go for anything lengthy, and it is still where I post my big comics projects.
I'm the counter example. I made a medium blog purposely to stop myself falling into this trap but then I didn't consider any of the articles "finished" enough and never posted them.
When people say "tools don't matter" what they really mean is that the "from 2004" part matters a lot more than the "WordPress setup" part.
That doesn't mean that static site generators aren't better though, and I'm sure we'll see more and more high volume blogs that are built in SSGs soon.
The most important thing about blogging is to just get started and make it low energy.
However, I was using wordpress for ~5 years and it was rotting under my feet. It served really slow. I also feel much more secure not having my content in a somewhat difficult to decipher xml file. I feel like if you don't have your content in a relatively straightforward form like plaintext or markdown or html, you're gonna lose it eventually.
I was considering going raw html, but Jekyll ultimately does have some convenient features while still keeping my content accessible to me forever in markdown.
It is also very convenient to serve from a github.io.
I spent too much time designing the site and wrote only 2-3 posts and never touched it.
This year again i started taking this pandemic as an opportunity. Over the last two years, I collected all the things I liked which my new site should have and hour should look. I have made post about it here.
https://bobbydreamer.com/things-that-my-new-site-should-have
Later decided too stop all this and use a static site generator and make content and not worry about designs that was a bit hard thing to do for me. But reality is how many posts am I gonna write. I chose Gatsby for its speed. So went through all the Gatsby themes and picked one and started. As everybody, I made a post about "how I made this site"
https://bobbydreamer.com/how-i-made-this-site
I like colors, I am not good at picking them, but I like them and at the moment all the design I do is change the background color of my site.
I am following footsteps of other web developers like "Flavio Copes", person writes 1 Post a day. I know I cannot be that consistent, so initially I started like one post a keep then it became month.
Basically what I am doing in my site is moving contents which I have saved in notepads, word documents and Posts all my learning into my site at the moment.
The approach I am following currently is working for me.
I have seen many people from hn their blog doesn't have more than 4 posts and one or two posts they written were excellent, I wished many times, it would have been good if they continued to make more content.
I've somehow pushed past "authors of custom static site generators" inertia and now I'm publishing blog posts regularly. My tooling for publishing my webpage is... well, terrible-ish. But one choice that did work out for me was to make the articles not much more than plain HTML.
What I'd like to do is pare down the static website generator I have so it's more dumb and fast. Make it more close to plain HTML. One problem is that I do a full build every time I deploy, and that means that the website is taking longer and longer to deploy as I add to it. But I'm too busy doing things and writing articles about what I do to also work on the tooling!
Optimizing to make your server setup simpler, it turns out, is the wrong optimization!
> pare down the static website generator I have so it's more dumb and fast. Make it more close to plain HTML
Once you wrap your head around it, this is what Hugo feels like! Maybe it’s because I don’t work with different static site generators often but it was a bit tough to get right at first
Hugo looks fairly similar to my custom system, but Hugo is somewhat more complicated. I'd like to move towards something simpler, and Hugo looks like it's a step in the wrong direction.
Pubmind puts me in the superhuman quadrant. I do low-friction blogging in Ghost, with the text usually forwarded to Hugo for integration into hierarchical documentation pages. A rough drafts blog doesn't need version control, but an evolving documentation site does. Haven't needed to write normal polished blog posts yet — that's more of a marketing thing, and I'm still in alpha and early beta for Cyborganize.
But yeah, the Hugo site is written in Org, and refactored with Treefactor which I wrote in elisp...
I've been maintaining my own blog engines for 15 years. I basically use it as my todo app or "hello world" for learning new technology.
For the longest time I always wanted my blog to have a database and everything because then I had to work with the DB tools in the new language and everything (C# -> Python -> JS -> Rust) and write migration tools in the new language and everything.
Wordpress would be better / easier if the end goal was blogging, but for me the end goal is to have a side project that is built and maintained the way I want :)
Not sure what were the author's references, but "The Cool MIT Professor" reminds me of Daniel Lemire (https://lemire.me/blog/, even though he's not from MIT) and "the weird dude who writes HTML" reminded me of Dan Luu (https://danluu.com/).
Both blogs are amazing and you should consider visiting them if you're interested in performance stuff.
For me, I just started writing to local Markdown files without worrying about who's reading it. Then I started using Pandoc to convert Markdown to HTML and just post it as a static site folder on Netlify, liked via git. Only now have I created a custom site for my blog. The pattern is that I started writing first and worried about the site later.
Remember, writing != publishing. Just write for yourself.
I find HTML too complex and dirty for writing while focusing on the content. I chose plain-text with some spices of Markdown. I can generate HTML or other formats from Markdown with ease.
This is basically why i will never move away from Jekyll v3 on GitHub pages.
I strongly recommend noone should use Jekyll v3 on Github Pages.
At very least use Jekyll v4 deployed GitHub Actions.
(The autobuilding in Github pages is very limitted can't add plugins etc and it seems unlikely they will ever update much are risk breaking things https://github.com/github/pages-gem/issues/651#issuecomment-...).
But moving my blog to some better platform is time spent on moving it, rather than working on my blog.
I could be better spending that time to write post.
Or even to tweak around with the CSS.
Time spent moving tools is just never going to pay-off the initial down-payment.
Jekyll v3 sucks, but not enough.
its a blog, not a complex website, I don't need things I like.
Artisanally hand-crafted HTML + CSS + JS. Hosted on Netlify. A+++ would recommend. My content works locally just by double-clicking a .html file. I can publish or edit live content by pushing to my private Git repro. Super easy.
Static site generators suck balls and are 10x more trouble than they're worth. I always know exactly what I want my blog posts to look like. Static generators can make it extremely difficult to generate the precise output html I know I want. It's radically simpler to just add some extra padding if it is more aesthetically pleasing for that specific content.
Depends on how many times you repeat yourself. A dozen of times? Sure. A hundred times? I don't think so. You can write a program that programmatically replaces the footer and header, provided that the content and layout is properly separated. But at that point, you might as well just have a build tool, and have your content and layout decoupled in the first place.
Fair point, lots of people never actually go past ten or more blog posts. Still, even a simple build tool in bash works better.
> at that point, you might as well just have a build tool, and have your content and layout decoupled in the first place
Maybe. One of the (many) problems with static generators is that it's really really really hard to get it to generate the code you want. It's easy to get it 95% of the way there. But that last 5%? It's brutal, and sometimes impossible.
A tool automatically does 95% and can be manually finished is very different from a tool that must do everything 100%.
A good rule of thumb would be "use wordpress until you hit 50 posts". At that point decide what makes sense for your content. And at this point you should know what you want, so any choice you make is likely to stick.
I don't recommend handcrafted HTML for most people. But I do think more folks should at least consider it. For my content it both gives more control AND saves me time. Even if I have to do a little grunt work every once in a blue moon.
I put together something like this with PHP, like how I did websites in ancient times with SSI[1], but it output a static site. It never occurred to me I could just cat them.
I could even still use PHP or any language to generate some components and just cat the output with the others into one file. That would help people who prefer to write in markdown. Just run it through a markdown->HTML converter and output it to a file with header and footer included.
By far the hardest part of writing a blog is finding the motivation to keep going. The best single trick that I've found to combat this is to write with a partner, as it'll keep both of you honest and motivated. The writing distribution doesn't need to be remotely even – just having a teammate is enough. That alone is worth more than any other productivity or motivation hack I've found.
(My coauthor and I write about running product/engineering teams and enterprise SaaS... we actually have indulged in the productivity woodshedding and use a static site generator with CI/CD, but it took less time to set up than it takes to write an average 1000 word post. https://staysaasy.com/)
I spent two years (on and off) getting a Jekyll set up for my blog…after that, I've mostly not touched it and just written things from time to time. So that's always an option…
I switched from WordPress to Craft, both on my personal website, and the one that pays the rent.
Working with Craft is a lot more pleasant, but I spent so much time working on things that Wordpress has many plugins for. I also spent a lot of time fighting with Redactor, the WYSIWYG editor that often messes up the "WYG" part. I still have to clear the cache manually using the command line. I'm used to this workflow, but I'm not sure I could teach another editor to use it.
Hmm, seems like I am somewhere in the middle - my blog is run on a custom static site generator and I have around 50 blog posts, which are mostly technical how-to content, including of course one on writing your own static site generator :)
I made my own markdown based blog site. Its took ~1hour, but then I went a bit crazy for few posts and added a lot of complexity. The blog site itself is very simple. I describe it here: https://n-k.freeddns.org/blog/posts/2020-11-06-3.md
Thinking about it again, I should probably have just done something simple like gh-pages.
I’m the exception to the rule — I wrote my own blogging software to power this site https://psalm.dev/articles but haven’t written about it.
Because it’s very boring! Basically just a souped-up markdown renderer that uses GitHub’s API for some draft functionality. I’ve spent maybe four hours building it in total. I’ve spent much longer writing individual posts.
This is hilarious because I’m currently converting my own blog engine (https://github.com/rcarmo/sushy, which powers https://taoofmac.com) to a static site generator, and have decided to port it to Rust sometime in the future.
Am I the only one that doesn't get the point? I understand what the comic is saying, but I don't understand why it matters. There's nothing wrong with writing 500 posts about blogging setups if that's what interests you. There's nothing wrong with spending many hours putting together an elaborate blogging setup if that's what interests you.
I think the author is finding humor in the fact that a lot of
us devs spend more time/effort in optimizing and customizing a workflow than creating content using that workflow. I took it more as light hearted ribbing than a value judgment.
It’s just a realization that a lot of people come to when they want to create a blog. They end up putting more work into setting up the blog than actually blogging.
I used to blog with Wordpress, then moved to Medium then moved to Write.as to get more independence.
Now, I'm apparently the weird dude that blogs in HTML.
I literally write my blogs in sublime text, update via SFTP to a single Apache BSD server.
It's easier and faster than medium or write.as and I don't have to worry about anyone between me and my (very few) readers. It costs a few dollars per year.
As a slowly-fading, basically-30, twenty eight year old modern millennial, I can't help but connect to more than 5-10 of these over a period of time.
If only there was a way to flatten these into a 1-d list and sort them by X.... then maybe... one can sufficiently setup, up front, for any possible optimizations [prematurely! of course]
I had to accept the only way I would blog consistently is with one of the severely feature-limited managed plans from Automattic to keep me from tinkering. 18,000 words later, the system seems to work.
I'm going to start linking https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/13/ every time people try to bring up "Git is simple if you understand the model" on Hacker News again.
I was coming to say just that, don’t stop at the referenced comic but browse the eighteen others, you will not loose your time (I particularly like the diff between the frontend conf and the functional programming one) kudos to the author, I’ll be following you from now on
Haha, this is so true. I started from "how the heck do I setup a Jekyll blog". Now I'm thinking to move to Hugo. Haven't written anything of substance yet.
This is too funny. I just made a custom static site generator last week because I was tired of hosting my WordPress and having to deal with multiple resolving site names, backup plugin spam, and constant updates which 9/10 times have me restarting to get it back up....so far I have made 6 websites and transfered all my WordPress content to my generator and I feel so much freer. it doesn't take PHP, it doesn't take a database and I can theme it and I am building a couple plugins. I have 120+ posts and I plan on expediting now that it's easy to publish this to multiple sites with a single publishing event.
I have written about 1,200+ blog-posts on my blog, which started in 2001. So, in total, I might have written over 2,000+ articles/posts in my 20-years career.
Focus on the content; the tooling will come and go.
I like to believe I’m the business translator who walks amongst design, engineering, product team. However, some of my proud achievements are that of igniting writing revolutions for engineering teams, designers, and executives in a few companies. I’m super lucky to have helped awesome people moved up their career trajectory multi-fold in short bursts with these means. The prove is the small set of people who would come running if I asked for any help — in drought, flood, rain, shine, or famine.
I used to be that person who would have perfect designed/developed themes before writing the content. I started with BlogSpot with a custom-comment system, then to Movable Type, and beta tested WordPress even before it was able to do multiple pages. In the early days, my blog used to attract millions of visitors enough to sustain a good lifestyle while I bootstrapped my Startups.
These days, I have downgraded to writing in mostly-plain-text with a dash of MarkDown for me to parse and publish. My current setup is a bunch of text files that I can understand manually without the need for any external tools. I then use Jekyll to parse it when needed. I use a few sets of plugins to parse the Markdown without the need for me to add front-matters. My needs do not require complex SEO and stuff, so it works for me.
I am in the process of even simplifying it by moving to Pandoc as my primary tool to swish-army my writing contents.
Besides all the good reasoning for writing in my work-life, ever since the Pandemic, I have an ardent yearning to write my personal story and journey. I want to be able to tell stories to my kids and beyond. Mine may not be as dramatic and romantic but I have my fair share of a broken family, starvation, begging relatives, earning for my own education since grade-5, etc. I'm afraid my stories will die with me if I don't write it down. I have been super protective of quite a lot of my stories that besides my wife, none knows the intricacies.
I would like to be able to remember all and write them down without worrying about the tools. Some of the highlights includes my life-long regret that I could have saved my best/childhood friend who died too young.
There are episodes, such as during our teens where we were whisked away at a military camp in the deep North-Eastern corner of India to repair a set of MS-DOS boot-error computers, with the military gunners protecting us while we pee on a hillock, and returning home by hitching a ride in a military ambulance with a pregnant woman in tow.
If you have visited those webcam-thingy sites during the early 2000s and if you know it was powered by Flashcom, in a rare chance, you might have been using my program. I was told it was for "magicians" but I realized later that they made too much money to be magicians. The client wanted me to come to the US but he "will sneak me in via Florida on a boat". Never took that up.
“Do you want to cross the border to Canada for a beer?“ asked the taxi driver. My IBM laptop failed right in the middle of my first ever international presentation in Detroit, luckily after showing off one of the most advanced Flash powered program used by large furniture companies to showcase users to virtually place furniture in rooms before buying it. I took a taxi to visit museums, the zoo but didn't go to Canada to find out his real intention and ran about half a mile in the freezing night to the Hyatt Hotel. I believe I saved myself being a victim of someone bad.
I like to write a whole lot and the only way to do it is to focus on the content and any tools that come along be able to manipulate it. My move to a more plain-text life is proving a good choice for me.
Tim Bray's "Ongoing" is "Generated from XML source code using Perl, Expat, Emacs, Mysql, Ruby, Java, and ImageMagick. Industrial-strength technology, baby." https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/
Most Interesting People post to some Wordpress, organisational, social media, or other blogging tool. It's what's easy or available.
My own experience across 20+ years of online posting is a mix of trying to suit my needs and find a good conversation. Currently, HN is one of my principle outlets: the crowd's pretty good, tends to call my bullshit, dang keeps the noise floor down, and Algolia search lets me find my shit. It's not a blog, but it fills some needs and interests.
The problem with "choose the easy path" is that eventually you find yourself outgrowing your needs, at least if you're doing anything half interesting. Or having hosts pulled out from under you. With about 800 posts to a subreddit, lack of real ownership, quite obviously incompatible site directions, shitty conversation-generative capabilities, and a real risk of losing any access to posts beyond a 1,000 count limit.
Self-hosting on a static site doesn't fit all my preferences, but it should be fairly future-proofed, extensible, portable, and convertible.
Other advice I also give: write short posts and write unfinished posts. If you wanted to write perfect 10/10 content again and again, you should write a book instead. A blog is about low friction to write. People are interested in your thoughts, get them out there.
[1]: https://cryptologie.net/