Do you run your own blog for personal use?
I know this has been posted before, but I was going through old posts about blogging and at least half the blogs linked in the comments were offline now, so I thought I'd bring this topic back to light.
Do you run your own personal blog, and if so, could you share some details?
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Is it self-hosted, or do you rent server space?
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Do you use Wordpress or another blog platform like that, publish through other means like a flat-file CMS, or did you build it from scratch?
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What topics do you write about?
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How consistently do you post; or alternatively, why don't you post as often as you would like to?
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Do you keep analytics, or do you write regardless of how many clicks you get?
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Is your site monetized with ads or otherwise?
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How popular is your blog on average?
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How do you keep up with other writers' posts?
I'm bringing this up because it seems like most places around the web centered on blogging are more in it for the money rather than for the content. Places like /r/blogging and the like are all talk about how to maximize views, earn revenue, and find your niche. I'd love to see some discussion more geared towards the content and construction of individual blogs, as opposed to people trying the next "get rich quick" scheme on their lists of passive income opportunities.
Personally, I have multiple blogs for the sole purpose of giving me a platform to voice my opinions or share things that interest me without being constrained to a centralized platform like Twitter or Medium. I'd love to hear what you have all made and/or shared online, as well as the process behind making it happen.
I suppose you could call it rented server space, I pay for a VPS through DO
Static site generator, specifically a modified version of eleventy
Analytics for a specific competitive video game scene
Like once a month
I track the nginx logs, if that counts
No
On a boring day it's like 300-400 unique viewers by IP, peak is like 8k.
I don't
I saw Eleventy mentioned a few times when I was browsing old posts but never checked it out until now. It looks great! How do you like using it?
It works alright. Tbh, there was a big more configuring than I'd like, but it does its job.
Is there a reason your Jekyll blog is on Dreamhost rather than GitHub pages? Because just in case you're not aware, Jekyll on Github pages is free. I'm not familiar with Dreamhost but poking around their site a bit, it looks like they charge a couple bucks per month (which isn't much, but still...)
I put a Jekyll blog up on GH Pages not too long ago and it was pretty straightforward. The biggest hurdle was figuring out how to display a last-edited timestamp without Jekyll's last-modified plugin. A simple git hook handles that pretty well.
I only put it on Dreamhost because it didn't affect my monthly cost to add hosting to another extremely low-traffic site. I probably should've just used Github Pages since setting it up with Dreamhost was a bit of a pain, but it's what I'm relatively used to now.
Github Pages.
Jekyll.
Photos and short comments about a grass.
Life is full-on so whenever I pull the camera out and have something to demonstrate.
No. Low-bandwidth and privacy conscious.
No.
It's not.
The only public group for the grass is on Facebook so I check there with no account.
Not really helpful but I wanted to demonstrate that Github Pages is an OK way to get content onto the web for free. There are plenty of themes for Jekyll to make it look however you wish, I prefer light and simple.
Currently my blogging outlet is A Fresh Cup . I've been through many iterations of blogging over the last (close to 20?) years, but for right now, this is what's active.
Published via Aerobatic at the moment. They've been trouble-free and low-friction, which is what I currently care about.
I'm using Jekyll. A version back I think, but it works so I don't mess with it.
I link to things that interest me in (mostly open-source) software development. Link blogging is one of the places where it all started and you kids can get off my lawn :)
Every weekday, with occasional misses due to holidays or travel.
I think Aerobatic has some metrics but I've never even looked. This is for me, and if other people derive benefit from it, that's great.
Nope. I used to make a fair amount of money from my .NET link blog, but that was many years and several iterations of web advertising ago. It got to be not worth the bother.
I dunno. I'd be throwing messages in bottles into the ocean if I didn't do this, so it doesn't really matter.
RSS is my friend.
Noone who has been on the Internet for less than 20 years thinks blogs still exist anyway :)
Serious question though, are threads like these the only place where you people mention your blogs? And if so, why do you make them so hard to find? If you are writing them purely for fun and put them in some random domain where practically no one can find it, then are you writing them for yourself only? If so, then what's separating your blog from something like a personal diary?
I do write, for the enjoyment and not money.
I host it on a static hosting service (Netlify) right now, and depending on Caddy 2's features, I may host it myself again.
I built my generator from scratch (I actually built it multiple times, including in Go and Clojure, it's in Typescript as of today).
Technical topics, around services, tools, and such.
I only post when I want to post, usually.
I do have some articles in writing or planning stage, but some are not as interesting as I thought they would be.
I don't look at any stats at all.
No monetization, except a link towards a donation page ("buy me a coffee").
I do not want to ruin the user experience with additional, and not useful, bloat.
Cannot see, cannot say!
I use a RSS reader with some independent blogs' feeds.
http://thesudorm.com/
I rent a droplet from Digital Ocean.
From scratch. I wrote the site in NodeJS using the express framework. Blogs are stored on the file system as Markdown and then rendered as HTML on the fly. Super inefficient. Thinking about using a script like others here that I can run on a Markdown file so I only do the conversion once.
Software development.
Not nearly as often as I would like. It's been on the back burner for way too long.
Nope.
Nope.
I don't think anyone visits it.
Visit them manually. Been thinking about getting an RSS reader.
I use Netlify, which is fairly well priced for smaller sites and (I've found) is pretty easy to get up and running https://www.netlify.com/pricing/
Jekyll has been pretty simple to learn. Basically I've just set up templates for the seperate types of "posts" I have and everything is organized in a folder/type and is all markdown.
Hobbies (music, games, gardening, photos, projects), personal life, nothing specific, mostly just to mess around with web stuff when I have ideas.
Monthly, I guess? I don't really keep to a schedule with it.
Not at the moment, thinking about adding (Matomo)[https://matomo.org/] at some point just to mess around with something that's not Google analytics (which I've used at work)
No need at the moment.
I don't think anyone reads it.
RSS, email newsletters, twitter, etc.
TL;DR I make my own ~blog~ gopher hole using gopher protocol & sdf hosting and I didn't write anything although I have list of things that I want to write about. so let's answer some question
hosted by sdf.org Thanks for them <3
NO wordpress or any front-end sh1t (sorry), I write plan text.
I didn't write yet, but my list is full of tech topics, and little personal (life) topics.
I didn't write yet, why ? well my English isn't good, and I ask myself if really ppl gonna read it. I mean I could talk to myself or daydream and blog on my own world.
sorry but fk these sh1t, I don't appreciate ppl who do things like this.
NO it doesn't
U can guess this question.
Using RSS, and sdf help me keep up with gopher holes changes
I'm at https://www.bfoliver.com
Hosted on Netlify.
Uses Jekyll. Not the best, I know, but it works for me. I started on GH Pages back when jekyll was the only option, so it all stemmed from there.
I use tailwind for css, which works for a noob like me. I like that netlify can handle this also.
Any movie I watch or book I read gets reviewed. This is mostly to keep my fingers warm. I also write small tech articles, mainly like a personal wiki.
Usually a few times a week.
I toyed with GoatCounter but currently I do nothing. Not that interested.
No
No idea. I have three or four posts that I get a lot of emails about.
RSS with newsblur.
I use a static site generator, so my blog is just a set of static files that I publish. I use the free tier of https://pinata.cloud/ to pin the files so they're accessible via IPFS, and then I use CloudFlare's free IPFS gateway to make them accessible through my domain name. Completely free besides the domain name, and it means that in addition to being accessible as a normal site, people can access it through IPFS and can help re-host it or archive a copy of it.
Besides being free hosting, it's super convenient that I don't have to manage anything, and I really value that IPFS provides an easy way for others to keep up my site themselves if anything goes wrong and I'm no longer around to fix things (like if the domain expires or the specific IPFS pinning service I used ends). It's something that could possibly outlast me, without just relying on the goodwill of a specific company. I hope more of the internet uses IPFS or something like it in the future, because it's pretty depressing how many websites fall off the internet completely after their creators go away.
I use Gatsby, which is a static site generator that uses React components for page templates. This is super convenient for sites that want interactive bits. (I'm a big fan of the interactivity in Going Critical; I want to make pages like that on my site.)
Click for an aside about what makes Gatsby and React good for this
In standard site generators or plain pages, if you want a specific page to have an interactive widget, then you need to:
It's all doable, but it's a discouraging amount of effort and repetition. You're probably not going to want to do that all any more than necessary. Gatsby and React removes the need for all of those steps since your components describe the initial HTML and the runtime javascript, and Gatsby automatically creates javascript bundles specifically for each page.
This post has quickly become me just preaching about IPFS and React, hasn't it. Hmm, maybe I can recycle this text into a few blog posts on that.
Software development.
My site just has like 5 posts I wrote years ago. I was too busy with other stuff so I didn't write much, but now I want to make more.
I reworked my site in the last few days and started drafting some new posts. I hadn't really been happy with my site's tech stack before now. I'm really excited that my current tech stack makes it really easy for me to make pages with arbitrary templates and interactive bits. It motivates me knowing that I can make my site have things that aren't possible or easy on popular platforms.
I've got Google Analytics on my site. I'm not entirely sure what the intersection is of stuff I like to make and stuff people like to see, and I'm really interested in figuring that out. I'm curious whether people who come to my site when a post is linked on an aggregator tend to explore other pages on it.
No. Even pretending I had traffic, I think the most I hope to get out of my writing is personal or professional connections. Maybe one day I might make little games and sell them or other software on my site, but that would be pretty far off.
A couple of my old posts got discussed on HN and Reddit when I first posted them. That's probably nearly all the traffic I've gotten.
I find a lot of software tech posts on Hacker News. I don't follow too many specific writers from that though. Sometimes I follow people's Twitter accounts, though that generally just exposes me to their favorite stuff rather than more of their content, which has been neat for most, though it's not been efficient for the task of keeping up with their content.
I set up RSS on my site so people could use it to follow me, but I don't use RSS to follow anyone. I think I support it mainly just in case RSS (or a service consuming it) suddenly becomes popular in the future.
I'm surprised how many others here mention using RSS. I wonder if it just happens to be popular with the sort of people that run their own blogs. tbh maybe that's the audience I'm aiming for, so it's probably a good thing I have it.
My blog - such as it is - can be visited at https://mxuribe.com
I rent a $5 VPS from digital ocean. Its more than sufficient for blogging (and then some).
I use pelican as a static site generator. I have used hugo (also a static site generator, which is totally fine) in the past, but I simply prefer the jinja templating from pelican/python world. The more that i think about blogging, the more that i think all blogs should be as simple as possible to publish (i.e. more function, less form).
Recently it has been about technology, but with a social slant to it. Previous incarnations of my blog were more personal/opinion stuff.
I do not post nearly enough. Mostly it is because lots of life, insufficient time/availability...but also because the stuff that i have to share is either short snippets (not really needing a full blog post), or i share directly with friends (such as via text/sms, email, etc.).
For years i used google analytics...but recently have been trying to de-google-ify, so implemented Matomo (fka piwik)...But honestly, I'm thinking on getting rid of matomo and just relying on server logs. Nothing wrong with matomo (actually it works well, and light on server resources, etc.)...Just becoming more privacy conscious and wanting to know less about my visitors.
Mine is not monetized; no ads. I don't think less of people who do this as long as they're not icky in how they go about it. Hey, if this is an essential way in which they make a living - and it doesn't harm others - then i say go for it. (Though if their site provides valuable content, and its slow, i might only consume via rss feeds, etc....slow sites are such a turn off for me.)
Not very popular at all...and, that's fine i guess.
RSS feeds. I run my own nextcloud instance which has an rss aggregator and reader. And, I've traditionally just read items from my feed via this web reader on my instance. However recently i installed newsboat (terminal-based rss feed reader) to read the rss feeds that my nextcloud instance captures...and I'm liking this alot. I guess my feed consumption - so far lately - really lends itself quite well to the terminal approach.
For a time in my professional career, I managed digital products that helped a company to blog with this money-centric intent. The company wasn't evil or anything, but i guess i felt icky nonetheless. Also, but separate of this former job, i found that the content (on my own blog) that i wanted to draft was more important for me as an internal diary or journal...Or, if there's stuff that i wanted to share, it just made more sense to me to share as short snippets over social networks (I use the fediverse almost exclusively for this). Also, lately, my sharing seems to happen more frequently (and more satisfyingly) with acquaintances in person.
This might be a good place as any to ask. If not, tell me and I'll remove it.
I'm 33yo and started learning programming. I'm half way throught a Go course and getting the hang of things.
I need a project to start practicing and I'm thinking of doing a converter of markdown to HTML to generate a website and host on github as my portfolio.
Is this what a static site generator is? Where should i look for to start working on it while i learn Go? Is this too hard for a beginner?
My other idea is a cli music player like cmus, but much simpler.
I would like to have a website like this for example.
This is one example of one, yes! IMO creating a parser is a non-trivial project, but the nice thing about it is that you don't necessarily have to build a feature-complete parser to derive any value from the exercise. Even a parser with support for a small subset of Markdown syntax would be a really great project.
You might end up with a royal mess of a solution, but if it works, you've accomplished your goal. It doesn't have to be perfect, clean code first time around :) Re-writing and refactoring is something that happens all the time. Turns out you tend to have a lot more expertise and opinions about a given problem after you've solved it.
If you're an ABSOLUTE beginner, it might be biting off a lot, but if you are motivated, I think you could do it. Just be sure to break the problem down into more manageable chunks and solve one part a time :)