This has not been my experience. If you do interesting things then there are plenty of people who are willing to bring attention to it. I've been cold-emailed by journalists wanting to interview me without ever doing anything other than a) make my work publicly accessible and b) collaborate with like-minded people.
Perhaps I'm lucky (probably). Perhaps my work would've gotten more attention if I spent more effort promoting it (probably). The things I do because I find them interesting are not things I feel the need to promote, because I'm not doing them for attention.
If your goal is to grab a lot of attention, you will inexorably have to do things that are not interesting because the only way to achieve broad appeal is to not offend anyone's tastes and the only way to do that is to be bland.
Careful. While I agree with the premise, you make it sound binary. You can have broad-er appeal while still being individual.
On that …
- It's generally easier for people to know what they _don't_ like than what they _do_. Preferences are defined by process of elimination.
- The commonality is: get lots of people on the same page about you, and you've got a big audience / broad appeal. But the most engaged audience is the one who has strong emotions attached, so being an offender guarantees a ravenous audience … and is generally easier.
I witnessed a memorable moment at work when an engineer responded to a VP and started by saying “careful.” Had it been another engineer, it would have been ignored as authoritative-sounding filler. But the VP did not take it well.
That's like an actor breaking character during a play and it pops the bubble of reality the audience has been living in.
In all likelihood, the engineer meant "that approach/idea/decision has risks we should consider." The VP likely heard "you are suggesting something wrong/dangerous/ignorant."
A nuance here is that the engineer probably implied that "(We should be) careful (in our consideration)" and the VP perceived "(You need to be) careful (and you don't seem to be)"
I'm possibly paraphrasing and simplifying too much but "How to Win Friends and influence People" mentions being very cautious about correcting people, more so correcting them publically, even when you are correct.
Such a good book, I'm about due for a re-read I think.
It also places the speaker in a position of authority, admonishing someone who is still learning. "Careful!" is what we say to children. A high-status person may be particularly sensitive to this, but nobody likes to be talked down to. As I alluded, I hear this amongst engineers and filter it out as verbal fluff, so there are cases where it is ok.
An easy alternative to "careful" is "I'm not sure about that" or even "I disagree." Both are what peers would say to each other. In scenarios where a high-status person is not receptive to being talked to as a peer, well, you get to add all the deference and qualification you need to, but it comes down to stating disagreement in a non-disagreeable way.
Honest question, because I am just starting out, myself. I have a small blog where I share my opinions and projects related to technology I enjoy. However, if I were to do a thought experiment and assume my audience is HN readers, I'd hesitate to say anyone here would find my posts very interesting. I like them, but I am not sure who else would.
I genuinely do not understand how to evaluate an audience, so I just write what I like to write and hope for the best.
Setup Matomo or similar analytics software, write about a bunch of topics and review after a year which topics your readers are most interested in, for which they search on your site etc.
When you have a decent number of posts and some visitors you can see which sub set they find the most interesting.
You can also make a blog about things that don't interest you at all. This is the shortest route to success and you will hate your new job :)
> This has not been my experience. If you do interesting things then there are plenty of people who are willing to bring attention to it. I've been cold-emailed by journalists wanting to interview me without ever doing anything other than a) make my work publicly accessible and b) collaborate with like-minded people.
Both of those are promoting your work so it is your experience. Your experience just has been that you haven't had to put much work into promoting your work so it doesn't feel like promoting your work to you.
I didn’t know what this acronym meant. Hopefully I saved someone a Google search.
What does this mean? (Googling wasn't helpful.)
Is that actually a possibility? I can't type faster than I can read.
seems like a perfectly reasonable idea for a blog about different stacks. I'm not advocating it, but there's nothing wrong with it if that's what interests you.
Almost every opinion people have has been covered by someone else in some way unless you are working at the forefront of something, so it usually depends on how you value-add to existing things with your own experience.
It's also that sort of I-know-what's-better attitude that turns a personal thing into a competitive thing.
What is semi-successful anyway...
OP is saying don’t be the person who says they want to write about Frogs, but who then spends an immense amount of effort not writing about Frogs, and writing about procrastination instead.
Write in markdown and serve directly, or export to HTML. Or write in LibreOffice Writer and export to HTML.
Upload HTML to a basic webserver. You don't need a fancy load balancer or denial-of-human-system or anything.
No, you just need a host that doesn't have ridiculously small limits. You can easily find find hosts with limits in hundreds of GB, or TB, or even unmetered. You can find them for free, and you can find them for quite cheap compared to most technologists' incomes.
Just joking. Sort of. There's apparently a modern tool you can use to transpile SGML to HTML[0], and I'm itching to try it out.
--
[0] - https://sgmljs.net/docs/producing-html-tutorial/producing-ht... - yes, it's an NPM package, and yes, you can run it in the browser, but you can also use it on a server, or as a static site generator.
Disagree. If it took less thinking than it will take reading, then yes, probably not worth it. But if you can trim your writing to the pith in every paragraph or even line, people will love you.
Too many people babble to keep the underlying lies and fraud and their complicity burried in narratives.
This takes a lot of time. Writing concisely is much more challenging and time-consuming than writing verbosely. Writing unnecessarily long essays means that your readers end up spending more time reading them than you did writing them.
As Blaise Pascal wrote: "I only made this letter longer because I had not the leisure to make it shorter."
> POSSE is the way to go
Can you host your own blog, but replicate (in part) in dev.to?
Is it against their TOS to have a link to an original, or even only include teasers advertising the 'real' blog post?
It's kind of like having you main git repo somewhere, but cloning to GitHub for the community.
You know a blog is going to be good when it's using the default wordpress theme from 10 years ago.
https://github.com/simonw/datasette.io
http://blosxom.com/documentation/users/blog.html
http://blosxom.com/documentation/users/install/dynamic/isp.html
I love the idea of it in that it's just markdown files! `vim ~/blog/entries/some-random-thought.txt` end ups with $AUTHOR of `chown`, $DATE of the file modification time, tree of `mkdir -p ~/blog/entries/some/category` ... it's just trivial to backup, restore, and work with. You can even (probably) hook it up to a static regen which is probably safer: http://blosxom.com/documentation/users/install/static/
The link to datasette is if you're wanting to nerd around a bit more, as it's kindof a combo of sqlite and a web server for rendering data from within it. The linked github repo is how their main site is built/rendered and it definitely has aspects of "blogginess", and you can kindof see how it's done. The neat thing of `let tags = "SELECT DISTINCT tags FROM posts"` or transforming blogging into effectively updating/adding records in a database is an extension of the blosxom zen of "it's just files [records], yo! go forth and edit them..."
set plugins and themes to auto-update, add wordfence and change default settings.
use updraft or similar to pull full backups on a schedule.
I agree but when I tried this a few weeks ago, it looked like a lot of work to publish on my own blog and then replicate everywhere else. I didn't find a good tool and got lost trying out fediverse stuff.
> Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time.
Nothing about substack wastes readers time.
Conversely, what wastes their time is your site being down or hacked and what wastes your time is maintaining your blog's infra, updating because vulnerabilities, and/or using bad UIs like blogging from github (maybe passable for nerds, not for non-nerds)
A blog isn't about the tech you use. It's about the writing. Worrying about tech is not going to add a single reader to your blog.
Of course there is plenty of money to be made as a social media influencer who specializes in long form content, and if that's the career a person is interested in building then sure - Substack, Medium, whatever - great choice. But for people who are interested in blogging as it used to be, independent writers who want to write without the pressure of editors, without paywalls, without popups, without forcing their readers into signup funnels... It might be a bit more work to set up, but tools like WordPress, Ghost etc are better suited.
- Own your content: Medium, Substack, Hashnode, Dev.to—all of them suck. Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time.
- No one cares about the technology behind your site unless it’s huge. So it should be the least of your concerns. Don’t be that JS guy who rewrites their entire site every week in a different stack and writes a blog post about it.
- Consistently writing is a lot of work, and there’s no way around it.
- Picking a niche and writing about it yields better results than trying to write about anything and everything.
- No one will probably read it for a long time, and that’s okay. You should write only for yourself in the beginning.
- POSSE is the way to go. If you don’t promote your work, no one else will.
- That said, if it took less time to write than it would take someone to read, it’s probably not worth writing.
[1]: https://rednafi.com