The easiest way to find out when a professor got tenure is to look at the last time they did a major update to their website. The last papers they decided to put up there are from 2014 and then they simply linked to a Google Scholar? This is a very strong predictor.
>I have a project in Things called "Blog post ideas" where I maintain an ever-growing list of topics to write about.
I've such a list. Currently at ~10K entries. At such high number it's actually counter productive as choosing from abundance of options requires more effort. The popularized term for this is paradox of choice. I wonder how M. Richard does it (https://matt-rickard.com/archive) and has written a single post every day for the past one-two years. Leaves me really impressed.
Once upon a time, I was young and foolish. When I came upon a topic, and if I could not find an answer on the first page of Google, I just wrote it out. There we go, one blog post. Blogs were new, and my few friends would swarm in, email/forward, and tell the others on other forums. It would suddenly be popular, shared, commented on, and debated.
Someone would ask a question on a forum or a mailing list. I would then blog out that answer and keep sharing it repeatedly to the same questions asked over and over again. The blog post would then be linked and discussed by sites such as Adobe, etc. Bam, you feel like writing more.
Now, I have a query or a topic, and there are hundreds of answers that people have already written about. Or I will know that is stupid; I need more information and in-depth research -- then I would get lazy and focus elsewhere.
Finally, I'm beginning to get addicted to the quiet and loving the new intoxication of silence.
Offtopic: The website's design is brilliant. Is this a theme or custom-rolled? A quick source did not reveal much but I would really love to steal a design similar to this that I can adopt.
Turn it in to your personal wiki instead of blog. The difference being making it hierarchical and making edits inline. And then write your work notes, thoughts on it.
No one might read it, but it's primarily for your own reference.
Hierarchical is more effort than simply adding relevant tags and inline edits implies preference over using their text editor. Topic-wise, the assumption that blog posts are final probably stems from them having a publication date (meaning it's expected they're final with minor edits perhaps) rather simply a start date expecting them to be living documents unless said otherwise. Good example being Gwern's site (https://www.gwern.net/). Like essentially is a blog but not the usual one. (E.g. it considers the previous remark.)
We're building montaigne.io to directly tackle the 'Updating and deploying takes too long' and 'Too hard to add and edit content' issues. montaigne.io allows users to create, edit and publish a website without ever having to leave Apple Notes.
From personal experience, using Apple Notes as the sole interface to my personal site has resulted in new, unexpected behaviour. I publish shorter items, more often.
It's possible update existing notes via icloud.com but a native device is needed to create a site. We'll be looking to support an Android native alternatives at some point.
It used to be that you'd get your traffic from Google. That one good tutorial you wrote would bring a steady stream of visitors for years. But for a few years now Google has a strong preference for fresh. Fresh links matter more than long-standing ones, fresh content will place higher than a more refined, but older take on the same subject... And there's a whole industry of people who spend their days, um, "paraphrasing" what you wrote. Can't win as a hobbyist :(
Finding the quality writing on blogs and forums is getting harder via Google. I love those old tutorials, but Google wants to recommend the same topics/websites again and again. The copy&paste spam blogs are hiding more knowledge behind paywalls and ebooks.
We need a new, more unpopular discovery engine for tech people and geeks?
I can only speak for my own experience. I blog because I enjoy it and because it helps me stop repeatedly solving the same problems. It's essentially my long term memory published to a website. If it was only that and no-one read it, that would be fine. It has been going for more than 10 years now and I have no plans to stop.
TBH I only really started looking at traffic in the last year and I'm gratified it gets a bunch. But honestly not for the topics I would imagine (and often hope for).
The other useful aspect: writing about a topic flushes out my areas of ignorance and clarifies my thoughts. That's a useful exercise.
On the other hand, I write for me. I find it valuable simply penning down my thoughts so my future self can see what I was thinking of back then (or the events that happened in the past).
But that's just a private journal that could be a text file somewhere. People have been doing that for centuries without publishing it. If anything, it seems clear -- given natural human tendencies -- that an actually private journal that you don't think will be published seems more valuable.
It's not the same. There must be an affirming feeling to putting your thoughts out there and not getting pushback on it, you feel more confident in yourself. You could imagine what good things come from confidence
Same for me, I write to get my concepts and ideas ordered and polished. I think it is important to communicate with the public, even if you get no responses. 99% of users only read, 1% reply - still, you have an impact on both groups. Confirmation is really not necessary (and confirmation may also have a negative influence on behavior and incentives, see how Instagram affects motivations to share pictures).
I coded my personal site with a static site generator and connected it with a CMS. I did it to learn React and Gatsby. I write my blogs occassionally there. But you are right. Not even my friends give a shit
I'm one of the few that kept going out of a love for writing. It was only three or four years that I put GoAccess on my server, ran analytics, and realized that I actually had traffic!
If the motivation is intrinsic, it will keep happening until traffic comes naturally. If it is not, then it is easy to stop.
True, which is why successful blogs start out with the author just wanting to write. Traffic comes later. If you don't have a desire to write, rather than a desire to be read, your chance of success is low.
I wrote a niche blog for several years. Why did I stop? Simply because hardly anyone was reading the blog!
At first, I was writing for myself and an audience was not important. But over time, I came to realise that, although the size of the audience was not important to me, the interest and engagement of readers did matter (especially for a blog with a very niche topic). Hardly any readers commented on my blog posts - which was important to me.
I don't regret writing the blog at all. Writing down my thoughts, experience or research all helped me better at writing.
And the main reason why they don't get any traffic and no one gives a shit is because they're either not promoting it or they give up too quick.
On the not promoting it side of things, there is too much disdain for self promotion. It's often looked down upon to promote yourself. So some people won't do it because they dislike others doing it. Their refusual to self promote hurts them more than others. The people who do self promote have a higher chance of success because they told everyone about themselves.
The giving up too quickly side of things, it takes time to build up a following, to build a reputation. You're not going to get 1000 views daily on your blog overnight. I've written multiple high traffic blog posts that are widely linked to, translated into other languages and even then, I barely get 100 users a day on my site when I'm not actively promoting it and creating new content. Most of my blogs probably get 1000 users overall. Very few get 1,000 users in a day. Sure if I keep building up my content and I'm more consisent it'll eventually get to the point I'm getting 1,000 users a day. But it's going to take time. And most people aren't willing to invest that time.
> The number one reason people give up on blogging is because they realize no one gives a shit and they have no traffic
I heard this one idea in a software development conference a while back, that went along the lines of: "Your keypresses will be more valuable if more people benefit from them." which was essentially talking about private notes possibly being more wasteful due to less impactfulness.
That's kind of why I still write things in my personal blog (and am actually working on a blog/video series about opinionated software development) even though it's not too popular.
So that in a few weeks/months/years when something that I have previously jotted down will be relevant, I'll be able to just share a link and offer up my points without trying to recall all the minutea.
this might sound selfish but for me I think part of it is it's no longer special. In 2002-2003 I was having fun doing something semi-rare, post thoughts online. That all changed with Facebook and Twitter. Suddenly everyone was doing it so it was no longer special or at least that's how it feels.
It's also that I have nothing to say anymore. I'm not sure which is the bigger reason. I didn't have all that much to say in the past I think. I just found random stuff interesting and wrote about it. But that goes back to the top issue. Anyone can tweet or post to their facebook in moments so it feels mostly pointless to try to share in an ocean of sharing.
At the moment having a well made Youtube channel seems like the new similar outlet. It's hard enough that it's semi rare. Sure anyone can post themselves just talking about stuff but not everyone can make Veritasium, Primitive Technology, Kutzgesagt, CGP Gray.
Let me also add, at least for me, it wasn't a small amount of work. A typical post took ~8hrs. 4~5 writing, editing, correcting and another 2-3 hrs editing images. There were shorter posts but the ones that made it feel worth doing were the longer posts.
If you have an rss feed and post something here that aligns with my interests I will always subscribe, travel a lot and the feed reader works a charm when the internet goes out.
I love the lowkey dev blogs, they don't try so hard and often have unique insights.
I get a decent amount of traffic, but I'm not sure that helps. Just creates pressure to write things that are worth reading, even though I'm primarily writing for myself. It was much easier to write when my audience was 95% bots.
I think my biggest obstacle is finding the time. Writing something worthwhile requires a decent chunk of time and brain real-estate. I have many other projects that also require the same, and juggling them all is hard. I kinda wish I had more time to write, because I really enjoy it.
On the one hand, the first youtube video I uploaded got 16 comments and about 1000 views in 50 days. Obviously this isn't "viral" but it's a lot more engagement than I've ever gotten with blogging or microblogging.
True. I get traffic from google with technical blogs, but no body really gives a damn about who you are as a person, your interests other than coding etc.
I do contracts and have a sort of 'CV' site with examples of my work. It's a readme.md in an otherwise empty public git repo.
It's like that cus I will actually update it, as updating involves just changing a text file and git pushing.
Also I think of it as a filter, if a client is superficial enough to not like me cus my CV site is not pretty, then good, I probably dont want to work for them.
Feedback can be savage when you make a slight mistake (or even not a mistake, you just go a little bit against the pack on some topic you understand more than others). That definitely keeps me from writing more and bias me to only publish "safe" posts that are likely to be in agreement with the current trends (which in my case is rarely).
This is the visibility bias at work. Just because someone posted a comment doesn't mean it's worth looking at. In fact, you can probably safely discard the opinions of the type of person that has the time and inclination to post "well akshually" rebuttals under random blog posts.
And yes I'm aware of the irony of an HN user saying this.
What if you don’t have a comments section? Considering publishing posts I’ve already written (but too scared to publish) and that’s a concern. You can’t get everyone to agree and can’t be liked by everyone but the internet can be savage and hurtful.
The actual reasons: lack of purpose and strategy, combined with permanent record.
A resource is only worth as much as it is requested. No readers? No updates. A personal website: if you are not looking for a job, you won't update it. A blog: if you have nowhere to passively promo your website (no twitter followers, no youtube subscribers, no newsletter readers, and you are not otherwise famous) then you must either actively promote it on HN/Reddit (takes a certain mindset) or again you won't update it (a strategy where you write first and then promote might help but target payoff must be so good to outweigh that, and again certain mindset).
You'd ask why not just practice around, write stuff knowing no one will read it? Permanent record. Screw up once on your personal domain and 98% of the time it's OK but 2% that's it for life.
Expand on this? I think this is the root cause. The rest, fiddling with site build and structure and editing process, having nothing to say, worrying about non-evergreen content, having no time is just post-rationalization (or a strawman if you prefer)
I began developing personal websites in 2001. It all began with <FONT SIZE="7" COLOR="RED">Hello!</FONT>. It was a time when people like me would develop personal websites just because we could. It didn't matter whether we had something useful to say or if anyone visited the website. All that mattered was that it was fun! I still maintain my personal website in the same spirit.
I do share the technical posts from my websites on HN and Reddit hoping to get some feedback but that's not the primary motive. Also, there were no HN and Reddit in 2001. Back then I used to write for myself and I still do so now. My personal website is a way for me to keep an archive of some fun things I know so that my future self can look back at them when needed or desired. Only a few days ago, I added a jokes page[1] to my website just because I thought it would be nice to keep my favourite jokes somewhere easily accessible.
As years go by, I've found that the friction of editing and publishing new posts or pages to my website has only become less. First came virtual private servers that swayed me away from shared web hosting services. Good riddance because the shared web hosts often had terrible security. Then came Git which made it incredibly efficient and convenient to keep a change history of my website and sync it to any system.
I write my pages in plain HTML using Emacs. Then git add; git commit; make pub[2] and the updated website is published within seconds. A Common Lisp program reads all my HTML pages, adds a common theme and template to them and writes them out to a directory Nginx can read from. It is as low friction as it can get while maintaining complete control on the design and code of the website.
It has been 13 years since I wrote the first line of HTML and I am still having fun!
Hello there, website-mate! :) Thanks! I am glad TeXMe turned out to be useful to you! Your personal website looks great with a rich variety of articles! It is always nice to see actively maintained personal websites.
One easy way to generate some content for a blog, if you're a techie who participates actively in tech communities like, well, Quora or Reddit or FB or... or this place*... is to keep your comments.
If you put in some effort and write something a few paragraphs long, or that took some research, or where you realised you had knowledge other commenters didn't, copy-and-paste it into the blog.
It's kept mine going for years. I write for a living; I rarely have time or inclination to do more for free. So, repurposed anonymised comments it is. Keeps it active and I have a few readers.
I find the hardest thing is having something deep enough that I'd want to write about it, and feel that it'd be useful to refer to in the future or for others to read.
Normally I do it alongside FOSS contributions, etc. - but with a full-time job, that's much less frequent than I'd like.
There's been times where it's been very useful though, both for my own reference and to show others e.g. on stuff that I did in my PhD ~10 years ago.
I blog for myself. My rule is pure technical "how I did stuff" content. Which is just my own memos on things it's useful to know from job to job.
The big change for me was making the effort easy - Nikola to generate static content and push to Github Pages is about as low effort as it gets, since jupyterlab completely solves the "markdown with drag and drop pictures" problem and Nikola can take that and just publish it.
Agreed, making it as low effort as possible to build, edit and publish sites results in a non trivial impact on the quality and volume of the output.
If you have an Apple device, check out montaigne.io. We're building it to make building a website as easy as possible - users can create, edit and publish a website without ever having to leave Apple Notes. And drag and dropping pictures is super easy in Notes.
The only reason I made a blog and a post was because it was something to learn with and get some of that sweet sweet Hacker News front page traffic. It did work by the way.
- it's domain is like a home address on the internet, the website is the home on the web BUT we normally do not do much on our homes to show things to others, they tend to be used just internally showing nothing particular to the outside world;
- using it to share some personal projects it's ok-ish in the sense that if the project grow it probably get a project website, if not is probably not much interesting for others being almost unreachable due to the lack of really effective semantic search engines;
- using it to publish CVs and alike is ok-ish since such publications can't be targeted so they are a bit too generic to be of effective usage;
- using it to publish personal articles is ok, but normally no one except professional journalists have something to publish regularly.
IMVHO real personal websites:
- MUST NOT be blogs, blog idea IMO was a tentative to milk more personal information in the early stage of surveillance capitalism before smartphones came out using the peoples desire to show themselves to the world not caring much if the world is interested or not;
- they should be REALLY personal, in the sense hosted on a homeserver because in 2022 ANY home should have an internet connection and any user a domain name so a static IP and a bunch of domains with vhosts for any family members for email, IM, file sharing, ... AND personal website as a way to publish something you like to share casually;
- RSS to offer a mean for friends to follow the site without manually visiting it (full articles in the feed);
- a personal web-app for file-sharing and things you like when on the go.
These are my only personal list of reasons to have, and so to keep a bit up to date, a personal website. Stating clearly that personal website does not mean blog.
Agree with the first four and last two points, don't agree with middle two. For example people were always looking to publish their essays ("letter to the editor"). A blog expands on this. For the next one, the workings of the site are in the end irrelevant to the reader. Also you say "a domain name so a static IP". One doesn't imply the other. You can have a domain name with a dynamic IP. Interestingly, if that's the case the home analogy kinda falls. Your address and land aren't distinct, yes this happens here. As for static IP, not everyone wants this.
- despite actual blog usage blogs was named as a contraction of web logs in the sense of human being web life logs, or "just post what are you doing, what you've just done" etc, they NEVER succeed for that of course, but that's was their original idea and design before "infinite scrolling" was a thing. Personal publications are more articles from a personal website and it's purpose unfortunately remain not that defined...
- I do not state tie a domain to a home nor to a human, but ideally I hope a day we all have a home server, we actually have outside ours control in general and improperly named "router" (well, improperly in the sense that such 'boxes' are actually multi-purpose small servers not just mere routers) but "at least any humans should have at least one domain name starting from the high school beginning" and it's purpose should at least be for emails/federated IM/file sharing/* the user want from it's own iron...
- I understand that static IPs might represent an issue for some reasons including file sharing coupled with other activities, privacy etc BUT dynamic DNS is an extra layer and honestly I prefer a real dome IPv6 deploy for anyone with privacy extensions BUT also with a global per any device we own...
Essentially: IMO it's hard to find a real unique and clear purpose for a personal website but since we more or less have all some set of needs to have a personal machine accessible from the internet and the web is the most common tech over internet... Well... At least "please try to integrate tools we have widespread to do something useful" to make the modern real Mundaneum Otlet/La Fontaine and many others have dreamed for more than a century :-)
