1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value.
2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they communicate well? If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't been updated in five years that's still a big boost over candidates with nothing like that at all. In a competitive market that could be the boost you need to make it from the resume review to the first round.
3. If you blog more frequently than that it can be a really valuable resource for your future self. I love being able to look back on what I was thinking and writing about ten years ago. Having a good tagging system helps with this too - I can review my tag of "scaling" or "postgresql" and see a timeline of how my understanding developed.
4. It's a great way to help establish credibility. If someone asks you about X and you have a blog entry about X from five years ago you can point them to that.
5. Building a blog is really fun! It used to be one of the classic starter projects for new web developers, I think that needs to come back. It's a fun project and one that's great to keep on hacking on long into the future.
Notably none of the above reasons require your blog to attract readers! There's a ton of value to be had even if nobody actually reads the thing.
As a general rule, assume nobody will read your blog unless you actively encourage them to. That's fine. What matters isn't the quantity of readers, it's their quality. I'd rather have a piece read by just a single person that leads to a new opportunity for me than 1,000 people who read it and never interact with me ever again.
If you DO start to get readers things get even more valuable. I've been blogging since 2002 and most of the opportunities in my career came from people I met via blogging. Today I get invited to all sorts of interesting events because I have a prominent blog covering stuff relating to AI and LLMs.
But I do honestly think that a blog is a powerful professional tool even if nobody else is reading it at all.
If you want to give it a go I've written a few things that might be useful:
I like Point No. 4. By now, I have enough articles to point to when people ask the same questions over and over. I have been asked, “Do you always have a blog post for these questions?”
Another advice or a deduction that I learnt from reading biographies and many historical books is — write as if you are writing for a stranger, even on your own personal blog/diaries/memoir — when you get older, your younger self will become a stranger and you will have forgotten a lot of things in that life you lived.
"[...] write as if you are writing for a stranger, even on your own personal blog/diaries/memoir — when you get older, your younger self will become a stranger and you will have forgotten a lot of things in that life you lived."
How bizarre. Well, memory spaces are just that, I suppose. I write diaries and letters since before I entered school and my younger self does feel anything but a stranger to me; many of my memories are as lucid to me as they were all those decades ago, both life-changing as well as trivial ones.
Depends on the person, I suppose? I have some strong memories from decades ago, but most of my normal memories of events fade within 5 years or so. The memories I do have from a decade ago are certainly not lucid but a bit blurry and sparse on details. I often wish I remembered better.
I really like that. It's absolutely true, I constantly find older stuff on my blog that I had entirely forgotten about and it's always interesting to get back in touch with past-me.
Oh, absolutely true about finding stuff, and I go like, “Ah! I wrote about that.” I got my search working (abandoned for a long time) and a list of all post archives just so I can find them easier.
Btw, I have had a to-do item for quite a while to copy your blog’s yearly archive link style in the footer. I haven’t figured out a way to make it simpler and I don’t have to deal with it for a long time. :-)
This is all true but I'm not sure about establishing credibility with a blog, especially when an LLM can help fudge the details.
I like your idea of blogging about TILs. There are shallow posts about TILs(plenty on medium) and then there are posts that mention TILs along with specific gotchas they faced and workarounds on the topic. Those saved me hours of searching/debugging on couple of occasions and I'm glad that they did that.
Sites like this one really emphasize monetization. Natural I suppose since it's startup-focused. But people used to be fine with blogs not having a monetary element at all.
That's a trend I've noticed as well over the past few years. It somehow feels like it's becoming increasingly “important” to make money from whatever you do on the internet. The idea that you can just create things because you enjoy it, or because you want to share what you've made with others in the hope that they might like it and offer interesting feedback, seems to be fading away.
I mean, I get it: the economic situation is tough for many people, and earning money matters. But the focus on creating something simply for the sake of sharing it seems to be disappearing more and more.
I have seen it said in hacker circles that people in their teens and twenties now are not just more reluctant to share stuff for free like FOSS, but they are even outright suspicious of such endeavors. To a generation who grew up on platforms and apps that maximize engagement for maximum profit, a community that doesn’t do that looks like a bunch of weirdos, maybe a cult.
I wonder how much of that mercenary approach to blogging today resulted ultimately from the 2008 crisis. It feels like there was less pressure to make ends meet, and consequently no pressure to hustle, before that. And maybe it is also the influencer self-branding culture of Instagram being seen as the default internet, so when people do alt-internet things they carry over those same values knowingly or unknowingly.
Additional factors that come to mind: the slow realization that you could be writing for an audience of one (yourself) after a brief surge of "famous bloggers"; and the rise of other forms of writing (social media, etc) that at least give you the illusion of an immediate audience. "Engagement metrics" and so on -- even if they represent the opposite of attention.
I think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes elsewhere, but doesn't necessarily stay bottled up in the mind of the would-have-been blogger. Even while pseudo-blogging platforms like Substack are having something of an upswing of esoteric low-audience content.
And I can say from experience that it's tough keeping a blog going when you have near-zero readership, even if you still consider the act of writing something and putting it out in public to be instrinsically valuable to you.
Just as a simple example, I have a once-in-a-while newsletter+blog on a niche topic, and I could get way more eyeballs if I'd just rephrase things as a Reddit post, but I'm nostalgic about it living its own life on the Free-ish Web. Or, I suppose, this comment right here, which could just as well be on a personal blog with a "backlink" to yours.
My biggest problem so far is with cost. I dont like recurring fees. I could pay a one-time fee for say 100 pages and last an eternality ( or 50 years or something ). I also dont like subscription, and it has nothing to do with subscription fatigue, it is just the way I manage my money since before Youtube or Netflix took off.
And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I use HN comments as more like a blog post.
I recently setup a little blog on tilde.club. They had a built I blogging tool in the CLI, but I wasn’t a huge fan. It gives some hosting space as well and supports php, so I vibe coded a little something that lets me throw markdown files with a date as the file name into a folder. Once created, it posts to the blog. Right now it’s just one long running page (and individual posts can be viewed/linked). I’m debating between adding an archive or just only showing a certain number of posts and letting them age out (unless linking to the specific post). I also have php generating an RSS feed based on the markdown files, so they just works without any fuss.
Of course my biggest issue is that I have started and deleted more blogs than I can count, so I don’t have any useful history, like I would if I would have stuck with one thing for the last 20 years.
I do this too (not the personal domain bit) but one thing to be aware of is that Google doesn't seem to index these sites unless you feed it each URL manually. Doesn't autodiscover, doesn't read a submitted sitemap.
Not a showstopper for me since I don't expect anyone to be interested anyway, but might be for some.
GitHub Pages gives you a neat URL - yourname.github.io - and is free forever and even lets you run GitHub Actions for free to operate a static site builder.
You could publish it as an onion service! Apart from keeping your computer running and an active internet connection, there isn't any other recurring cost.
I enjoy having a place to write that I can call my own, and it is a major flex when a topic comes up for a client like, say, migrating giant Subversion projects to Git, and I can whip out [1] and say "ah, I happen to know a thing or two about that".
Struggle quite a bit to share hobby interest via anything including instagram. Might try this. Back to date of html 1.0 and gopher …
I still sad about my favorite go to photography blog was gone dark because of the vendor is sort of gone I guess. Might be we have to live with Buddha worldview - nothing is permanent.
I mainly use them as a thesaurus and proof reader, and occasionally let VS Code autocomplete finish a sentence for me when I'm writing longer form pieces.
Much of the value of platforms like X and Mastodon is in discovering and bookmarking long form articles and blogs to read.
I have written close to 3000 blog articles over the last 25 years (and many books) - primarily because I like writing, otherwise the top post here today nails it listing reasons to blog.
There are just not enough ways to discover personal blogs.
HN is a great source, but you'll notice over time there are always AskHN posts asking something like "What is a site like HN for..", and people trying to build HN clones.
Reddit was good for a while for this, but hasn't been for a long time.
If you blog I think it's really important to develop a habit of linking to other people's blogs. That's how blog discovery used to work back in the 200xs and it can still work effectively today.
If you mean creating a blogroll to show other blogs you recommend, that is no longer so effective now that mobile phones are most of the world’s default interface to the internet. Themes for common blogging platforms like Wordpress generally hide the sidebar, blogrolls included, on mobile.
If you consider how huge the web is then 23887 websites is not covering a small but a tiny part. Also the approach of maintaining such a list manually seems fairly uninspired.
While we are here, may I ask what are some blogs you guys read regularly? (Regularly as in: going back to read new articles as opposed to a one-off link shared on some other platform.)
I built Scour to help me sift through noisy sources like HN Newest. For each article in my Scour feed, I can click the Show Feeds button to find what other sources that post shows up in. I’ve found that to be quite a nice way of discovering people’s blogs that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
You can also scour all 14,000+ sources for posts that match your interests.
I really wish someone came up with an reddit alternative - perhaps stick to STEM + lifestyle topics only to keep things free of national/international politics - and thus free of interference/censorship.
Cloudhiker is pretty healthy as a StumbleUpon revival. I've found lots of great personal blogs and sites across a lot of categories through it. https://cloudhiker.net/
the problem I always have with starting a personal blog is that-I want to write about my projects, but I also want to write about introspective life things. And I'm always fearful that introspective life things would detract (perhaps significantly, if they are too revealing) from employers/etc looking at me as a potential hire. This is not so much about politics (I don't find a strident need to blog about my political opinions (yet?)), but just writing about friends, life events, what I thinka bout those, etc.
I've thought about two potential ways of getting around this:
1. Maintain two separate blogs, one professional, one personal, make the personal blog pseudonymous, and put all the things I don't want employers to see over there. This seems fine, but also feels like too much work in practice? (perhaps the work is just of selecting where to put the post after I'm done writing it, though.)
2. Maintain one blog, and not care about market hire or anything like that. This...would work, but I'm not sure about potential bad effects because of this. I could just choose to write completely pseudonymously instead. I'm not sure.
> I could just choose to write completely pseudonymously instead.
That's the route I decided to choose when I started my professional career.
I already had a personal (pseudonymous) blog.
And that's where I put the stuff around work.
I decided to go this way for many reasons.
First, because I don't want it to be a source of pressure. If I talk about work stuff and make a big mistake, then people can call me out on it and it would tarnish my reputation.
Second, because I want to share things for free and to help others first, not to help myself/my career.
Last and related, if I was using it as a self-promoting media, I would focus on things that would help my career, not on things that I find funny or that I think can help someone else.
So it would BE work.
And it would only take a few months before I would be tired of it.
Also since I've mostly worked on heavily regulated things, I'm quite limited about what I could publicly communicate.
Now, I have my own personal room on the Internet where I can discuss everything I want, without feeling any pressure about how or what or when I should write about anything.
My two cents: if you're not doing anything too political or controversial, it's fine or even beneficial to mix in the occasional personal essay with the professional.
After all, many of your readers are also human beings with lives, maybe even lives similar to yours based on your professional content. (The rest of your readers are LLMs.) Your readers might appreciate your perspectives on random life things or just getting to see what their favorite blogger is up to.
I feel similarly. Sometimes I feel like spinning up an anonymous account on bearblog.dev or matatora.blog where I can write freely without any hassle. For now, though, I have a microblog section as a secondary stream that mixes tech with low-stakes, personal, non-tech bits (music, pictures, showerthoughts, etc).
I have done the second way. I have split it up in categories, so people can subscribe to different categories rss feeds if they don't want the whole feed. I have ~1000 daily readers now. With all kinds of interests.
Two years ago I started a niche blog and tech site focused on hardware and software guides for Linux creatives. Even set up a forum because I was fed up with digging through scattered mailing lists and Discord servers for information. I like to think it has helped some people and it gives me a chance to practice writing human-readable documentation.
Social media referral traffic is also dead, mostly due to algorithms that really don’t want users to click out of their websites.
The only exception is Bluesky because it does not have algorithmic feeds, but technical content does not do well as most technical people did not migrate.
The content will be discovered just fine. It'll get embedded in the LLMs on the next round of training. Won't be attributed to your blog of course, but an approximation to the information will still get out there.
The way things are going, I’m not sure if the mega corps will ever truly turn a profit off the blood sucking. Maybe suck some USA tax money for a bailout…
In the meantime, there are lots of actual humans trying to do things who will benefit from your knowledge being repackaged and delivered by the blood suckers.
I honestly can’t wrap my head around people getting excited about companies ingesting their work to munge up and sell without compensation or any attribution. I’m sure the feeling is mutual, but I really don’t get it.
Will an LLM purposefully change facts to incorrect information without fighting you the entire way? Seems like a blog platform could offer a feature where every posts has 3 or 4 factually wrong posts that would only be found by scrapers.
Substack to me seems to be 40% self-promotion or advertising a service, 40% long-form LinkedIn posts / AI slop, and the remaining 20% is behind a subscription with eventual freebies. Mostly professional writing. It’s far from being a new blogspot.
I agree. Substack feels more like Op Ed writers realised they could make more money by self publishing than by staying at a dying media company with multiple levels of editorial oversight.
To do well on Substack you need to publish pretty regularly, several times a week to keep and build an audience, and the only thing anyone can generate that fast are opinions. So Substack has really just become a decentralised Op Ed page.
Decentralized and expensive. Maybe I’m looking at the wrong blogs but my impression so far is that a lot of subscriptions are around 5-10$ monthly for a single creator. I can get a ton of newspapers (ok not papers, websites) magazines etc for that price or better, and those have way more than one contributor. The video platform Nebula for example has 175 creators for 6$/month.
It does seem to work for a lot of people, though. Good for them.
The minimum price is enforced by Substack, unfortunately. You can make everything free but you can't charge, say, $1/month. It definitely pushes the platform toward writers who think "I want to make this my full-time job & income". It also definitely suffers from, to a lesser extent, the Medium problem of way too many people thinking it is some kind of get-rich-quick thing. Somehow the Reddit algorithm started showing me the substack reddit, which seemed to mostly be pretty new authors complaining that they aren't making much money from Substack.
That explains a lot. Thank you! What a weird business decision on their part. I would guess the minimum has something to with payment processing overhead, but Patreon handles 1-2$ monthly payments no problem and always has. Strange.
It was about sharing bits of your daily life and personal thoughts and feelings, while building a small community. Having more than 50-100 readers was a major event (and not a thing people aimed for).
I sometimes compare Mediawiki vs SharePoint to Web x.0 vs WAIS n Gopher.
One is light on resources, storing just the information with some formatting hints, leaving presentation to standards and the other is SharePoint. The comparison is really about bloat, not functionality, but the two are intertwined.
I'm sorry to be harsh, but honest question - What's the purpose of using AI to create toy software that already exists (eg. YouTube downloader)? Normally the purpose would be to learn how to create that type of software, but that's presumably being skipped.
Similarly... what's the point of blogging if you're not writing it yourself? This post is very long, but seems to basically just be riffing on the title over and over, at least by the 3rd graph. If you're not explaining anything and readers aren't receiving anything - what's it for?
I really am asking with curiosity even though it's probably clear I have an opinion on this endeavor. There must be a reason you've paid money to do all this!
My main advice for engineers is to write a blog. It isn't for anyone else it is to organize your thoughts. But should be presented in a way others can learn from.
For a year I published every Tuesday morning, and that schedule made me learn so much so fast.
I have been blogging since 2003. My reasons,learning, and rewards and why I still blog:
- It is a personal blog = 1st audience is me. Best self-improvement investment I made
- I blog for my present self: I blog about what I read, what I'm thinking about a topic, what I learned etc. But also I blog for my future self: the trends I'm noticing, how I should prepare and I am preparing
- Since it is a personal blog, sometimes I blog about books I read, sermons I preach, technical notes. All mixed up.
- This year got about 40k YTD traffic, which is not bad for a personal blog. Highest traffic came for my post on openwebui.
Benefits I've seen:
- I am not selling anything or running ads. So there are no first order monetization
- Since I blog about topics that matter to me (career, tech trends), I already have a clear thinking on those topics. So when they come up for discussions, I am able to speak clearly and with depth. That has landed me in promotions, faster career growth, coaching opportunities, and more
- People share my blog post when certain topics come up for discussion. This has increased my influence and their respect towards me.
I've been indexing blogs and while I can't definitively say they are back, there are a lot of active bloggers. More than that, there are a lot of people wanting to have blogs to read since everything else has gone to shit.
Yes, it is. I've blogged since 2006, and after the content-oriented-to-SEO boom, I totally lost hope in writing online again. Part of me wants to write for the sake of sharing, but the other part thinks being a free content farm for AI is quite depressing.
On top of that, discoverability is dead, SEO indexing for attribution of original works does not exist, the culture of rehashing content for walled gardens like LinkedIn and Medium is out of control, and the substackzation of writing does not make things optimistic.
Bloggers write because in their value system, the result of this effort is a net positive. LLMs show up and, as far as some bloggers are concerned, turn that net positive into a negative. Bloggers stop blogging. That's rational behavior, not nihilism?
I'm not sure of your age, but I'm old enough to remember the days of copyright protection. The argument was that without copyright protection, there would be insufficient incentive to create content.
There's certainly a difference between making useful content for the love of it and making content because you think there's an opportunity to get something out of that (that could be money, but it could also just be appreciation or someone reading your work).
It's demoralising to not get any views on your hard work, and in this economic environment it sometimes feels more worth your time to do any other activity.
You may be the counter-proof to that and I enjoy your blog! But, also a lot of what makes your content useful is timing with depth and that's something that AI can't beat yet
It's just, no one will read it, beside of some machines. Blogging was fun because you knows that someone is reading it. You had some comments under your articles. When this isn't there, you can just write your stuff in a paper book and put it in your drawer.
And today, there is absolutely no one who will read it, or react to it. Only AI inhales the information and shows it without giving credit to people that never will hear about you. You just fill their database with useful data for free. Thats all.
Having everything you make stolen and fed into the AI machine absolutely is a good reason not to create anything useful. Or at least a good reason not to post it online
I think it’s a reason. It’s certainly demoralizing. Plagiarism sucks and feels bad. If I were to google something and see the AI overview parroting my blog post, sort of almost kind of paraphrasing my words and shoving the link to my actual blog off the phone screen entirely, I think I would personally travel to google headquarters and start swinging a baseball bat.
But… For starters, plagiarism has always been an issue. Even before the internet. Look at Tesla, or Rosalind Franklin. It was an issue on the internet before LLMs showed up. It’s always been trivially easy to copy and paste digital information, and with a little bit of programming to do so at scale. Those weird SEO wordpress blogs with their aggregated/stolen content have been around forever. The web was choked full of plagiarized garbage years before chatgpt was an option or even an idea.
Also consider that the AI machine takes a lot more than your stolen creative output to run. It needs tons of electricity poured into expensive equipment. It’s not clear whether the “stolen data + expensive scientists + expensive graphics cards + metric shittons of electricity” side of the equation is ever going to equal “monthly rate people will pay for access to sort of ok almost sometimes accurate information (a service which has been on offer for free for roughly 2 years and is easy to find for free depending on the company/model/use case)” let alone be lower than it. The plagiarism is not profitable and hopefully unsustainable.
And let’s sit on “access to sort of ok almost accurate information” for a second here. Because I’m pretty sure people looking for this and people looking for a blog written by a real human person who they can build a (parasocial perhaps but still) relationship with and send emails to and follow for more related content are entirely separate demographics. Blog traffic has dropped off because Facebook, Instagram, etc. It was those massive sites, not LLMs, that gutted that part of the internet.
Going back to sustainability, legal challenges to the plagiarism machines do still exist and have traction. The more creators, more bloggers and artists and programmers and more of anyone sharing their stuff online, the more people we have with a very vested stake in ending the plagiarism free for all.
I say get in there, get creating, and get up to some lobbying on the side for good measure. Don’t sit back and let a handful of spoiled nerds and obscenely wealthy old people ruin the joy of creating and sharing things. Maybe drop in more references to baseball bats to make your output less palatable to the monster. I don’t know.
> If I were to google something and see the AI overview parroting my blog post, sort of almost kind of paraphrasing my words and shoving the link to my actual blog off the phone screen entirely, I think I would personally travel to google headquarters and start swinging a baseball bat.
This is the only sensible reaction to the abuses that huge tech companies are dumping onto society.
I do agree half heartedly with what you are saying. Making our own stuff and seeking out human-made stuff is more important than ever
It's just demoralizing because it is now also more difficult than ever. It should be the norm, not the exception imo and to me the future looks bleak and soulless.
And further, the LLMs will DDOS you in the process, completely disregarding robots.txt, so self-hosting is a pain-in-the-ass, forcing you to use (and trust) something like Cloudflare (or the Anubis, or Kiwiflare).
The ecosystem and interconnected-ness has completely vanished. If you look at the late 90s or early 2000s, people had RSS readers, and sites had feeds, blogrolls, trackbacks/pingbacks, a commenting system which worked, and social bookmarking sites (like del.icio.us) which were somewhat mainstream.
All of this is gone. Blogs are not going to survive in the current super-noisy consumption architecture.
For blogs to be back, you'd almost need a new internet.
I have never been much info blogging, but I am in the habit of writing things down in small text files on my computer. It has almost the same benefits as a personal blog that has no outside readers, and a bit less stress about having to write something or worry about what I can say in public...
I maintain a list of interesting personal websites. There's some link rot, but a good number of young people maintain personal sites, and some of them have blogs! (college CS/design grads, mostly.)
I don't think anyone's really optimizing for SEO. (it's not even really clear to me that that's very important any more.)
I don't know about being back, but it certainly isn't dead. A few years back, I used to get at least 10k readers a day. That number went down to less than 100 a day at it's lowest, I was writing 10 entries a year at most. Last year, I wrote just 4.
One thing I failed to notice was that RSS was still active. So this year, I started consistently contributing, over 150 so far, and I see RSS picking up right where it left off [0]. A lot of my blog post suck, but I write them as an observation and my current understanding of a subject. Readers have agency to skip what they don't like and only read what they like.
I hadn't looked at my feed subscriber stats in a while, turns out I had around 6,000 at the start of 2025 and I'm up to around 12,000 now - very healthy!
I use my own server-side tracking to count them - I look out for the user-agent from feed software like Feedly and pull the number out of it:
Wow. A few questions:
- I recently added RSS to my blog. The URL works but I don't advertise it with the icon. Should I?
- What do you use to track traffic?
I don't use the icon, but at the end of every article I have the "Follow me via RSS Feed" as a direct link to the RSS. As far as tracking the rss traffic, this graph is generated from my server logs. It is literally cat apache logs | grep my feed url | awk daily traffic | sort.
Note this shows me how many RSS readers have accessed my RSS daily. I can't actually track each person, although I have a report I'm working on for the end of the year.
If you’d like to dip your toe in the blogging pool for the first time (or again), I’d appreciate if you gave https://pika.page/ a look. It’s free for your first 50 posts (that’s a lot).
I started this journey from scratch. Despite not pushing for numbers and regular schedule, my website still have 20k viewers since I added analytics (didn't have analytics for 2 years in the beginning). That might be a small number for most, but it means that there are people who want to read what I write. That is all that matters. Atleast to me.
At that time, when Problogger started showing off the Google AdSense checks, many blogs also got “inspired,” and AdSense became the default for blogs. I still remember getting my first check all the way from Mountain View, which takes about 30-40 days to reach my home in India. I never encash that one, just like the few others that serve as nostalgia pieces for my Time Capsule: the first DCMA letter, the tiny dollar checks one gets from Apple settlement checks, etc. Of course, the check size grew pretty big, and with other ad revenue that my personal website brought in, it was enough for me to live a rather lavish life in Bombay (INDIA) in the mid-2000s.
Just like Problogger, India has its own — Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal at https://www.labnol.org
In fact, a VC hinted to me that I should, or if I have the balls to convert my personal blog to the “Techcrunch of India” and become Michael Arrington. I wasn’t made for that and never wanted to be a blogger. My blog should be a very personal space. Well, my personal blog became a cheesy mess of personal ramblings with no aim or ambition. :-)
I think Kiruba Shankar attempted the closest to that one in India at https://www.kiruba.com and did succeed to a degree.
Fortunately, my website still enjoys direct links from a few Patents in the USA that reference my articles as a source of truth, as well as a few links from Wikipedia, WordPress.org, Adobe, and a few other well-established websites here and there. Quite a few of the articles were translated into other languages, and I keep getting referenced. Google still sends me quite a handful of visits daily.
I don’t think niche blogs are coming back, because the moment a “niche blog” becomes sustainable and “profitable”, it is no longer a niche blog. It becomes another commercial website or a publication.
I was around when the blog got invented and I never felt the need. Now I am starting to. Even if no one reads it, it is still a better way to organise my thoughts and at least celebrate my own achievements like I would want to without the suffering modern social media.
If you’re looking to put one up, try https://bearblog.dev (no connection, just appreciate Herman’s work).
It’s got just the features you need, is built by a solo dev, and it’s got a very fair split between free and paid features. I used it to put up my personal site and have been very happy with the experience.
Something cool I noticed while living in South Korea is that Naver Blog is very popular and a large amount of people use it, either writing content or looking up content for recommendations, e.g. where to go when travelling.
I'm a little skeptical of AEO. What's the point if AI users just ask the LLM to retrieve the information and never visit your blog? I almost never click the links ChatGPT gives me
Maybe it makes sense if you're selling a product or service, but I don't see the appeal of AEO as the new SEO. Maybe I'm missing something?
I guess mine is more blog-lite? It's a mix of microblogging (an embedded view of the rss feed for my mastodon) as well as some static-HTML blog articles below that.
The article goes back and forth between bloggers who "are doing well" (ie: making money) and efforts that are non-commercial. It comes across as asking humanity to put more effort into writing and publishing in a non-profitable space while the blogging incentives are profit. I still think the unexplored space for blogging (and the LLM-proof space) is _private_ blogging--for friends and family. But maybe Facebook killed that space off, who knows.
I want to start one myself. More of a public journal, but all the same. I keep having fits and starts and things distract me from the habit. That, and I'm never satisfied with my implementation in the end and I always want to try new or different things.
I started mine a couple of weeks back and I was surprised how useful it was to write down your process, as each post gives you a clear goal and helps you consolidate whatever you are working on.
Decentralisation for the win. Coincidentally, my project Gethly.com just recently added a new feature - paywall as a service. Which is perfect for personal blogs with some valuable content.
I would love something that is close to phpBB but slightly more modern. Like, phpBB but with federation support and a clean API would be great. But most modern forum-like software is Reddit clones.
How I miss my script kiddie days of being 15, downloading "nulled" versions of vBulletin off of Limewire and throwing them up on pocket money paid cPanel web hosting account waiting for it to upload on my parents 56K.
The issue with blogging is that now people are absolutely brutal about quality. I wouldn’t be comfortable sharing my understanding online on a blog, even if I’m an expert. I just know that what I write will be endlessly picked on, probably mocked in some cliquey discord channel
I sometimes think about the best way to create some kind of semi-offline local diary. Like a RPI with a public AP, disconnected from the greater internet and with a default gateway page eing the diary. Are there any standards or customs for such a thing?
I've been curating some of the last few personal blogs in one place for a couple years now (http://boredreading.com).
It always makes me happy to see more people bring back blogging. I hate that everything is on platforms like substack, and would much rather see a million wordpress or ghost installs.
The Gemini protocol, which has been posted here recently, is pretty good for reading personal and niche blogs. Yes, yes, I know you don't need Gemini for this, it is entirely possible from a technical perspective to host a minimalist personal blog over HTTP. But a great thing about Gemini is that there really isn't that much else on there, so the signal to noise ratio is higher. I check gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/ pretty regularly and find some interesting posts there.
> Neocities unfortunately does not really capture that old spirit. It's just ... different.
Geocities was used by slightly nerdy average joes while from a brief glance Neocities looks to be a place for Mastodon techies to roleplay an internet they never participated in.
I’ve maintained my own domain since 2010 and know plenty of others that still do as well
My page is one of my favorite places on the internet cause it’s in my opinion the original purpose of the internet which is to share your personal research and places to document and share personal ideas with infinite distribution.
Creating a blog is like a fart in the wind. You have to do everything. Marketing, dissemination etc etc. Good luck. Do not feed the AI overlords for nothing.
Are personal blogs back? My personal blog ten years ago (even twenty years ago) received a lot of direct traffic on all sorts of things from the primary search engines and so on. Nowadays, the only search engine that delivers any traffic to my site is Kagi! Looking back, I haven't changed my style of writing very much, so I suspect the reality is that I've just fallen behind in a comparative sense. There are much better things nowadays to access.
It's probably similar to the street-side musician. In old times, he may have been the only musician around you might hear. Nowadays, he's got to compete with a perfect recording of Hotel California by the Eagles.
I assume that search engines these days don't care as much about showing results that won't make them money. Either you bought search ads, your site is showing ads from their network, or you're SOL.
I think they do. The problem is different. It used to be that if you had a blog about something like guitar maintenance or linear algebra, that was enough to show up in the results, because no one else was directly competing with you.
Over time, a lot of companies figured out that if they start posting content-farmed articles on notionally non-commercial topics, this drives people to their website, so you ended up with billions of pages like this: thecleaningauthority . com/blog/how-to-clean/the-ultimate-guide-to-cleaning-pillows-and-pillo/ (remove spaces if you really want to).
And then LLMs brought down the marginal cost of cranking out content on any conceivable topic basically to zero, so you're all of sudden competing with 500 companies publishing spammy guitar maintenance advice. It's not that search engines want to show that stuff, but it's hard for them to tell.
You may not reach the masses, but there will be an audience.
I have an RSS feed of personal blogs which I really enjoy.
I also refuse to go to LiveNation type concerts. I only go to local musicians charging $10 at the door.
I don't even do it on principle. Corporate entertainment (including blogs) often feels formulaic to me. I find that Medium sucks the life out of good writers for some reason.
I haven’t noticed a huge upswing in traffic on my personal blog but efforts like mastodon have led to some nice interactions. I think there is more sense of community and people realizing that blogs need to be encouraged than there was a few years ago. Whether this is sustainable remains to be seen.
If you like this sort of thing, find a blog you like and contact the author to tell them you enjoy their work.
Huh, thank you for letting me know. What did you observe? It's running on a machine in my home office so it's entirely possible something happened for a short duration of time.
I just checked in incognito on my cellular network and it seems to be working now. If you get the chance, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know what went wrong when you visited it. Email in profile if you'd prefer that.
Also, I was just reading your blog and saw a reference to FutureMe.org. Man, that website really did survive. I searched my email for it and look at this!
> (The following is an e-mail from the past, composed on Wednesday, June 14, 2006, and sent via FutureMe.org)
And another where I say
> Hopefully, you have a child and everything is good and they are healthy. I wish you the best of luck, mate.
It worked out. Thanks for the good luck, past me! :)
Every blog is a niche blog because blogging is a niche. It never was and never will be mainstream. Social media began as an attempt to make the spirit of blogging a low lift for the noobs.
Today, you’re talking to an audience that is online, willing to venture outside social media, and opting to actively read content rather than passively listen or watch. That’s far from everyone and that’s okay.
We had the time around when blogspot was a thing when everyone and their dog had a blog. It was mainstream enough for "Julie and Julia". It was a different time.
I would argue that most people who had a blog were 15-25 in that time. Yes it was very common in that demo, but outside of it, it was definitely not. I don't know if that classifies as "mainstream".
The very active ecosystem of blogs I followed in the first decade of the new millennium, on arts themes (literature, cinema, non-popular music) and religious-denomination news, were mainly people above 30 blogging, sometimes much older. Wordpress had made it easy for any computer user, not just tech nerds, to set something up.
The previous poster might also consider all the high profile, independent, and influential publications across various subjects that grew out of blogging – e.g. HuffPo, Pitchfork, Jezebel, so many video gaming and entertainment sites... many of which were sadly bought up by rich idiots and/or existing media conglomerates.
> Everyone and their mother wasn’t online back then.
Yes, but - there were lots of people who got online in other to blog. Livejournal, blogspot and others were the reason some of their mothers did get online. It was that mainstream!
It was good when we had social networking, and it got bad when that turned into social media.
The point should be connecting people to other people and their creativity, not just connecting people to content which may or may not be vomited out by generative AIs.
> Every blog is a niche blog because blogging is a niche. It never was and never will be mainstream.
Content creation is indeed something a minority of society practices, but that can still be mainstream. In the first decade of the new millennium, the Movable Type and Wordpress ecosystem was active enough among ordinary people, not just nerds, that it led to things like local politicians being ousted, religious denominations’ leadership being shook up. All the drama now associated with Twitter/X happened on blogs before that.
Watch the last episode of The Onion’s series Sex House from 2012. A joke about everyone focusing on blogging is used multiple times. Even after the rise of Web 2.0 social media platforms, social media and blogs still coexisted for a time. It wasn’t until just after this that Google began deranking niche sites, and social media platforms sought to keep people on their sites for maximum engagement.
Heh, when you started talking about venturing outside I thought you were going to talk about in real life meat space.phones and tablets really freed us up but we still don’t leave our house to go on the internet for discussions. Funny with all that freedom the untethered life gets us.
1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value.
2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they communicate well? If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't been updated in five years that's still a big boost over candidates with nothing like that at all. In a competitive market that could be the boost you need to make it from the resume review to the first round.
3. If you blog more frequently than that it can be a really valuable resource for your future self. I love being able to look back on what I was thinking and writing about ten years ago. Having a good tagging system helps with this too - I can review my tag of "scaling" or "postgresql" and see a timeline of how my understanding developed.
4. It's a great way to help establish credibility. If someone asks you about X and you have a blog entry about X from five years ago you can point them to that.
5. Building a blog is really fun! It used to be one of the classic starter projects for new web developers, I think that needs to come back. It's a fun project and one that's great to keep on hacking on long into the future.
Notably none of the above reasons require your blog to attract readers! There's a ton of value to be had even if nobody actually reads the thing.
As a general rule, assume nobody will read your blog unless you actively encourage them to. That's fine. What matters isn't the quantity of readers, it's their quality. I'd rather have a piece read by just a single person that leads to a new opportunity for me than 1,000 people who read it and never interact with me ever again.
If you DO start to get readers things get even more valuable. I've been blogging since 2002 and most of the opportunities in my career came from people I met via blogging. Today I get invited to all sorts of interesting events because I have a prominent blog covering stuff relating to AI and LLMs.
But I do honestly think that a blog is a powerful professional tool even if nobody else is reading it at all.
If you want to give it a go I've written a few things that might be useful:
- What to blog about: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/ - Today I learned and write about your projects
- My approach to running a link blog - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/ - aka write about stuff you've found
Another advice or a deduction that I learnt from reading biographies and many historical books is — write as if you are writing for a stranger, even on your own personal blog/diaries/memoir — when you get older, your younger self will become a stranger and you will have forgotten a lot of things in that life you lived.
How bizarre. Well, memory spaces are just that, I suppose. I write diaries and letters since before I entered school and my younger self does feel anything but a stranger to me; many of my memories are as lucid to me as they were all those decades ago, both life-changing as well as trivial ones.
Btw, I have had a to-do item for quite a while to copy your blog’s yearly archive link style in the footer. I haven’t figured out a way to make it simpler and I don’t have to deal with it for a long time. :-)
I like your idea of blogging about TILs. There are shallow posts about TILs(plenty on medium) and then there are posts that mention TILs along with specific gotchas they faced and workarounds on the topic. Those saved me hours of searching/debugging on couple of occasions and I'm glad that they did that.
I mean, I get it: the economic situation is tough for many people, and earning money matters. But the focus on creating something simply for the sake of sharing it seems to be disappearing more and more.
I think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes elsewhere, but doesn't necessarily stay bottled up in the mind of the would-have-been blogger. Even while pseudo-blogging platforms like Substack are having something of an upswing of esoteric low-audience content.
And I can say from experience that it's tough keeping a blog going when you have near-zero readership, even if you still consider the act of writing something and putting it out in public to be instrinsically valuable to you.
Just as a simple example, I have a once-in-a-while newsletter+blog on a niche topic, and I could get way more eyeballs if I'd just rephrase things as a Reddit post, but I'm nostalgic about it living its own life on the Free-ish Web. Or, I suppose, this comment right here, which could just as well be on a personal blog with a "backlink" to yours.
And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I use HN comments as more like a blog post.
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing
Of course my biggest issue is that I have started and deleted more blogs than I can count, so I don’t have any useful history, like I would if I would have stuck with one thing for the last 20 years.
Not a showstopper for me since I don't expect anyone to be interested anyway, but might be for some.
[1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/reposurgeon/
I still sad about my favorite go to photography blog was gone dark because of the vendor is sort of gone I guess. Might be we have to live with Buddha worldview - nothing is permanent.
I mainly use them as a thesaurus and proof reader, and occasionally let VS Code autocomplete finish a sentence for me when I'm writing longer form pieces.
I have written close to 3000 blog articles over the last 25 years (and many books) - primarily because I like writing, otherwise the top post here today nails it listing reasons to blog.
But honestly: without having an efficient way to fight LLM crawlers I'm not willed to write for it anymore.
Is there an efficient solution I can add? It's hosted on a Shared Web Hoster. For self-hosted stuff there's Anubis. Also willed not to use Cloudfare.
Personal blogs are not "back". The article has zero evidence for this.
Ironically, Darren Rowse (the "problogger" person cited in the article) hasn't published a new blog post since 2024-07-24, more than a year ago.
HN is a great source, but you'll notice over time there are always AskHN posts asking something like "What is a site like HN for..", and people trying to build HN clones.
Reddit was good for a while for this, but hasn't been for a long time.
I'm hoping people rediscover/reinvent slashdot.
It works really well if you're looking for a cozier timeline.
0: https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true
1: https://kagi.com/smallweb
As a Kagi customer I have to say that's a disappointingly short list and static approach :/
You can also scour all 14,000+ sources for posts that match your interests.
https://scour.ing
I've thought about two potential ways of getting around this:
1. Maintain two separate blogs, one professional, one personal, make the personal blog pseudonymous, and put all the things I don't want employers to see over there. This seems fine, but also feels like too much work in practice? (perhaps the work is just of selecting where to put the post after I'm done writing it, though.) 2. Maintain one blog, and not care about market hire or anything like that. This...would work, but I'm not sure about potential bad effects because of this. I could just choose to write completely pseudonymously instead. I'm not sure.
That's the route I decided to choose when I started my professional career. I already had a personal (pseudonymous) blog. And that's where I put the stuff around work.
I decided to go this way for many reasons.
First, because I don't want it to be a source of pressure. If I talk about work stuff and make a big mistake, then people can call me out on it and it would tarnish my reputation.
Second, because I want to share things for free and to help others first, not to help myself/my career.
Last and related, if I was using it as a self-promoting media, I would focus on things that would help my career, not on things that I find funny or that I think can help someone else. So it would BE work. And it would only take a few months before I would be tired of it.
Also since I've mostly worked on heavily regulated things, I'm quite limited about what I could publicly communicate.
Now, I have my own personal room on the Internet where I can discuss everything I want, without feeling any pressure about how or what or when I should write about anything.
After all, many of your readers are also human beings with lives, maybe even lives similar to yours based on your professional content. (The rest of your readers are LLMs.) Your readers might appreciate your perspectives on random life things or just getting to see what their favorite blogger is up to.
> This seems fine, but also feels like too much work in practice?
Once you've finished procrastinating on your perfect stack to run/generate the blog, it's easy to set up a second.
Is it? I haven't seen anyone in my circle return to blogging, nor kids of this generation.
Discoverability is going to be a massive problem, since search engines are dead. Maybe word-of-mouth through social media is enough?
The only exception is Bluesky because it does not have algorithmic feeds, but technical content does not do well as most technical people did not migrate.
The alternative would be to setup yourself a system that could serve those people.
In the meantime, there are lots of actual humans trying to do things who will benefit from your knowledge being repackaged and delivered by the blood suckers.
Playing telephone has now been automated ...
To do well on Substack you need to publish pretty regularly, several times a week to keep and build an audience, and the only thing anyone can generate that fast are opinions. So Substack has really just become a decentralised Op Ed page.
It does seem to work for a lot of people, though. Good for them.
(I fear) the blog of this generation's kids is called TikTok or whatever and the form is video instead of text.
It was about sharing bits of your daily life and personal thoughts and feelings, while building a small community. Having more than 50-100 readers was a major event (and not a thing people aimed for).
I sometimes compare Mediawiki vs SharePoint to Web x.0 vs WAIS n Gopher.
One is light on resources, storing just the information with some formatting hints, leaving presentation to standards and the other is SharePoint. The comparison is really about bloat, not functionality, but the two are intertwined.
Similarly... what's the point of blogging if you're not writing it yourself? This post is very long, but seems to basically just be riffing on the title over and over, at least by the 3rd graph. If you're not explaining anything and readers aren't receiving anything - what's it for?
I really am asking with curiosity even though it's probably clear I have an opinion on this endeavor. There must be a reason you've paid money to do all this!
- It is a personal blog = 1st audience is me. Best self-improvement investment I made - I blog for my present self: I blog about what I read, what I'm thinking about a topic, what I learned etc. But also I blog for my future self: the trends I'm noticing, how I should prepare and I am preparing - Since it is a personal blog, sometimes I blog about books I read, sermons I preach, technical notes. All mixed up. - This year got about 40k YTD traffic, which is not bad for a personal blog. Highest traffic came for my post on openwebui.
Benefits I've seen: - I am not selling anything or running ads. So there are no first order monetization - Since I blog about topics that matter to me (career, tech trends), I already have a clear thinking on those topics. So when they come up for discussions, I am able to speak clearly and with depth. That has landed me in promotions, faster career growth, coaching opportunities, and more - People share my blog post when certain topics come up for discussion. This has increased my influence and their respect towards me.
If you are interested to see how my blog has changed over time, I have kept a changelog: https://www.jjude.com/changelog/
I don't think personal blogs are back.
Feels very nihilistic.
On top of that, discoverability is dead, SEO indexing for attribution of original works does not exist, the culture of rehashing content for walled gardens like LinkedIn and Medium is out of control, and the substackzation of writing does not make things optimistic.
There's certainly a difference between making useful content for the love of it and making content because you think there's an opportunity to get something out of that (that could be money, but it could also just be appreciation or someone reading your work).
It's demoralising to not get any views on your hard work, and in this economic environment it sometimes feels more worth your time to do any other activity.
You may be the counter-proof to that and I enjoy your blog! But, also a lot of what makes your content useful is timing with depth and that's something that AI can't beat yet
I think it’s a reason. It’s certainly demoralizing. Plagiarism sucks and feels bad. If I were to google something and see the AI overview parroting my blog post, sort of almost kind of paraphrasing my words and shoving the link to my actual blog off the phone screen entirely, I think I would personally travel to google headquarters and start swinging a baseball bat.
But… For starters, plagiarism has always been an issue. Even before the internet. Look at Tesla, or Rosalind Franklin. It was an issue on the internet before LLMs showed up. It’s always been trivially easy to copy and paste digital information, and with a little bit of programming to do so at scale. Those weird SEO wordpress blogs with their aggregated/stolen content have been around forever. The web was choked full of plagiarized garbage years before chatgpt was an option or even an idea.
Also consider that the AI machine takes a lot more than your stolen creative output to run. It needs tons of electricity poured into expensive equipment. It’s not clear whether the “stolen data + expensive scientists + expensive graphics cards + metric shittons of electricity” side of the equation is ever going to equal “monthly rate people will pay for access to sort of ok almost sometimes accurate information (a service which has been on offer for free for roughly 2 years and is easy to find for free depending on the company/model/use case)” let alone be lower than it. The plagiarism is not profitable and hopefully unsustainable.
And let’s sit on “access to sort of ok almost accurate information” for a second here. Because I’m pretty sure people looking for this and people looking for a blog written by a real human person who they can build a (parasocial perhaps but still) relationship with and send emails to and follow for more related content are entirely separate demographics. Blog traffic has dropped off because Facebook, Instagram, etc. It was those massive sites, not LLMs, that gutted that part of the internet.
Going back to sustainability, legal challenges to the plagiarism machines do still exist and have traction. The more creators, more bloggers and artists and programmers and more of anyone sharing their stuff online, the more people we have with a very vested stake in ending the plagiarism free for all.
I say get in there, get creating, and get up to some lobbying on the side for good measure. Don’t sit back and let a handful of spoiled nerds and obscenely wealthy old people ruin the joy of creating and sharing things. Maybe drop in more references to baseball bats to make your output less palatable to the monster. I don’t know.
This is the only sensible reaction to the abuses that huge tech companies are dumping onto society.
I do agree half heartedly with what you are saying. Making our own stuff and seeking out human-made stuff is more important than ever
It's just demoralizing because it is now also more difficult than ever. It should be the norm, not the exception imo and to me the future looks bleak and soulless.
And further, the LLMs will DDOS you in the process, completely disregarding robots.txt, so self-hosting is a pain-in-the-ass, forcing you to use (and trust) something like Cloudflare (or the Anubis, or Kiwiflare).
The ecosystem and interconnected-ness has completely vanished. If you look at the late 90s or early 2000s, people had RSS readers, and sites had feeds, blogrolls, trackbacks/pingbacks, a commenting system which worked, and social bookmarking sites (like del.icio.us) which were somewhat mainstream.
All of this is gone. Blogs are not going to survive in the current super-noisy consumption architecture.
For blogs to be back, you'd almost need a new internet.
I don't think anyone's really optimizing for SEO. (it's not even really clear to me that that's very important any more.)
Submissions welcome ofc :) https://arc.net/folder/4A220E67-674A-456D-AEDB-796B5BE82034
One thing I failed to notice was that RSS was still active. So this year, I started consistently contributing, over 150 so far, and I see RSS picking up right where it left off [0]. A lot of my blog post suck, but I write them as an observation and my current understanding of a subject. Readers have agency to skip what they don't like and only read what they like.
[0]: https://imgur.com/a/RSVtD1W
I use my own server-side tracking to count them - I look out for the user-agent from feed software like Feedly and pull the number out of it:
Here's my code for that: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/blob/main/feedst...Note this shows me how many RSS readers have accessed my RSS daily. I can't actually track each person, although I have a report I'm working on for the end of the year.
Not only because it sucks they do it, but because I host everything.
Why do I host a website? - https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/11/2019/why-do-i-host-a-...
And state of blogging: https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2024/life-of-a-blog-b...
I started this journey from scratch. Despite not pushing for numbers and regular schedule, my website still have 20k viewers since I added analytics (didn't have analytics for 2 years in the beginning). That might be a small number for most, but it means that there are people who want to read what I write. That is all that matters. Atleast to me.
Just like Problogger, India has its own — Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal at https://www.labnol.org
In fact, a VC hinted to me that I should, or if I have the balls to convert my personal blog to the “Techcrunch of India” and become Michael Arrington. I wasn’t made for that and never wanted to be a blogger. My blog should be a very personal space. Well, my personal blog became a cheesy mess of personal ramblings with no aim or ambition. :-)
I think Kiruba Shankar attempted the closest to that one in India at https://www.kiruba.com and did succeed to a degree.
Fortunately, my website still enjoys direct links from a few Patents in the USA that reference my articles as a source of truth, as well as a few links from Wikipedia, WordPress.org, Adobe, and a few other well-established websites here and there. Quite a few of the articles were translated into other languages, and I keep getting referenced. Google still sends me quite a handful of visits daily.
I don’t think niche blogs are coming back, because the moment a “niche blog” becomes sustainable and “profitable”, it is no longer a niche blog. It becomes another commercial website or a publication.
It’s got just the features you need, is built by a solo dev, and it’s got a very fair split between free and paid features. I used it to put up my personal site and have been very happy with the experience.
https://neat.joeldare.com
It seems like you'd get traffic from search engines a few years back, but now the only traffic I've had is from a HN post.
Everything points to optimizing for "AEO" for LLMs now
Maybe it makes sense if you're selling a product or service, but I don't see the appeal of AEO as the new SEO. Maybe I'm missing something?
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
There are lots of different RSS readers out there depending on whether you want a web based or local one. Personally I use Thunderbird.
List of Public Blogs of Hacker News users
https://brynet.ca/
https://brynet.ca/article-x395.html
nekoweb is another one: https://nekoweb.org/explore?page=1&sort=lastupd&by=tag&q=
They didn’t go anywhere! Ask the folks who have consistently maintained them regardless of current fad
https://joeldare.com/why-im-writing-pure-html-and-css-in-202...
Not sure if you're looking for a hosted solution, though. A lot of those would involve you running your own server.
[1] https://www.phpbb.com/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_s...
Exploit ridden PHPNuke & e107 CMS too.
People out there are generally nice. People mostly don't care. And even if someone mocks your stuff in private - it says more about them than you.
It always makes me happy to see more people bring back blogging. I hate that everything is on platforms like substack, and would much rather see a million wordpress or ghost installs.
Here's mine (but barely incomplete drafts, I started it last week): blog.moralestapia.com
Blogging kind of was better in the past.
I also remember geocities. It was kind of cool.
Neocities unfortunately does not really capture that old spirit. It's just ... different.
Geocities was used by slightly nerdy average joes while from a brief glance Neocities looks to be a place for Mastodon techies to roleplay an internet they never participated in.
I’ve maintained my own domain since 2010 and know plenty of others that still do as well
My page is one of my favorite places on the internet cause it’s in my opinion the original purpose of the internet which is to share your personal research and places to document and share personal ideas with infinite distribution.
It's probably similar to the street-side musician. In old times, he may have been the only musician around you might hear. Nowadays, he's got to compete with a perfect recording of Hotel California by the Eagles.
Over time, a lot of companies figured out that if they start posting content-farmed articles on notionally non-commercial topics, this drives people to their website, so you ended up with billions of pages like this: thecleaningauthority . com/blog/how-to-clean/the-ultimate-guide-to-cleaning-pillows-and-pillo/ (remove spaces if you really want to).
And then LLMs brought down the marginal cost of cranking out content on any conceivable topic basically to zero, so you're all of sudden competing with 500 companies publishing spammy guitar maintenance advice. It's not that search engines want to show that stuff, but it's hard for them to tell.
(Perhaps also the browser, email, etc? ;)
I have an RSS feed of personal blogs which I really enjoy.
I also refuse to go to LiveNation type concerts. I only go to local musicians charging $10 at the door.
I don't even do it on principle. Corporate entertainment (including blogs) often feels formulaic to me. I find that Medium sucks the life out of good writers for some reason.
Am I supposed to advertise it with the icon explicitly or is it enough if the URL works? What do you generally look for?
If you like this sort of thing, find a blog you like and contact the author to tell them you enjoy their work.
I just checked in incognito on my cellular network and it seems to be working now. If you get the chance, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know what went wrong when you visited it. Email in profile if you'd prefer that.
Also, I was just reading your blog and saw a reference to FutureMe.org. Man, that website really did survive. I searched my email for it and look at this!
> (The following is an e-mail from the past, composed on Wednesday, June 14, 2006, and sent via FutureMe.org)
And another where I say
> Hopefully, you have a child and everything is good and they are healthy. I wish you the best of luck, mate.
It worked out. Thanks for the good luck, past me! :)
Today, you’re talking to an audience that is online, willing to venture outside social media, and opting to actively read content rather than passively listen or watch. That’s far from everyone and that’s okay.
We had the time around when blogspot was a thing when everyone and their dog had a blog. It was mainstream enough for "Julie and Julia". It was a different time.
The previous poster might also consider all the high profile, independent, and influential publications across various subjects that grew out of blogging – e.g. HuffPo, Pitchfork, Jezebel, so many video gaming and entertainment sites... many of which were sadly bought up by rich idiots and/or existing media conglomerates.
Yes, but - there were lots of people who got online in other to blog. Livejournal, blogspot and others were the reason some of their mothers did get online. It was that mainstream!
The point should be connecting people to other people and their creativity, not just connecting people to content which may or may not be vomited out by generative AIs.
*You changed your post and now mine doesn't make sense anymore. I forgive you but don't do it again.
Content creation is indeed something a minority of society practices, but that can still be mainstream. In the first decade of the new millennium, the Movable Type and Wordpress ecosystem was active enough among ordinary people, not just nerds, that it led to things like local politicians being ousted, religious denominations’ leadership being shook up. All the drama now associated with Twitter/X happened on blogs before that.
Watch the last episode of The Onion’s series Sex House from 2012. A joke about everyone focusing on blogging is used multiple times. Even after the rise of Web 2.0 social media platforms, social media and blogs still coexisted for a time. It wasn’t until just after this that Google began deranking niche sites, and social media platforms sought to keep people on their sites for maximum engagement.