Ask HN: What is your obscure personal blog or website?

[kickscondor]

Recently on HN, a user posted a personal website in the comments (https://philosopher.life/) that I thought was pretty unusual. It made me wonder what other interesting non-commercial, non-software websites all of you might have. It can be any kind of goofy, miserable or unfinished thing. I guess part of what I’m asking is: are there still personal sites out there outside of social media?

Oh and don’t worry if you don’t discover this thread for a day or two - please still post, because I will look at your site!

[pattrn]

https://stephenmann.io

Writing a lot about infrastructure automation (Terraform, AWS, gcloud, Kubernetes) and how to design / deploy production applications. Trying to write blog posts that contain stream-of-thought code and explanations that starts at zero and ends up with a fully functional example.

[kickscondor]

Thankyou for answering! You are on the directory of links I found: https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/

[tedmiston]

Know of any good linters for Helm charts / k8s yaml files by chance? I haven't found much in this space yet.

[stone-monkey]

Since you asked: https://dailyflywheel.com

To be honest, I put as little effort into maintaining this blog as possible. It's a default WordPress setup I use to spew my digressions that never have the opportunity to come into conversation.

It's also to help me log the general flow of how the year went. Increasingly, as I get older, I forget things at a faster rate - not just events, but the general time frame for things. Even when I remember anecdotes, I can only remember it as happening in a general year, maybe in a specific six month period if I can recall enough clarifying detail. The blog really helped me recall specific events that occurred last year in the general time line in which they occurred. My only regret is I've stopped doing it regularly.

Edit: Recalling why I started in the first place sparked my desire to start up blogging again. Hopefully I can keep it up this go around.

[kickscondor]

Thankyou for not being shy. I enjoyed looking through your blog. I posted a summary here: https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/

[design-of-homes]

I'm not sure if this counts, but here is a blog I wrote from 2007 to 2013 and then stopped. It's called 'The Design of Homes' and is mostly about housing design in the UK (the site domain expired, hence the archive.org link).

https://web.archive.org/web/20170626051806/http://designofho...

Why did I stop writing the blog? Mostly because no-one was reading! I thought I was immune to the idea that an audience wasn't necessarily important. However, I realised that, although the size of the audience didn't matter, the interest and engagement of readers did matter.

I have no connection to the field of (mass) housing design and architecture, but I loved to read books and research papers on the topic.

By the way, it's true what they say: if you can write down what you've learnt (or think you have absorbed from reading) you'll not only remember it more firmly, but you'll understand it more deeply too. And you'll be able to talk about that subject with much more confidence.

[krrishd]

here's mine: http://itskrish.co/

my 'blog' is the writing tab (on mobile you just scroll down), i'd like to think the few things i've written about are decently novel/unusual :)

[kickscondor]

Ok, I've added you to my directory of sites I took a look at. https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/ Keep writing!

[kickscondor]

Thankyou! This is great. Well done.

[Rjevski]

https://rjevski.io

I thought about putting more effort in there and using it to voice my opinion on some things (laws & regulations in the financial and telecoms sector, etc) but honestly I don't think anyone would bother reading it, and my views would most likely offend a lot of people profiting from the things I'm criticising and this could hurt my career down the line or bring potentially unwanted attention.

Sometimes I wish we'd go back to the early days where everyone is anonymous and you can post shit all day without major real-world consequences.

[SenHeng]

I never got around to actually making a website.

https://github.com/SenHeng/journal

[kickscondor]

Hey, that's fine! You are added to my directory: https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/

[otras]

I have a simple Hugo blog at https://alexanderellis.github.io/blog/. I write some about software, but I really enjoy writing about non-software things like user experience in general, design, how things work, etc. Recently I had a post on how a spray bottle works get pretty popular here (front page for a couple of days) which was fun!

[kickscondor]

Very nice and clean. :) I've added you to my directory of links that I found: https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/

[dhruvkar]

https://www.wints.org

i write in the Journal to solidify concepts for myself and its only sporadically updated. I enjoy adventures-for-a-cause and hope to write about them more at some point (currently under Projects).

Needs more work.

Checked out kickcondor, cool thing you're doing.

[zapperdapper]

https://coffeeandcode.neocities.org

Small personal site. Interesting bits of python code, JavaScript and even some technical memoir. I try to post twice a month but doesn't always work out. Site is built using a little python and bash.

[grecht]

I really like personal websites, so I just set up mine a while ago. It's neither goofy nor miserable. Maybe a bit unfinished? Anyways, it's just a very simple static site generated with Hugo, using a basic Hugo theme which I modified to my liking.

https://grecht.github.io/

[kickscondor]

I can't seem to load this site. ?

[tedmiston]

https://blog.tedmiston.com

I write about Python, startups, side projects, etc. I've put some effort into making the blog very visual and including plenty of photos.

[kickscondor]

Yes, your design is very impressive. You made it yourself??

I have added you to my directory: https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/ Thanks for sharing your link!

[mabynogy]

http://dailyprog.org/

It's not really my website as I don't have and I'm not the only one to work on.

[sweetbee]

Recently started mine: https://ondjuric.com

Can’t wait to see others. :)

[kickscondor]

Thankyou! I'm so happy that you shared your blog with just one post. Continue writing - I will check in again.

I've also put you into my directory: https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/

[cirrus-clouds]

I hope this won't be controversial, but last year I made a single page website to try and dissuade people from voting for the Conservative Party in the UK (we had a General Election in the UK in June 2017).

The site is no longer online because the site's purpose is no longer relevant (the Conservative Pary unfortunately formed a minority government after the General Election). However, I did extract two sections from my website and published them on medium.com:

UK General Election 2017: Why we need to change our method of voting

https://medium.com/@dontvoteconservativeuk/uk-general-electi...

UK General Election 2017: Coverage in the media

https://medium.com/@dontvoteconservativeuk/uk-general-electi...

The website (and medium.com articles) had absolutely no effect whatsoever.

I thought I had made the site as fair as possible. I deliberately avoided linking to any left-leaning newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent. (I linked only to news reports from The Telegraph - a Conservative Party supporting newspaper.) I linked to figures and research from independent, third-party organisations. None of this mattered.

When I shared the site on some politics forums, the reaction from Conservative supporters was negative. One poster even said it had strengthened his resolve to vote for the Conservatives even more!

What did I learn from the experience? That you can't persuade people with facts, no matter how dispassionately you present them. Especially on political stories. This is true whether you lean to the left or the right or the centre ground. It's kind of stating the obvious really and you see such behaviour everywhere online, including Hacker News (and yes, I'm just as guilty of such behaviour).

As Brexit looms in the UK, I'm thinking of creating a new site. This be very different from my previous site: loud, screaming headlines (much like our national newspapers), more sound-bites, and less detail because, let's be honest, that's what makes people sit up and take notice. Does that make me a hypocrite? Very possibly. If you can't beat them, why not joint them?

[l0tuseater]

This actually sounds like a pretty good idea, do you need any help with the website or content?

[dannas]

dannas.name/TIL.html. Today I've Learned