The timing of this post is quite impeccable - just a few days ago I finally went ahead and paid for a domain, to set up a personal blog (despite having decided to make one several years back). I would like to ask fellow HN bloggers, what were some of the unexpected things you encountered in your process? (I'm more curious about the experience, though I am also interested about more technical details.)
Well, I can say, as a person who's been running a blog since 2003 or so, if you're planning a long-running online presence, building a site based on technology that makes it relatively easy to move to different technology platforms is really important. a) it future-proofs your site so you can move as the technology moves, but also, b) the odds are you'll end up with content that's easier to back up, manipulate, etc.
The first iteration of my blog was based on an old wiki engine, and the beauty of that engine was that, while the markup format was unique, the data was stored in flat text files that I could easily manipulate.
Some number of years back, now, I moved to a static site generator that uses Markdown as the source format, and since I was dealing with flat files, I actually had a fighting chance of making the switch fairly easily.
And now that everything is just Markdown, I can version control it with git, back it up easily, etc. And again, if I decide to switch technologies in the future, I can do that because the content is stored in a format that's very easy to manipulate.
And thinking very long-term, this kind of approach ensures that archiving your digital legacy will be a lot easier, since the content isn't tightly bound to a specific technology.
Thanks for your comment, that (tech getting depreciated) is something I hadn't consciously considered. I also think Markdown is a really solid idea for anything that doesn't need to be very fancy (like most blogs).
I've had my personal domain since 1999. It was originally hand-coded HTML, but has been WordPress for at least the last eight years.
Back in 2014 I wrote a beginner's guide to C#, with the lessons building a very simple (non-graphical) role playing game. It was mostly to show the thinking behind starting out very simple, with the basics of objects, and eventually build a program that is larger and "complete".
It got a little popular and I've received quite a few messages/comments from people who've told me the lessons helped them understand things better in their programming courses at college or code camps. Those messages have been a lot more fulfilling than being coder #12 on $BigCo's multimillion-dollar, multi-year project.
It's also a nice thing to point to when interviewing. Just like a public GitHub repo, I doubt most interviewers take more than a cursory glance at it, but it is a way to stand out from the crowd of candidates who don't have a technical blog.
I've had times when I've burnt out and haven't posted for a year or more. Other times, I get a burst of energy and write every day. There is a bit of pressure to feel like I should be writing and posting. And, since I have programming guides, there are occasional support questions to answer (especially when Microsoft changes Visual Studio or moves from .NET Framework to .NET Core then to .NET 5/6). But, it usually doesn't take too long to deal with that.
On the technical side, it has been a bit of a pain to go through web hosts every few years. The hosting service eventually gets bought out, service quality goes down, or the site gets slow (and support says, "It looks OK to me"), etc.
Thank you for your insights. I think the variability in writing is something I'm also going to personally experience. That feeling of satisfaction and happiness sounds great - good for you, and also thank you for offering such useful content for free!
Thanks! I've yet to set up the website (planning to go for a simple static site), and I mainly intend to post to HN haha (partly because of the nature of topics and discussion).
Thanks for your links, the point of doing something once in a while no matter how small really makes sense and was something I hadn't considered.
