Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
195 comments
·January 29, 2025rednafi
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POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
I didn’t know what this acronym meant. Hopefully I saved someone a Google search.
southernplaces7
Thanks! You saved me from exactly that.
narmontas
I searched for this and then came back, only to find the answer below!
lippihom
Nice - thanks.
snackbroken
> If you don’t promote your work, no one else will.
This has not been my experience. If you do interesting things then there are plenty of people who are willing to bring attention to it. I've been cold-emailed by journalists wanting to interview me without ever doing anything other than a) make my work publicly accessible and b) collaborate with like-minded people.
Perhaps I'm lucky (probably). Perhaps my work would've gotten more attention if I spent more effort promoting it (probably). The things I do because I find them interesting are not things I feel the need to promote, because I'm not doing them for attention.
If your goal is to grab a lot of attention, you will inexorably have to do things that are not interesting because the only way to achieve broad appeal is to not offend anyone's tastes and the only way to do that is to be bland.
saelthavron
>> If you don’t promote your work, no one else will.
> This has not been my experience. If you do interesting things then there are plenty of people who are willing to bring attention to it. I've been cold-emailed by journalists wanting to interview me without ever doing anything other than a) make my work publicly accessible and b) collaborate with like-minded people.
Both of those are promoting your work so it is your experience. Your experience just has been that you haven't had to put much work into promoting your work so it doesn't feel like promoting your work to you.
gffrd
> the only way to achieve broad appeal is to not offend anyone's tastes and the only way to do that is to be bland
Careful. While I agree with the premise, you make it sound binary. You can have broad-er appeal while still being individual.
shermantanktop
> Careful.
I witnessed a memorable moment at work when an engineer responded to a VP and started by saying “careful.” Had it been another engineer, it would have been ignored as authoritative-sounding filler. But the VP did not take it well.
meiraleal
One can have even broader appeal by offending everyone
0xEF
When people give advice to content creators in the form of "when you do interesting things" my brain immediately jumps to one question; how do you know what other people consider interesting?
Honest question, because I am just starting out, myself. I have a small blog where I share my opinions and projects related to technology I enjoy. However, if I were to do a thought experiment and assume my audience is HN readers, I'd hesitate to say anyone here would find my posts very interesting. I like them, but I am not sure who else would.
I genuinely do not understand how to evaluate an audience, so I just write what I like to write and hope for the best.
econ
It primarily refers to what you consider interesting.
When you have a decent number of posts and some visitors you can see which sub set they find the most interesting.
You can also make a blog about things that don't interest you at all. This is the shortest route to success and you will hate your new job :)
rednafi
Don’t evaluate your audience; it’s a losing game. Write things so you can find them later, and leave the rest to chance. Worked quite well for me.
moehm
I know people here don't like site analytics, but for this one it's pretty good.
Setup Matomo or similar analytics software, write about a bunch of topics and review after a year which topics your readers are most interested in, for which they search on your site etc.
fsckboy
>Don’t be that JS guy who rewrites their entire site every week in a different stack and writes a blog post about it.
seems like a perfectly reasonable idea for a blog about different stacks. I'm not advocating it, but there's nothing wrong with it if that's what interests you.
gffrd
You’re missing the point.
OP is saying don’t be the person who says they want to write about Frogs, but who then spends an immense amount of effort not writing about Frogs, and writing about procrastination instead.
egeozcan
If it had been phrased like yours, I'd completely agree. I reread that part from the OP, but the point really doesn't come across.
watwut
Nothing wrong with that either. It is an unpaid hobby. Doing what you feel like doing is perfectly fine.
eclipsed0x01
That close minded opinion you quoted left a bad taste in my mouth and makes me not want to check the OP's blog out.
Almost every opinion people have has been covered by someone else in some way unless you are working at the forefront of something, so it usually depends on how you value-add to existing things with your own experience.
It's also that sort of I-know-what's-better attitude that turns a personal thing into a competitive thing.
What is semi-successful anyway...
mvkel
I'd argue that you could write only for yourself for your entire life and still have a successful blog.
walthamstow
People focus a lot on the 'web', and not enough on the 'log'
dredmorbius
Problem in a nutshell, excellent.
mvkel
Bring back .plan files!
rednafi
Yep. The success metric isn’t unidimensional here. Having external readers is just a cherry on top. I didn’t even think anyone else would find my writings interesting, let alone useful.
cryptopian
Often, the only reason I write is to have a method of sorting out the soup of thoughts in my head into a recognisable shape, with the accountability that being public brings to it (no, you can't have the link to my site!).
RobotToaster
> No one cares about the technology behind your site
You know a blog is going to be good when it's using the default wordpress theme from 10 years ago.
sidpatil
RobotToaster
I was hoping someone would post that (^_^)
rednafi
Exactly. Or a pure HTML and CSS site, like Daan Luu’s or Russ Cox’s blog.
gamedever
Strong disagree on Medium, Substack, etc. There are very famous and popular blogs on both with tons of followers. My sister asked for a blog, I steered her to substack. Zero effort, just works.
> Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time.
Nothing about substack wastes readers time.
Conversely, what wastes their time is your site being down or hacked and what wastes your time is maintaining your blog's infra, updating because vulnerabilities, and/or using bad UIs like blogging from github (maybe passable for nerds, not for non-nerds)
A blog isn't about the tech you use. It's about the writing. Worrying about tech is not going to add a single reader to your blog.
alisonatwork
Substack is trash. VC-backed, full of tracking pixels and privacy-invading anti-features, constant push to monetize, cross-promote and increase engagement... Every blogger who has moved there has gotten less interesting than they were when they were independent. It's everything that is wrong about social media cynically branded as some kind of alternative media outlet.
Of course there is plenty of money to be made as a social media influencer who specializes in long form content, and if that's the career a person is interested in building then sure - Substack, Medium, whatever - great choice. But for people who are interested in blogging as it used to be, independent writers who want to write without the pressure of editors, without paywalls, without popups, without forcing their readers into signup funnels... It might be a bit more work to set up, but tools like WordPress, Ghost etc are better suited.
eviks
> Nothing about substack wastes readers time.
Login modal wastes time.
pithanyChan
> if it took less time to write than it would take someone to read, it’s probably not worth writing.
Disagree. If it took less thinking than it will take reading, then yes, probably not worth it. But if you can trim your writing to the pith in every paragraph or even line, people will love you.
Too many people babble to keep the underlying lies and fraud and their complicity burried in narratives.
eagleislandsong
> trim your writing to the pith in every paragraph or even line
This takes a lot of time. Writing concisely is much more challenging and time-consuming than writing verbosely. Writing unnecessarily long essays means that your readers end up spending more time reading them than you did writing them.
As Blaise Pascal wrote: "I only made this letter longer because I had not the leisure to make it shorter."
jrflowers
I like this post about the value of brevity that starts with “disagree”, immediately agrees with what it’s responding to, and then goes on to talk about a completely unrelated thing
thaumasiotes
> That said, if it took less time to write than it would take someone to read, it’s probably not worth writing.
Is that actually a possibility? I can't type faster than I can read.
kqr
You can if yountype complicated tjings and include typos that make it hard to decode anything much less a run on sentence like this that includes redundancies and extra meaningless words saying the same thing which is easy to type but takes ages to read.
moehm
Well done.
econ
You don't have to type. I wrote some things with hundreds of links then assumed the reader was at least somewhat familiar with the set of links above each paragraph. I may even try keep opinions out of it (less effort) and simply paint a context with references for the reader to do their own thinking.
rednafi
LLMs
idlewords
The best writing advice I ever got was from a college professor—"everybody's got 100 bad essays in them. You just have to get them out."
I feel like this is what blogging is especially good for. You can clear out the awful stuff and then try to incrementally improve.
I would diametrically disagree with point #7—if you want to write well, you need to revise the hell out of it. I guess pick whose writing you like better, between me and the author, and take the corresponding advice.
nthingtohide
> then try to incrementally improve
My technique is Da Vinci method just collect / discover lot of shiny pieces. Then stitch them together later. Develop these pieces separately like colored glass pieces in a mosaic, sort of inversion of divide and conquer, collect and assemble.
_glass
I was doing this, and then it is confusing for people to follow. Nowadays I do this, too. But when I am ready, I write up everything once, then add in the details.
wholinator2
Yeah, I've been collecting many bits on my obsidian notes but I'm still in the stage of mostly dreaming of putting them together. But it is very interesting to see what thoughts i deem worthy of recording and which i don't. It's helped me significantly to form a coherent understanding of the world and politics, and i suspect one day it'll help me with finding novel research for my PhD
alxexperience
While I agree, I know it can be hard to start writing as well, because you are so worried about the quality. One of my professors from college brought up a great point that "No one will read your shitty first draft except you."
I find that phrase very helpful, because usually when I write, the first draft is always a giant mess. But you're able to craft it and edit it the best way that you can. So you can push out what you think is good work, and continue to improve as you write more.
idlewords
It is very scary. Oddly that makes blogs kind of a good place to start, since almost no one will find them or read them. It's public writing, but a lot less nerve-wracking than putting yourself out there in other formats (like forum posts).
1dom
I don't consider myself a writer, but it sounds like you do.
I find forum posts far, far less nerve-wracking than a blog post. For me, a forum post is almost like how the original article describes a chat: it feels closer to realtime, and feels easier, because it's just like playing a normal role in a conversation. It's normally a response to something, expecting a response.
A blog post feels closer to a formal publication, and I feel like they're more expected to stand on their own, without the justification and context helpfully provided by others' posts.
deadbabe
It’s better to get those bad essays out in the form of comments, you get instant feedback and you’ll know what works and what doesn’t work when you go to write a real blog.
7thpower
Sadly, that hasn’t helped me.
darig
[dead]
lazyant
yes; quantity leads to quality
wodenokoto
In high school I did a report on a local poet and author.
What struck me back then was he said in an interview that you need to go through at least a thousand sheets of paper before you start producing anything good.
As a high schooler dreading to write a 4 page report on the guy, a thousand pages sounded ludicrous.
thomastjeffery
This is what I tend to use HN/Reddit comments for... I know I would probably be better off writing a blog, but I'm too busy procrastinating to make that happen.
greenie_beans
there's a lot of good writing advice out there, but some of the best i got was from a college professor, too. i will botch it:
each sentence should make sense based on every prior sentence. each sentence should be able to stand alone on its own sheet of paper.
greenie_beans
i had the perfect restatement of this pop in my head later during the day and then i forgot it!
write each sentence on a single sheet of paper.
raesene9
I've been blogging for just over 20 years at this point, my main takeaways
1) Blog for yourself and no-one else. Write things up because you find them interesting or you learned something. Trying to second-guess things like what will be popular or get engagement is not a fun time for what is likely to be a hobby.
2) Keep it low maintenance and simple publishing process. I use Github pages and Jekyll, but other similar options are available.
3) If you're doing technical content, try to have practical examples. I've had multiple times where I thought I knew how something worked and, in the process of writing a blog with practical examples, found out I was wrong about how it worked!
MisterTea
Point 3 is very important and something that needs to be done more often. I would also say have someone who works in the domain you're writing about read it and give feedback.
zerr
Why publish at all? Why not just write privately?
raesene9
A couple of reasons (for me anyway)
1) Main reason is that if I've spent time working something out, I can save other people the time doing that, by writing down the details in a searchable place.
2) If I want to explain something to someone, it's easy if I can just point them to a blog I've already written
3) (bit of an unintended consequence) It helped get me my last two jobs :D Being able to point to a long history of technical blog posting was relevant when I got a job in advocacy as that's one of the necessary skills.
jononor
Sometimes you talk to someone (possibly online, usually about a shared interest), and they ask you what your thoughts are on X. Then you can just link them, if you have written on X (or related).
Sometimes others want to express a (non trivial) idea to someone else, and your writing may be the best thing they know that gets the message across. Then they can send it.
Sometimes (or rather, always) your idea and writing is not the best or final thought you have on the subject. But it is not until someone has read and commented/replied (thoughtfully) that you understand what the next refinement is.
And then there is serendipity, just putting it out there to see what might (or might not) come of it.
Plus maybe one finds it motivating to have it actually accessible for others. As a clear goal and a standard to hold each piece to.
branislav
I echo the other responses to your question. Just recently I had two instances where an old blog post of mine contained a solution to a problem a coworker encountered. I publish these notes mostly so that I don't forget about them, but it's an added degree of satisfaction when it proves helpful to others. I wrote a bit about this in one of my recent posts [1]. Don't be afraid of the rabbit holes!
lapcat
> I should add, for context, that my friend and I are talking about writing beautiful essays here. If you want to write the most precise thing possible, you need to edit mercilessly and accept that the writing ends up flat and disjointed.
I don't think that merciless editing and beauty are opposed. The author perhaps underestimates the extent to which artists mercilessly edit their own work. The author employs the metaphor of musical improvisation, but the best musical pieces are usually composed, not improvised. I like jazz, but... not for the songwriting. For stream of consciousness writing, you'd almost be better off posting on social media.
I've been blogging for over 15 years, and my advice, admittedly ironic, is to not take advice from anyone. Actually, that's my advice on many subjects. Everyone wants to impose their own little idiosyncrasies on you, but what works for them won't necessarily work for you. One's idiosyncrasies are not universal truths.
codpiece
I am getting started writing a blog, and this article is some of the most helpful I've read.
Makes me feel OK to be quirky and unpolished when the rest of the world is making reaction faces and pointing at text to feed an algo.
xanderlewis
Thank you for not doing that.
jopsen
Unless you aim for your blog grow a following. You really don't need to overthink anything!
A picture and 3 sentences can be a blog post.
You can talk about a hobby, a trip, a vacation or random thoughts.
Sometimes people will find a how-to blog post through Google. Sometimes an old friend or former teacher will look you up.
In reality, you'll probably be happier if your blog never grows a steady following :)
theshrike79
Daring Fireball by John Gruber (used to) frequently post just links to a post/article with a short excerpt.
No need to write a full-on 10k+ word novella on everything.
Animats
Do they have something to say, or is this like "I want to be in a band" of a previous generation?
al_borland
This is a question more people need to ask. Be it a blog, YouTube channel, podcast, or whatever else, they all need to be rooted in having something worth to sharing to some small piece of the world.
Many people get caught up in thinking the blog, YouTube, or podcast is the thing, when it’s just the thing that lets you share the real thing. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to really integrate this lesson.
1dom
That sounds like a chicken/egg scenario: how are you supposed to know if you have something worth sharing without producing that something first to make that assessment?
I think putting more questions and uncertainty in the way of actually just writing/podcasting/youtubing is what stops a lot of people really building the habit in the first place.
al_borland
That’s just it, a lot of people want to write, podcast, or be a YouTuber, but they struggle with ideas. They want to use the medium, but they don’t have content ideas. The “real thing” I was talking about is the overarching theme or topic. What are you into, what are you going to write, podcast, or make videos about?
I think understanding what you want to share helps solve the major stumbling block that leads to thousands of blogs with one entry that is effectively hello-world. If told to draw anything, most people will sit with a blank page. However, if they are told to draw a castle, those bounds give them the freedom to start and create, and it can evolve from there.
What are you into to? What hobbies do you have? What do you know, or have opinions about, that others might be interested in? This is your theme, the “real thing”. Writing, podcasting, or video production, without this usually falls flat after 1 or 2 attempts, and it makes it impossible for a habit to form.
If you’re already into something and doing it on a regular basis, then you’re just writing about, talking about it, or recording what you’re already doing or thinking about all the time anyway. The content and ideas can flow more easily, especially at the beginning. Not to mention, being more motivated to make the content, since it’s already a passion.
So many people are trying to make content about nothing, because they aren’t really doing anything else… and this is where friction is born. Do something you find interesting, then share that thing and your perspective on it. Start with the doing, not the sharing (writing, podcasting, and YouTubing is the sharing).
Hopefully this clarifies what I was getting at and resolves the chicken/egg thoughts.
a-french-anon
You're supposed to be capable of introspection and ask yourself "would I truly be interested in what I want to write? Do I even have an idea of what I want to write?" before writing anything...
Turboblack
there are two types of blogs - sincere ones, where the author pours out his soul and talks about what he can't keep to himself, possibly raising some important issues, trying to convey them to the masses, and SEO blogs - where there are excrements of hashtags, advertising slogans, constant repetitions, and requests to throw a bone (support the project, you haven't supported the project yet? you can do it here, well, or here! did I forget to tell you that you can support the project? by the way, one more thing - support the project!). Such ones are immediately banned. I am also very annoyed by those who are already looking for a place for a banner from the first minutes of the site's existence. you will not survive in this world without this cent? 10 bucks a month - payment for personal shame?
all this conversion and optimization of texts for search engines turns bloggers into robots, and it is simply impossible to read the texts, they are not human, they are as if created by neural networks. who needs this hypocrisy?
Animats
sincere ones, where the author pours out his soul and talks about what he can't keep to himself...
Talking head with big microphone, with no editing.
Relevant Black Mirror episode: [1]
tkjef
i think you're exactly right. but to blog with zero SEO in mind sounds foolish as well.
you should blog, and by a blog definition that is going on the internet. to get more people to read it (often the goal) the easiest thing to do is utilize the tool people use to find things on the internet (search engines).
if there are issues with spam, keyword stuffing, forever run-on paragraphs of nothingness, well that is the search engine algorithm's job to fix. And they have a lot of money to fix it.
and if they don't fix it we should use a new search engine. it'll take time. but those seem like the dynamics at play in this scenario.
LtWorf
I mostly write for future me.
drewcoo
> is this like "I want to be in a band" of a previous generation?
People started blogs for that? I thought that was more the realm of supermarket bulletin boards next to the firewood flyer.
Maybe I'm just from a previous previous generation.
How can "a friend" post something on a supermarket bulletin board now that they don't seem to exist?
billdueber
“Do you want to be a Writer, or do you want to write?” I think that almost any question of the form “Do you want to be an Xer, or do you want to X” is useful these days.
danielmarkbruce
100%. As a kid growing up near a golf course I knew lots of kids who wanted to be a pro golfer (me too). Did they want to spend 10 hrs a day at the range hitting ball after ball? Not so much. Lots of people want to be Warren Buffett - do they want to read 10-ks for 10 hrs a day? Not so much.
zem
what the gp is getting at is that back in the day there were people who wanted to be in a band not out of any particular musical talent or even inclination but because a lot of their friends were doing it and it looked like a cool thing to do.
dghlsakjg
Ronnie Coleman put it succinctly:
“Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.”
bookofjoe
Your question got me thinking about supermarket bulletin boards. I recall them from way back as busy places with lots of notes attached, but last year or thereabouts I remember seeing a small bulletin board with one note attached and thinking how unusual it was.
christophilus
Speaking from experience, start by building some tools to make blog publishing more pleasant— build a markdown processor in your favorite language, then write your own syntax highlighting and html parser / transformer, then benchmark and optimize the heck out of it, then decide blogging isn’t all that interesting, and write some games instead.
rchaud
Every post about blogging that reaches the top of HN turns into a discussion about static site generators, without fail.
madhadron
> (I should add, for context, that my friend and I are talking about writing beautiful essays here. If you want to write the most precise thing possible, you need to edit mercilessly and accept that the writing ends up flat and disjointed.)
There speaks someone who has never spent time writing poetry, and probably isn't very good at editing.
gerdesj
Why do you insist on only using the middle third of my screen to display content?
I'm over 50 and my eyes are not quite what they used to be. Your 12pt (ish) text is largely legible to me but why do you insist on your idea of presentation, rather than mine?
The whole point of the www as far as I recall is that you send a message and I receive it. How it is formatted should largely be a matter for the recipient, with some hints from the sender.
rchaud
> Why do you insist on only using the middle third of my screen to display content?
You can always read these posts in Reader Mode on your browser and adjust the text size, paragraph width etc. Even on this site, I have to magnify the display to 130% to view comfortably on a hiDPI screen.
The reason why most blogs are narrow is because blog templates are still from the 2000s in terms of how they show content on desktop . Traditionally the right hand third of the screen would display ads or a blog roll, while the left hand third would show the site's navigation .
Over time this changed, but what stayed the same was showing body text in the central third columns.
jraph
Content width is an odd thing to complain about:
- everybody limits it. This is because no matter the size of your screen, the human eyes are somewhat limited to lines of 70-130 characters. Higher than that, and your eyes have hard time finding the next line at the end of the previous one because the travel is too high. As a web page writer, you need to take care of that, because the default presentation will be bad for everyone if you don't.
- as it happens, the author uses Subtrack so they might not even have picked that size consciously.
- reader mode works on this page, so you can use this to read the post the way you want, and if you like the content and would like to read it regularly, there is an RSS feed that you can use with a client that displays posts the way you want.
The last point is why separate style sheets and correctly structured content are so nice: if you have such a strong opinion, you can tweak stuff or even ignore the style sheet and use yours. And reader mode actually makes that practical for most blog posts / articles.
(that said, I agree that the width seems particularly small, I replaced it with 80ex just to try and it looked better to me - but I just set up a new WordPress website and the default 2025 theme has the same ~730px width for the content, I don't know what's with this default size)
eviks
> human eyes are somewhat limited to lines of 70-130 characters. Higher than that, and your eyes have hard time finding the next line at the end of the previous one because the travel is too high.
That's unfortunately a common myth even re regular text (even more so re code with all the extra structural helps) that's responsible for a lot of vertical space waste.
But at any rate you can adjust your window to whatever is comfortable, no need for the author to incorrectly guess what's best for you
jraph
> That's unfortunately a common myth even re regular text
A common myth that seems quite well researched [1], no? Do you have some evidence of the contradictory?
> you can adjust your window to whatever is comfortable
Websites all have different layouts, you'd have to change the window width (and/or zoom level) for each website. That would be quite clunky… on devices where it's at all possible.
Forcing users to resize their windows constantly is not a nice alternative.
echoangle
Limiting width is what you should do, if the lines are too long you will struggle to find the next line when skipping back.
SteveVeilStream
My favorite two reasons for blogging:
1) Because sometimes you are right about something and it's nice to show that you were thinking about it ahead of time. An example would be my prediction in 2023 (which is fairly late in all fairness,) that one of the most important improvements in AI in the near future would be the ability to interact with any GUI as if it was an API.
2) Because often you are wrong about something and having it written down and in public will keep you honest about hindsight bias. An example would be predictions I made about lasting impacts of the pandemic on how we approach healthcare and minimizing respiratory infections in general.
jopsen
Also nice that people you interact with online or old friends who look you up, can see some of the stuff you do. Without having to resort to Facebook.
Whether that's hobbies, a home renovation project, a public presentation you did at work, a life event (wedding, kids, etc).
msephton
My advice is do it for yourself, any engagement is a bonus, and don't lock it behind a wall like Substack etc.
I have been maintaining a semi-successful blog [1] for the last five years and have learned a few things along the way:
- Own your content: Medium, Substack, Hashnode, Dev.to—all of them suck. Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time.
- No one cares about the technology behind your site unless it’s huge. So it should be the least of your concerns. Don’t be that JS guy who rewrites their entire site every week in a different stack and writes a blog post about it.
- Consistently writing is a lot of work, and there’s no way around it.
- Picking a niche and writing about it yields better results than trying to write about anything and everything.
- No one will probably read it for a long time, and that’s okay. You should write only for yourself in the beginning.
- POSSE is the way to go. If you don’t promote your work, no one else will.
- That said, if it took less time to write than it would take someone to read, it’s probably not worth writing.
[1]: https://rednafi.com