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Ask HN: Where do you post your writing?

31 points| whiskey14 | 3 years ago

I've started writing a blog post and was wondering how do the folks on HN host their blogs these days?

a) own website b) write on something like medium c) use in built article feature on LinkedIn

74 comments

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[+] kayamon|3 years ago|reply
I write on my own website, where I scream into the wind endlessly like an elderly person shaking his fist angrily at passing clouds. I don't believe anyone reads any of it but I find it helps me get my thoughts in order.

It's hosted on DreamHost. It's all custom, I glued it together with Markdown, CSS, and a little Python. I've been with them for years and I can still recommend them. I'm not sure the exact location matters though. Success comes not from the venue but bringing an audience.

Also the key to successful self-promotion is to spam your own stuff tirelessly until the heat death of the universe, so here we go:

http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/why-build/

[+] Eiriksmal|3 years ago|reply
Sometimes, it turns out the wind carries your voice farther than you thought. I submitted my blog to Hacker News a few years ago to see if I could get some sweet, sweet SEO juice for my name as I ramped up a job search. It managed to get to the top 5, which was enough to set the SEO flywheel spinning for quite some time. Months later, someone randomly submitted another of my prolix posts to HN--a mind-blowing moment. Is it one of you, dear RSS subscribers? How do you find me?

My original thesis was https://lawler.io/scrivings/long-form-websites-and-typograph...

Tufte CSS + Pelican static Python generated, hosted on a ~$5~ $6 a month DO droplet. Easy to write in a JetBrains IDE in Markdown, preview in Firefox via running `make devserver` in the console, then publish with a simple `make rsync_upload`.

[+] xtracto|3 years ago|reply
I do something similar, I setup a simple Ghost app in a DigitalOcean server. I write for me, I write about stuff that I find interesting and that I want to "find" in the future. I used to have Netscape bookmarks in the 1990s, del.ici.ous bookmarks in the 2000, Google Bookmarks (another for the Google cementery) in the 2010s, and they all have died on me one way or the other.

So writing a simple paragraph about a link, idea or thing that I *really* believe I'll find interesting later has worked quite well.

[+] whiskey14|3 years ago|reply
I really enjoyed reading that article, the ending was superb
[+] leephillips|3 years ago|reply
RSS subscribed. I hope you write more this year.
[+] animesh|3 years ago|reply
I love reading opinions from experienced developers. Subscribed, thank you.
[+] theandrewbailey|3 years ago|reply
I blog on my own site, on my own domain name, on my own hardware.

But it seems that most HN'ers use a static site generator and push to Github Pages.

EDIT: might as well give the link: https://theandrewbailey.com/

[+] whiskey14|3 years ago|reply
Nice set up and I'd like to run my own hardware if I had the time. One thing that has always put me off about running my own hardware is that someone in my house accidentally turns it off or we have a power outage. Do you have any tips for running your own hardware?
[+] night-rider|3 years ago|reply
One caveat to GH Pages is if the repo’s public then all your amendments, typos, mistakes etc can be seen in a diff due to the way GitHub works. Not sure about private repos however. You may be able to conceal mistakes with that but not sure
[+] justinlloyd|3 years ago|reply
Like several others here I run my own websites and Wordpress blog (multiple personal websites & blogs actually), on my own hardware, co-located in a data center on an unfettered gigabit connection and spinning rust storage. CentOS for the OS, Plesk for admin. Web server, mail server, bunch of other services pointing this way and that. Costs me just shy of $100/month.

My "blogs" are "one thought a day" (sometimes I post on this blog, sometimes I post on that blog) which also includes the list of movies I've watched (along with my brief thoughts), some TV shows (again with thoughts), books I've read (with mini-review), albums I've heard (with mini-review), art I've drawn, music I've made, problems I've solved, thought's I've thunk, and science papers I've digested.

And it goes all the way back to 1976, from childhood drawings and musings about programming problems at 12 years old only to discover someone had the same thought decades earlier, all the way through to "I was standing in the shower this morning and had this thought about artificial intelligence..."

I don't write to gain traction or popularity (tried it for a year, hated myself more than I usually do), and I am pretty sure if I did get any notoriety, I'd lose interest in publishing my writing on my blog pretty darn quick. I write because I want too. I want to gather my thoughts, and putting out something that someone else might read, even though nobody will read, means I have to actually pay attention to what I am saying about a subject.

[+] bombcar|3 years ago|reply
https://indieweb.org/POSSE has some in-depth discussion - for the vast majority of people publishing doesn't really matter because likely few will read so why not just use your own site?

In the off-chance your writing becomes noticed, you'll have it there.

[+] whiskey14|3 years ago|reply
This is wonderful and pretty much exactly what I want to set up. Seems like a bit of overhead in setting up the APIs, but worth it. I wonder how much extra maintenance it adds?
[+] kentlyons|3 years ago|reply
This is an interesting set of options as it points towards a couple different things. One is the technical infrastructure needed to host the blog (and several comments here are discussing that).

Another key difference is discoverability of the blog/content. Something like LinkedIn leverages the platform so the post gets in front of people (however how that happens is outside your control). A self hosted website does not have any direct way to attract/retain the audience (you need a way to get inbound traffic, and then a way to get people to keep coming back). To me, this part seems like the more challenging bit relative to the tech stack and I'm curious what other perspectives folks have here.

[+] SenHeng|3 years ago|reply
For the latter bit, I've noticed many tech blogs use a 'comment on HN' link.

I don't really care for discoverability and don't want to deal with comments anymore so I don't do anything. Maybe one day I'll restart my twitter account and tell people to tweet at me or something?

[+] cossatot|3 years ago|reply
My own website: https://rocksandwater.net

I started out with Wordpress circa 2011 but I switched to Pelican/AWS once the plugins became available to use Jupyter notebooks in the blogs (I'm a geoscientist so I like to show numerical/computational stuff in the posts, although it's been a few years).

More recently I've implemented some cool plate tectonics visualizations in D3.js:

https://rocksandwater.net/blog/2020/11/tibet-blocks-js/ (tectonics of India-Asia collision)

https://rocksandwater.net/global-block-model/ (work-in-progress global tectonic plates/blocks)

For those who are primarily interested in blogging for writing purposes (i.e. primarily text based) then going with a wordpress/medium type centralized solution sounds great. For me, SSGs can better deal with the content that I make, and pushing to AWS is really not that hard.

Of course I'm not really interested in wide visibility either (pretty niche stuff here...).

[+] burnt_toast|3 years ago|reply
I went the lazy route and host a static website on Github pages. I don't advertise my blog but it's gets about 20-30k views a year through random searches.

Hosting on platforms like Medium is good for views (so I've heard) but I'd be concerned about relying on someone elses platform. What happens if the platform goes downhill and your stuck with them? What if they shut down? What if you're wrongfully banned?

Guess it just comes down to preference and what you find important.

[+] Cupertino95014|3 years ago|reply
Substack is it right now. If you're like most of us and just want to shake your fist at clouds, then there are lots of forums. I appreciate learning about them. Maybe lightning will strike, like it did for Eiriksmal .

If on the other hand, you want to make money off your writing, like Matt Taibbi, then Substack is the place for you. They give you most of the royalties. Ted Gioia explains it in his interview with Rick Beato.

[+] Eiriksmal|3 years ago|reply
So, statistically, how many more years will it take for me to be hit again? Writing something less useless and and more frequently would probably decrease that epoch.

On the lightning itself: Some of the consulting offers I got in response to the post on dev hiring strategies were... interesting. I didn't pursue any of them, but they showed the world is a weirder place than our whitewashed walled gardens make it out to be.

I'd certainly agree that the most "professional" (polished? well-written? organized?) writing I read these days is on Substack. In five more years, that writing will inevitably be found on a new platform that displaced Substack which bumped Medium, which ate Blogger, etc. Any bets that Evan William's next business will also involve publishing people shaking their fist at clouds?

[+] EddieDante|3 years ago|reply
> If on the other hand, you want to make money off your writing, like Matt Taibbi, then Substack is the place for you.

Yeah, no. I have a friend who tried to make money off his writing, and every reader he got mistook themselves for his boss. He'd stopped publishing because it just wasn't worth the hassle to him anymore.

[+] pawptart|3 years ago|reply
I'm probably like most people and just use Github pages:

Blog is built with Jekyll. Treating GH as a CMS means I have a diff built-in to my platform. I also have a GH action that can schedule merges for post PRs. No one really cares to look through the blog source code but I have GH premium so that the pages repo can be private -- coupled with the merge scheduler this means no one can see the post before it goes live on my blog.

Other than that I have a static site landing page hosted on Netlify, also a private repo. Both sites are under the same domain:

https://ty-porter.dev/ https://blog.ty-porter.dev/

[+] pivic|3 years ago|reply
Speaking about my personal writing, I post on three different sites:

* https://pivic.blog: my new blog that runs on Mataroa. I write in English about anything here. SSG, extremely small load time.

* https://niklas.reviews: my book reviews in English. SSG, Jekyll/Netlify.

* https://niklas.rodeo: thoughts in Swedish (my mother tongue). SSG, Jekyll/Netlify.

I've also written on https://niklasblog.com for about 25 years; this is a WordPress blog that I might kill. I'll see about that.

[+] rufius|3 years ago|reply
Self-hosted OpenBSD VM on vultr.com.

I wrote my own static site generator[0] to suit my needs. It’s not especially fancy - just a series of JSON config files and then a notion of “posts” and “pages” that are in Markdown format.

The code gets pushed to sourcehut and uses a build stage to deploy the site.

None of this is especially novel - I wrote the static site generator mostly because I was frustrated with how complex some of the more flexible existing tooling is. Nothing wrong with those tools, just more complicated than I need.

[0]: https://git.sr.ht/~zacbrown/zsitegen

[+] wcedmisten|3 years ago|reply
I just set up my own blog last week that's hosted on a $5/mo digitalocean droplet and uses cloudflare as a CDN and to provide SSL support.

It's definitely more complex than raw HTML purists would prefer. I'm using NextJS with static site generation to generate static HTML from my React code. I'm also using MDX to automatically compile my articles, which are written in Markdown but I can embed React components in them.

https://wcedmisten.fyi

Source is available at the bottom of the page. All feedback welcome!

[+] SenHeng|3 years ago|reply
I started off in the late noughties with Wordpress and my own domain. Medium came out and was actually good so I and pointed my domain at it and shifted over. Then Medium started going to shit so I moved to GitHub Pages and hugo, but building a site in hugo was a huge PITA so I just wrote plain markdown files and left it as it.

This year, I rewrote the whole thing in Next.js and now it's somewhat more presentable.

https://legendofcode.com

[+] ecesena|3 years ago|reply
Hackernoon, or if I can't then medium. Hackernoon is a publication, so your post goes through review and sometimes even light editing.

I don't mind because in my experience it improves readability (I'm non-native) but I guess it depends on which editor you get and in general how do you feel about it.

Moreover, Hackernoon is to share a story / something meaningful to others. It's not for a PR about you launching a new feature for your product. In these cases I still use medium.

[+] rektide|3 years ago|reply
(To give the cynics all too much ammunition,) I'm still too busy setting up & playing around with Kubernetes to have made much progress actually getting a homesite up.

2018 I think I had made my yearly objective to be back to hosting a more live site. I have some WIP persistence layers that I want to power it all. A desire to use webcomponents & ActivityPub- with my homesite as basically a well tailored feed reader that happens to point first at my content.

I have written a couple tbings on LinkedIn, because I more or less wanted some practice. But not a lot.

Mainly... I guess I ought confess.... I write here. In comments. To me, my writing is about, not quite an arena of ideas (it's no so zero sum) but participating in exploring & thinking & searching for Truth and Meaning, Justice and Liberty, Progress and Gain. Hashing things out, seeing a lot of different ways of viewing a thing, and finding a couple pivotal points or ideas to inject: that's really rewarding. I really enjoy the interlinked nature of the web, and having threaded conversations to engage in, that can branch out & talk to different ideas very much embodies similar values.

[+] tndl|3 years ago|reply
This is a good question. I've struggled with this quite a bit, I used to post exclusively on medium, then everything on my own site (https://tndl.me), and now I'm toying with the idea of a substack. But really the important thing is to just write and publish it _somewhere_, the biggest benefactor of your writing will always be yourself.
[+] drakonka|3 years ago|reply
I have the source of my blog (https://liza.io) in a private GitLab repo and have GitLab CI build and upload the static site to S3. This has been my workflow for years. Aside from tig (which is what I use for a git CLI) getting really slow (presumably with the size of the repo), it's been a really smooth workflow.
[+] abathur|3 years ago|reply
SSG (hugo) + git -> own site (hosted at nearlyfreespeech.net)

I used to do very ~project-oriented blog stuff at tumblr, but I wanted to be able to consolidate things down to one site where I could have a ~main stream with all posts, while still being able to add new streams for big themes/topics/projects. (This works, though IIRC I haven't sorted out separate RSS feeds for each stream yet.)