My own blog/website is now 22 years old! It began in my university dorm room, though back then, it wasn't really a blog. Instead, it was just a loose collection of pages. I added a blog to it much later when blogging became fashionable. I still update my website occasionally [1].
Back in 2001, a chance encounter with Microsoft Personal Web Server (PWS) on a Windows 98 system introduced me to the client-server concepts essential for creating and hosting a website. I used PWS to serve my website for the first couple of years and then moved on to IIS. At first the web pages were just individual HTML pages loaded within an HTML frameset. The frameset presented common headers and sidebars for the website. Later I learnt to use ASP (the classic ASP) and add dynamic content such as quiz, guestbook, etc.
By the final year of my university days, I had gained sufficient Unix/Linux knowledge to confidently replace Windows with Linux, IIS with Apache, and ASP with PHP.
These days, I am serving my website using Nginx from a Linode VM running Debian stable. The website itself is generated statically using my own little Common Lisp program [2]. All of the content and layout is simple handwritten HTML. The Common Lisp program combines the content HTML with the layout HTML and writes the final HTML pages that are then served via Nginx.
I've been blogging on wordpress.com since 2006 and think writing for the Internet still underrated (a point Patrick Collison and many others have also made). At some point I got a custom domain, which I then thought I'd renewed but hadn't (ambiguous emails from Wordpress) and switched to a different custom domain.
I see a lot of complaints, often justified, about the dominance of the big social media companies, but not nearly as many people deciding to go their own, off those sites.
Even if you do your own thing and make something super cool, nobody's gonna stumble upon it randomly. You either have to spam it on social media or aim for high ranking in search results (while that's still somewhat of a possibility). So, even with your own little website, you're still completely at the mercy of big tech.
I still highly recommend it though. Your social media account comes and goes, but your own little website will be there however long you want it to be, display whatever info about you you want it to display, and it can look however you want it to look.
> Even if you do your own thing and make something super cool, nobody's gonna stumble upon it randomly. You either have to spam it on social media or aim for high ranking in search results (while that's still somewhat of a possibility).
Seems like this might depend on the objective. Spamming social media and aiming for search rank might be necessary for ad revenue, self-promotion, or other conversions, whatever those might be. But it is not strictly necessary. Doing your own thing and making something cool can be 100% the end in itself.
The issue I have leans the other way. I'm hesitant to self-publish anymore primarily because I don't want my work to get sucked up into the commercial machinery of the Big Tech Web. I have no interest and gain no benefit from feeding AI, scrapers, aggregators, or other "creators" who do surf around for other people's work they can mill into their own hash for their own purposes.
I'd love it if I could somehow publish only for other end-user humans, but I don't see how I can do that without paradoxically engaging with some aspect of the commercial apparatus. It's like a Foucaultian nightmare. There's no way not to be part of the system. Rejecting it requires first embracing it.
To wit: here I am on HN complaining about giving away my work for free
I get it, a decade or so ago I happily blogged around on my own and plenty of other websites, my posts were released under CC BY-SA whenever I could get away with it. I was quite happy to do that! It brought me all-expenses-paid conferences, TV interviews, you name it! (Not a lot of tech bloggers at the time in this part of the world, I got cool opportunities simply for existing.)
I was "famous" enough that ChatGPT now definitely knows about me. If you ask it very nicely it'll without a doubt refer to me in particular, by my full name, but every single detail it'll tell you about me is wrong. Where I'm from, what do I do, everything. And it's all just slightly, but demonstrably incorrect. No, I'm not from Serbia, I'm from Bosnia, and no, I'm not an infosec guy, but a devops guy, those kinds of errors. And of course, there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. I already get to live that shitty future you fear, my work has been used already, but in the worst way imaginable.
Needless to say, I haven't actually posted anything in quite a while (excluding HN and Mastodon), and if I ever do so again, I'll do my best to block every single AI user agent I find. I'll also switch to CC BY-NC (only non-commercial purposes) and pretend like that actually means anything.
Definitely for the first paragraph. I've got a little blog and to be honest, I could careless if anyone ever reads it. I do it because I want to. If someone stumbles upon it and finds something useful, great! Otherwise its mostly for me. The only somewhat 'promotion' I do is, if I get a lot of the same technical questions over and over, I'll write a blog post. So next time someone asks, I just give them the link to the blog post. Im still active in my University's discord. Lots of people every semester get confused by pointers in C on their first encounter. So when those questions get asked, I paste the link in there and that clears up all the confusion. I can help others, but I don't need to constantly have the same conversation every 6 months.
Charge something like $.05 to get access. Will get rid of worries around feeding the AI, scrappers, and aggregators. Not sure how to limit the (human) plagiarism angle.
I don't know why posting it on social media is considered "spamming". Putting an article on forums or a subreddit where people might find it interesting seems reasonable, likely will garner some views, and possibly some interesting conversation.
It also doesn't have to be self serving. I've thought of writing articles because I see a lot of misconceptions on various topics I've seen on certain language subreddits. But the roadblock is in the effort to make my "research" (toy projects) into these things suitable for public consumption, not any particular fear that it won't do something for me. If it helps even one person, awesome.
I agree with you, at least in principle. I've shared things I've written to various sites, including this one. My guidelines:
- I never write with the goal of gaining traffic.
- I only share things organically when it makes sense.
If I were on Reddit and someone was talking about Foo, and I'd written something relevant about Foo, I'll send them the link. I've I write something and then realize people here might think it's interesting, I'll submit it. In short, I want to participate in the conversation, not make the conversation all about me.
I keep stumbling upon these small blogs or personal websites, sometimes it's just someone's mastodon account with a link to a github page. They're incredibly valueable gems not just for their content but also because they tend to cite or link others in their domain of expertise.
I think the biggest issue today is it's hard to find blogs and other tiny websites via search engine. You almost have to be on social media for people to find your website.
I have to admit, I have never really understood this need to be found and this focus on discoverability. Unless you are monetizing your audience, why does it matter whether 10, 1000 or 100,000 people read your blog? If I write something on the Internet, or release some open source program, or post a video, I’m not making any money off of views: I’m doing it for myself. So I don’t really ultimately care how many people read it or view it.
I firmly believe the best content on the Internet is not necessarily the stuff optimized for search engines and audience-building. We shouldn’t really care about that.
When people were blogging because it was fun for them, the world was full of various content. Once a few got rich (or at least well-to-do and famous) from it, it all went to hell.
If you're blogging and worrying about "how will readers find me" you're doing it wrong, and are basically doomed to fail.
You blog because you like to write, and readers will slowly accumulate over time. Comments and/or a small forum can work wonders, too, as long as you're protected from spam.
It was hard to get your blog discovered 15 years ago, too. Recall "blogrolls", where blogs would link to other blogs — networking to securing such links would be the analogue to making yourself visible on social media today.
I wonder — in absolute terms, is the number of people you can reach smaller today? It's surely proportionally smaller because the internet is much bigger.
If you ever come across it - I'd love to find the "MkDocs-Material of Photo Gallery". Structured folders of photos - run one command - a slick, static-HTML site is built. A feature where you could put full-size photos in there, and the tool would automatically generate web-friendly sizes... Keep an eye out (or share here if you know a good one!)
There are many others of course. Perhaps the most important part is finding an editor. (I wound up marrying one, which is not uncommon.) I've seen recs for Sasha Chapin: https://www.sashachapin.com/
Always nice to hear of people who have been blogging for a long time. I myself have been blogging (not always very seriously) for more than 29 years. First from a '~/home' directory of the University I was working at, later I moved to my own domain [1]. The first entry is from February 1995, but it also has contents from before that date.
I am still writing HTML (with some JavaScript) using a modified version of Crystal Edit, which has the ability open local files by following HTML links [2]. (So, it act like a kind of HTML source browser.) I am using a C program to check HTML and links [3], which also places all updated files in an upload directory.
Yeah, long time blogging is always impressive. I've got archive remnants going back to 1999-ish [1] and I know I had websites prior to that, too. My start was in the personal web space of AOL back when a MB seemed like a lot. My personal domain itself goes back to 2002. For worse and sometimes for far better, I've got a bunch of archive holes from lost backups in the middle, too. It's still wild how much continuity I have managed to maintain across the decades, though, even with those bumps.
(Over the years for blogging, I've bounced from handwritten HTML to custom PHP to Drupal to custom Python/Django to Jekyll.)
The editor is not a fork of this Emerald Editor [1] on SourceForce but based on Crystal Edit [2] from Code Project. It could be the Emerald Editor is based on Crystal Edit. I have not been able to work on it for many years because it is based on MFC and I have no access to Visual Studio. It does work under Wine on Linux (although some versions have problems with the mono-spaced fonts that it uses).
I’ve found writing my own software a wonderful experience over a number of years; seeing how my skills have improved, seeing the evolution of the site, seeing what fads came and went. Obviously if you’re focused primarily on the message rather than the medium then using pre existing software—providing its not a trick to wall garden your now tracking-laden content—is a good idea.
> I have a website/blog that gets 1-2 million people per year, if I monetized I could get 5-20k/yr
This depends on so many things. For one, there are various ways to monetize. Sure, if you just slapped Adsense on the sight, that may be your earnings. However, if you add in some of your own products, as well as direct affiliations, you could earn $10k+/month. I've heard of people making triple that in a single month.
27 years for me. Started with FrontPage 1997, with extensions for Apache on Linux! Then I wrote a PHP site with Smarty. Then I wrote a Rails app. Then I moved to Wordpress. Given that I've done another 15 years writing Rails apps, I should rewrite it in the new Rails 7/8.
Because I use a ton of 3rd-party JS libraries which don't work well with Turbo, I'm kind of stuck with Rails 6 with turbolinks disabled on my main project. I've been looking for some reason to get to grips with the new additions, and I think I just talked myself into it.
I'm at 16 years. It's been through multiple iterations - a Django site, hosted on GitHub Pages, etc. Today it's a simple static site generated by blogdown/Hugo. MathJax is a godsend - I use a lot of LaTeX formatted equations. Biggest pain was search. I tried Algolia, but am currently doing a very simple client-side search.
I'd be very interested in people's blog stacks or if they have recommendations similar to the above.
20 years is a long time makes me wonder what the next 20 years of blogging/websites will look like.
As beginner in web development I'm jealous of the simplicity of web development described at the beginning of the post.
Finally I've held off on putting comments/a guestbook on my website for the same reasons. I don't think I have even close to enough traffic for it to be a issue but if it ends up being one I don't want to deal with it.
> As beginner in web development I'm jealous of the simplicity of web development described at the beginning of the post.
I've been blogging for 17 years, and gone through a number of iterations (started with Wordpress, then my own PHP blog, then Posterous, then Jekyll, and now Scroll). The language I use now, Scroll (https://scroll.pub/), is very simple, you might want to check it out. You can start small with something like this:
header.scroll
# My Blog
firstPost.scroll
import header.scroll
Hello *world*
<b>Its fine to use html too</b>
index.scroll
import header.scroll
snippets
I've been back and forth with comments over the years, including a couple posts that went viral enough to get a large volume of comments in a short time window. At the moment I've got some of those eras archived in a ZIP file but not currently visible. Moderation is definitely a responsibility. Spam Moderation is definitely a chore. Data ownership is definitely a trade-off: some of the comment hosting platforms that are better at spam auto-moderation want to own more things about your data or show more ads or trackers to your readers.
It can be a lot to deal with. I added a comment widget again just recently because I missed some of the feelings of conversation, but I probably picked one that won't likely get as much conversation as some of my past tools did because higher barrier to entry on first comment (but that also makes the spam floor higher and gives me a trade-off in data ownership versus tracking JS). We'll see how long I leave it in place this time.
> Getting a Perl website running has always been a challenge.
What am I missing? Getting Movable Type working was to FTP and dropping it in "cgi-bin" > making them executable > connecting to the DB you created. Every web host that runs Apache has that, doesn't it?
I've started and sold a few blogs - the Pagerank, Domain Authority, Domain Age, etc. I think I also sold an entire website with a pretty popular WordPress theme. The primary theme that started it all was acquired by Automattic, the WordPress company.
I have been blogging on my personal blog since 2001, so it's been about 24 years now. I think mine started as a Flash website, with a `/blog` serving up the first few articles from PHP (or was it ASP?). The host was in a suburb of Bombay, and I remember seeing my neighboring websites, which were pretty popular brands. Yes, I could see the files, but I could not edit them. Very secure stuff. ;-)
26 in a month. Like everyone else here, I went through handcoded HTML (hosted on my Amiga!) to a self-written Perl CMS-like-thing to some PHP ball of mud, and then across a variety of wikis and blog engines and static sites and back to blog setups and back to static sites.
Last month I migrated my Hugo setup to a hosted micro.blog account. It adds the missing bits I was too lazy or time-crunched to configure myself, like crossposting to other services, webmentions, and all the other indieweb goodness.
A big shout out to Matomo analytics that lets me look at anonymized visitor records on my self-hosted server. It lacks the detail of Google Analytics (although you can pay Matomo for plugins that bring it close) but my visitors' information never leaves my possession. I don't care about what _a_ visitor does on my site, but I enjoy seeing the aggregate patterns, how people came to find me, and things like that.
I'm at 20 years blogging as well. I've managed to keep my archive of posts with the blog as it moved technologies (with an unfortunately ever growing number of dead links as external sites die off).
These days Github pages, Jekyll, and writing in Markdown have proven a good way to get things done. Means I don't have to worry about server hosting and all the content is accessible if I ever want to move it.
My blog's been very useful to me as a reference for things I've looked at in the past and has hopefully helped out some other people as well. These days I generally blog when it's taken me a little while and some digging to figure something out, hopefully saves other people a bit of time.
I think Astro is great for building small mostly (or entirely) static sites. It doesn't assume that you're building a blog, but it's plenty flexible enough to support it.
This said, blogs feel like a nice sweet spot for Astro. The current version of my blog came together without much fuss. (I've studiously avoided using Astro DB, or using Astro to build an API backend, etc. and so can't comment on them.)
Overall I've found Astro to be highly reliable. I identified one unexpected behavior (I think a bug, related to when CSS is rendered) while building my blog and was able to work around it but, other than that, Astro behaved exactly as documented.
There were days I wished that astro components didn't exist and, instead, I could just use the client:* attributes in (say) my Preact components. That said, astro components are well thought out and the tooling in vscode is solid.
Mostly that I don't have enough experience working with Astro on things that are more sophisticated than "interesting CMS-backed blog or publication" to really comment. Secondarily that there are plenty of tools, some quite venerable at this point (Rails! Django!), that have the more complex terrain covered already.
Thanks for posting. It's fascinating you've kept up with it so long. Same with a couple other commenters in this post. I've had a website is some form for the same amount of time, but while I tinkered with blogs a few times it never made to my main site. Here's mine with it's unchanged design from like ~2005 (I'm not sure when) with just some simple additions of content over time. http://www.benjaminosborne.com
21 years, here! This made me go back to find my first post[1] from August 2003. Oof.
It’s interesting how things have evolved over time. Started it in college, and it was random posts about activities, feelings, etc. A lot of more personal stuff.
Growing up, changing careers (and changing again and again), having kids… I find that my blog has gotten less personal and more just general knowledge sharing of things I find interesting.
I suggest to use a wiki instead of a blog. The idea here is that a blog might contain articles that are more "polished" and those that you want to share with others while a wiki is a place to store personal knowledge which is a constant work in progress. This way a 'blog' is simply a subset of wiki wherein you have a page called 'blog' that just links to various articles in the wiki.
Blogging since last year on my own site. Didn’t want any obstructions and something that loaded really fast, just hacked something together with PHP and static files.
PHP is a great template language.
So far I think it already led to some interesting opportunities and good discussions. All of my articles got picked up by well-know newsletters so at least it’s good enough for other people.
You only get a discussion if you claim something outrageous, you’re completely wrong or you share something that can be read in less than a minute.
Ha, very nice. My blog is 19 years old, although the website itself I started 25 years ago! It has been hard to keep up and keep posting in the most recent years. With kids life got real busy! You have inspired me to go back and keep posting as well.
I started blogging about stuff I've learned about that I am likely to forget down the road. It feels so good when you throw up a post, never share it, and still manage to get a thank you email for writing it years later. If you have a folder full of notes, I would recommend turning them into a blog on a rainy day.
It’s really just increasing your surface area of luck. When I wrote about iOS dev in 2008, I got contacted by an editor at Manning and then wrote a book. I have had people reach out to ask follow-up questions on a tech post and then hire me for a contract. To be found randomly — write a lot of posts that answer questions people Google (those are the ones I have that get the most hits).
But also, when I applied to my last job, I could show some samples from my blog where I referenced their products (that I had built add-ons to). That’s just writing stuff down about what you are doing.
Finally, I mostly write my thoughts — those get no SEO and aren’t as useful, but are good to send to clients when they ask for my thoughts on some subject.
I have a contact page and I point people to LinkedIn to connect.
The bit about PHP made me yearn for those simple days. Now creating a website with all the trendy technologies creates such a barrier to creation and creativity. It seems large scale system good practice has trodden the small, quick and creative.
Back in 2001, a chance encounter with Microsoft Personal Web Server (PWS) on a Windows 98 system introduced me to the client-server concepts essential for creating and hosting a website. I used PWS to serve my website for the first couple of years and then moved on to IIS. At first the web pages were just individual HTML pages loaded within an HTML frameset. The frameset presented common headers and sidebars for the website. Later I learnt to use ASP (the classic ASP) and add dynamic content such as quiz, guestbook, etc.
By the final year of my university days, I had gained sufficient Unix/Linux knowledge to confidently replace Windows with Linux, IIS with Apache, and ASP with PHP.
These days, I am serving my website using Nginx from a Linode VM running Debian stable. The website itself is generated statically using my own little Common Lisp program [2]. All of the content and layout is simple handwritten HTML. The Common Lisp program combines the content HTML with the layout HTML and writes the final HTML pages that are then served via Nginx.
[1] https://susam.net/
[2] https://github.com/susam/susam.net