HACKER Q&A
📣 SuboptimalEng

What Is Your Blog?


Hello HN, I've been considering starting a blog, but realized I didn't know where to start. Wanted some inspiration so I thought I'd ask ya'll:

1. What is your blog about?

2. How often do you write on it?

3. Where do you host it (medium, substack, self-hosted, etc.) and why?

4. Link?


  👤 mplanchard Accepted Answer ✓
1. Whatever I feel like writing about: largely rust, things I've enjoyed reading, opinions about work stuff, the occasional random other stuff, etc.

2. Whenever I find the time, somewhere between a few times a week and twice a year, depending on lots of other circumstances.

3. Self-hosted (via azure & cloudflare) HTML generated from markdown files using a fun little utility I built as a learning project (all the generator code, markdown, & HTML is stashed on GH: https://github.com/mplanchard/speedy). For whatever reason I'm more motivated to maintain something I've built myself as compared to previous attempts with medium and such. The freedom to do whatever I want, however I want is nice. I can present things simply, with little to no adornment, avoid pushing trackers and ads on people, explicitly release my content under whatever copyright I want, etc. So far I've yet to incur any costs beyond Azure's free plan, but while it's been free so far, I'd gladly pay a bit of money to continue to keep it under my control.

4. https://blog.mplanchard.com/


👤 extremelearning
1. Mainly computational and applied maths - especially in the context of statistical sampling and computer graphics.

Some of my posts are detailed articles which, in my next life will evolve to journal papers, but most are just interesting things I have stumbled upon and explored, and then shared because I thought others might find them helpful and/or interesting, too.

2. Sporadically, but about once a month.

3. Wordpress. Why? I just downloaded some themes and a handful of plugins, and voila! I had a blog that is: well designed; has a responsive layout; elegantly displays math equations, and although 99% of the time has miniscule traffic, it copes well with occasional HN-induced traffic spikes. This means I can then set it and forget it, and focus more on writing.

4. http://extremelearning.com.au/


👤 the__alchemist
1. Sensor readings, their applications, and electronics projects

2. When I have an idea for an article and time to write it; average once every week to once every other week.

3. Self-hosted, since I have full control over it, and it might draw attention to the items I'm selling.

4. https://www.anyleaf.org/blog


👤 papa
1. I post my book notes and other things I’m learning about. I started it a year ago and I’m still trying to figure out what it’s about.

2. I post twice a week. I like the consistency and habit that regular posting imposes (I was posting 3x/week but found that was a bit too much).

3. I use Digital Ocean to host. The blog uses Ghost CMS. I’ve used WP in the past, but I like the blogging focus and relative simplicity of Ghost. On the hosting side, I like Digital Ocean’s pricing model, documentation and community. I’m starting a newsletter for the blog using substack mostly because it’s dead simple to setup a newsletter with them. And rather than fiddle with various solutions, I wanted something turnkey that I could just get started with immediately.

4. https://mentalpivot.com


👤 jonathanliu
Great to hear. Everyone should write and publish online. Writing clarifies your thoughts. Publishing online allows you to receive feedback from others.

1. Personal development and life updates, but I'm working towards writing market commentary. Took a step in that direction with my latest post.

2. Once a week. It's a fairly tough publishing schedule though and longer essays take more than a week to write. I may rethink it in the future.

3. Wordpress on Bluehost because it was easy when I started. I wouldn't recommend it though. Load times aren't great and changes are unwieldy.

4. https://jonathanliu.me


👤 semicolonandson
1. I vlog about my 10 year perspective on maintaining and growing my software business (a web app marketplace I bootstrapped in 2010). Things like architecture, stability, performance,seo etc. I'm a strong believer in ignoring the fashions and searching for the timeless in software, and this is my attempt.

2. Once a week at the moment. It's a lot of effort but I hope to monetize eventually (similar to railscasts or Laracasts).

3.Self-hosted (to avoid platform risk) plus YouTube (for organic inbound)

4. https://www.semicolonandsons.com/l/rails


👤 Whirl
1. I write mostly about happenings in quantum information and quantum computing. Ranges between dives into interesting papers and commentary on recent funding/start-up developments.

2. Whenever I feel inspired. Sometimes that means several posts within a week or two, sometimes it means months without posting. I realized I can’t force myself to do it unless I’ve got something on my mind. I just can’t write about something that I’m not obsessed with.

3. I host it on netlify as a static site. Seemed easiest at the time.

4. https://whirlwind.netlify.app/


👤 senjindarashiva
1. I try to write about daily life although I am far to inconsistent for that to work, I am a bit better at writing short reviews of books I read. The goal is to use the blog as a practise area for general writing and reflections about what I read.

2. Very inconsistently sometimes weekly and sometimes yearly... however as a target for the autumn I am aiming for monthly.

3. Currently it's a hugo site on a S3,cloudfront stack however I am in the process of moving away from US owned services so it will be moved to another host shortly.

4. https://fredrikloch.me


👤 stevesycombacct
1. Data science, mostly visualization, sometimes as fiction.

2. Only a handful of times, over the past year. The time needed to write and edit can be long. I'm also trying to write a novel.

3. Medium. I'm a writer for a publication called Nightingale.

4. https://medium.com/@PhilHawkinsDC, my top article is this one: https://medium.com/nightingale/draw-the-rest-of-the-chart-88...


👤 skorbenko
1. Mainly book summaries/notes/reviews. Planning to evolve it into full-scale compilatory essays. 2. About once a week or once new material is available i.e. I've finished a new book. 3. Github because I haven't gotten around to hosting it on a "real" domain yet. 4. https://skorbenko.github.io PS. Any comments as per the improvement of content/styling/direction is welcome. You can comment here or shoot me an email through the form on the website.

👤 asicsp
1. Mostly self-promotional articles to lead towards my ebooks. But I'm proud of my 'customizing pandoc' and 'what next in Python' posts.

2. I am averaging about 1 post per 2 months :(

3. GitHub, because it is free and I can use markdown. Currently using a jekyll theme, but I'm planning to switch to static-site generator like https://github.com/getzola/zola

4. https://learnbyexample.github.io/


👤 kondov
1. I write about the more philosophical aspects of software engineering. As the years passed I got more interested in the "why". Why do we use certain techniques. Why do we build software the way we do. I started researching my questions and writing essays based on what I've found mixed with some of my own thoughts.

2. I post twice a month.

3. It's hosted on Netlify and built with Gatsby. All of my articles are just markdown files.

4. https://alexkondov.com/


👤 SkyLinx
1. What is your blog about?

It's mostly about web programming and DevOps.

2. How often do you write on it?

Not as often as I would like. Been very busy.

3. Where do you host it (medium, substack, self-hosted, etc.) and why?

I actually just launched a new blogging platform at https://www.dynablogger.com so my blog is hosted there. It's a simple alternative to WordPress or Ghost. Check it out!

4. Link? https://vitobotta.com


👤 dglass
1. I write a mix between programming career advice and technical tutorials.

2. I’m writing a book about career advice for programmers that will be published through Holloway early next year, so I don’t post on my blog very often. I’m trying to write in the open at least once a month though.

3. It’s hosted on netlify because it’s free. I use Hugo to generate the static site.

4. https://www.exponentialbackoff.com/


👤 joehx2
1. What ever has piqued my interest. Mostly money topics and technical topics.

2. Anywhere from once a month to three times a week.

3. GitHub pages (i.e. a static Jekyll blog) with a domain purchased through Google. Mostly because it's free (except for the $12/year for the domain) but also because it gives me a lot of control over the actual HTML.

4. https://www.joehxblog.com/


👤 maverickJ
I write about ideas inspired from business,engineering and finance. I also share original thoughts of mine.

The goal is to enable my readers leverage these ideas for practical applications.

I currently release once a week on Sundays at 9am BST.

My newsletter is https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/

Check it out and please subscribe. It's growing and exciting.


👤 activatedgeek
1. Anything and everything. It is often about my current research or an interesting tid-bit from math, philosophy, social sciences etc. It is more of a fluid knowledge base than a blog.

2. I commit to the source code a couple times a week, but keep updating posts whenever I find time.

3. I host the source code on Github and deploy on Netlify.

4. https://im.perhapsbay.es


👤 avian
1. Various topics, most often about electronics and software. I'm currently writing about a system for RF vector measurements I'm making.

2. Around 1 post every 1 to 2 weeks.

3. A self-hosted static-site generator I made myself 15 years ago.

4. https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/


👤 kkoppenhaver
1. WordPress and Laravel tips that we've learned through doing client work as well as case studies for clients

2. I would say we average once a month or so.

3. Self-hosted WordPress. It's what we're familiar with and we can customize it easily if needed.

4. https://alphaparticle.com/blog/


👤 codingbbq
1. My experience learning technology, notes on books that I read and everything related to self improvement.

2. I have a reminder for every friday so yes, mostly 1 post weekly which is what I try to keep up to.

3. Github, because I wanted to learn github pages and also design a simple blog myself.

4. http://codingbbq.github.io


👤 indian369
1. Fiji food recipes

2. Once a week, videos as well

3. Self hosted, Wordpress because its easier for my partner to use. Eventually want to do a flutter app for this.

4. https://thatfijitaste.com/

A nice way to preserve and document the uniqueness of Fijian/Fiji Indian food and something different to do apart from coding.


👤 laminatofo
1. Anything I google and don't find an obvious answer - reinforces the learning and may save someone else the effort! Also side project status updates as it's useful to look back and see progression

2. Every few weeks? Not often enough!

3. Self hosted with Ghost

4. https://blog.sixpoints.co.uk


👤 ivars
1. Streaming, server-side media processing, graphics, networking and all things related. These are things that interest me and I'm sure there are my soulmates out there with similar interests.

2. I just recently started.

3. Hosted on Netlify, built with Hugo.

4. https://ivarsblog.com


👤 mindhash
My blog is about field stories on product and engineering : https://amols.blog

I started recently. So just once a week, I publish. Writing happens whenever I find a topic worth organising or sharing

Netlify. It’s free. I use gatsby theme borrowed from Victor Zhou


👤 rails
1. Software engineering in general. Topics I get in contact with and think about. A lot of it gets a bit philosphical because I don't have clear answers.

2. Maybe once a month

3. Self hosted. Got a server anyway, so I can as well host it myself.

4. https://stefanschick.eu


👤 stakkur
1. 'Random' as I develop a new direction.

2. Aiming for twice-weekly.

3. Regular web host w/WP. In the interest of 'stop playing around with tools/static sites and just write'.

4. https://jamesgill.net/articles/


👤 rozenmd
1. I mainly write about what I work on day-to-day. At the moment, that's using React as a frontend developer.

2. Weekly, I aim to ship by Tuesday evening (Australian time)

3. Self-hosted on AWS S3, with a Cloudfront CDN.

4. https://maxrozen.com


👤 mortivore
1. Technical topics that strike my interest. Thinking of expanding it to include other things I'm interested in.

2. Not enough.

3. Gastby.js and Netlify because it was easy to get started with.

4. http://carlchesterlloyd.com/


👤 eivarv
1. Security, privacy, software development, music, random goings on...

2. From a couple times a week to every other month.

3. Self-hosted because of development-ease and customizability.

4. https://www.eivindarvesen.com


👤 vinrob92
1. Productized services.

2. Haven't updated it in a while but used to be every week

3. Self-hosted, because I wanted custom features (community)

4. https://www.productizedstartups.com


👤 ijustwanttovote
1. Random thoughts and things I find 2. At least once a week 3. self hosted with ghost 4. https://www.michael1e.com/

👤 mslate
1. Technologies & lifestyle decisions

2. Sporadically, 1x a month on average

3. AWS S3 + Cloudfront, to control recurring costs and support spikey traffic

4. https://maxmautner.com


👤 aayushagg28
1. My personal public diary 2. Very rare 3. Self-hosted and built on wordpress 4. https://www.aayushaggarwal.com

👤 rdtwo
With everyone writing blogs do people actually read them or are they more like a public diary

👤 urlaunched
1. I'm writing about all startups we are working on.

2. Whenever feel inspired & have a time. But trying to do this

once a week.

3. self-hosted. want to rise own traffic.

4. http://urlaunched.com/blog