Respectable to see this candor on how it's done, wishing much success in 2026.

Thanks for sharing what platform you’re using to run your blog! Been meaning to message you about it and ask. I see this model being quite attainable as somebody looking to advance myself professionally, following a similar approach.

It's always a pleasure watching your videos, even when I don't like the topic; you seem like a genuine person that enjoys tech. Thank you for the content.

I always enjoy watching your videos Jeff, appreciate your honest, no-hype approach. As a bonus it's great to see you active here and on Reddit as well.

Jeff, your /books and /blog links appear to be broken here: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/about/

D'oh! Tracking some issues like this on https://github.com/geerlingguy/jeffgeerling-com/issues/175 - thanks!

Ahh wondered why the RSS feed seemed to reset

Yeah; sorry about that! I tried to keep it close on the metadata so it wouldn't do that... but apparently that's not possible haha.

Everything is possible with a little script or two

> For most of my favorite projects, I write the blog post _first_, then adapt that to a YouTube script. I still consider the written word to be vastly superior to video form.

Thanks for this context! I've re-worded that sentence to remove the assumption that the Mac Mini post was adapted from the video.

>blog has earned maybe a few thousand dollars with Amazon Affiliate links each year (it covers the hosting, at least, and gives a little extra cash, but I try to keep the blog as "old school web" as possible.

Wow, I'm surprised it's that little. I assumed all the popular homelab creators were making much more from affiliate links because I'd assume it's $500-5k in referred purchases per day ($12.5-125/day @ 2.5% commission), so I'd expect $10-20k/yr.

If it's an insignificant amount of your income, why bother? Affiliate links create a bias that goes against the interests of readers.[0] I get it when it's the only way to be sustainable, but if it's a pretty small percentage of annual earnings, it seems not worthwhile.

[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...

I track separate for blog vs video description, and my other smaller but focused sites like the Pi PCIe database.

The blog is about 10% of total affiliate revenue.

This really highlights the misalignment between information density and monetization mechanisms.

Text is random-access, searchable, and respects the reader's time (I can skim a blog post in 2 minutes to find the one command I need). Video is linear and demands a fixed time commitment.

It is somewhat tragic that the format which is often technically superior for documentation and reference (text) relies on the format that is optimized for engagement/retention (video) to subsidize it. Kudos to you for maintaining the blog-first workflow despite the incentives pulling the other way.

> Video is linear and demands a fixed time commitment.

Because people like video. I'd rather watch a video where the narrator shows me exactly what's happening and where, over text that I have to read. Many on HN like the opposite but don't seem to have the charity to understand the point of view of people like me.

I think for me it comes down to what I know:

Do I know what I'm looking for? Do I know what I know and what I don't know about this subject? If yes, I prefer text so I can jump to whichever part I need. If not, I prefer a video walkthrough where I might learn about pitfalls, what to do and not to do. I'm open to sitting through a video if I'm learning something new.

I think this can be effective if videos are structured properly. The other day I was trying to learn Wan animate and found a comfy ui workflow that game with an hour-long "how-to use" guide. The workflow required some diffusion models that were not listed in the video description, so I had to scrub through the video to find it. I used the auto generated transcription to help me, but even that's kinda shoddy sometimes.

The official ComfyUI tutorials are great — they give you the workflow, they tell you what to download, and they have screenshots of each step of the process, and take maybe 15 mins to follow.

So I think it depends. I don't know why HN is hostile against people who prefer video, it seems like a strange hill to die on, but as with most things in life, there's nuance.

It's nuanced but for me it boils down to: prefer videos for novel information/narrative, docs for something I know

I'm similar and I think it comes down to the exploration versus exploitation dilemma [1].

When I'm in exploration mode, time is plentiful. This makes linear mediums like videos excellent primary sources of information.

When I'm in exploitation mode, time is short making videos a bad fit for the time I have to spend. I'd rather prefer text-based primary sources that will allow non-linear consumption.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration%E2%80%93exploitati...

> Video is linear and demands a fixed time commitment

I recently saw that YouTube allows you to “chat” with videos through AI and can surface random content from the middle of the video if you ask it to.

That's neat, but now it's almost as if YouTube is encouraging people not to watch videos, but to just make AI give you the cliff notes.

I absolutely use it for this because lots of videos drone on and pad their length for the ad revenue, so I ask the AI to summarize and then I can click through exactly what I want to see. I found myself actually watching more videos now, not less, because I know I don't have to listen to them for 10 minutes and waste my time when they don't get to the point.

Oh I agree, I use it for the same reason. It just seems counterintuitive to YouTubes bottom line (ie discouraging folks like us from watching to video to give them ad money)

It’s because a video can be passively watched when doing chores while reading text is an active … activity. The former requires less energy and commitment than the latter.

It also means that if YouTube displays an ad while I’m washing the dishes, I’m not stopping to press the skip button (unless it’s one of those silly ads that last an hour) which probably inflates the stats quite a bit.

You put into words what I often felt. I can’t CTRL+F a video per se. And a 30 minute video is too high a bar to learn it didn’t answer the question

> Just finished upgrading it to Hugo today! (After being on Drupal for 16 years)

I did this exact thing back in 2020 It was the smartest move I ever made.

I found Hugo to work well for the most part. Seemed everytime I went to publish id run into a new error if I wasn't consistent enough about posting. I moved over to Docusaurus for the new year and off of Hugo.

Thanks for the work you do, really inspirational honestly.

I know it is a choice but would you mind turning on full RSS with your blog.

Can you suggest that over in the GitHub issues? I will do it if it's simple to do in Hugo. A long time ago I set the summary as default in Drupal, and since there's no ads on the site or anything like that, the main reason to not do it is bandwidth, maybe, depending on how much traffic that URL gets (I was seeing like 5-10 requests per second for that URL earlier today, much more than I'd expect!).

Thanks. Done. Included the how-to in the comment.

Oh hey, I think I first started running into you via our chef-drupal cookbooks ;) that community treated me so so well, but it's certainly better to move past it these days

I don't doubt that writing the blog first forces you to create the framework from which to create the video. You dot the "i's" and there too you remember the thing you almost forgot.

The blog no doubt makes the videos better.

> Just finished upgrading it to Hugo today! (After being on Drupal for 16 years)

what made you migrate from Drupal?

from past videos i could recall your vast experience with running websites using it, even using drupal deployment for some sysadmin tutorials.

much appreciate the insider baseball about your work!

EDIT: there is a post on this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46487498