I think the big number 1 that trumps all others when building a person website is: focus on writing content.
This is by far the hardest part. All the other stuff: it's just tangential. Wordpress, Blogger, Jekyll, Hugo, Medium, hand-written HTML files: IMHO it doesn't really matter if you don't have any content. Just use whatever is easiest to get started with and gets out of your way when writing. For me, personally, it would be writing Markdown in Vim and converting that. For other people, it's something else.
Later, when you actually have some content going you can start focusing on tooling, layout, and so forth. Converting things to another platform usually isn't too hard. But chances are, you will never actually get any content going. I've seen a lot of people create personal websites, write one or two things on it, and then basically don't do anything with it.
I've built some websites for various friends/non-profits over the years, and about 90% of the time they never actually wrote any content. These days I ask people to write content first, and then I'll build the website for them. Most of the time I never hear about it again. That's okay, it's really hard to write content and a lot of people (myself included, before I had more experience with this sort of thing) tend to be way too optimistic about it and underestimate just how hard this can be.
And people will read your website regardless if your content is good. Is Paul Graham's website the peak of web design? Not really. People still read it. Dan Luu's website? Pretty much the most basic HTML file you can get. Still widely read.
That being said, if your goal is also to learn more if you're young or inexperienced: then sure, muck around with these tools all you want. I learned a lot from building my personal website over the years in all sorts of tools (geocities, hand-written HTML, shell scripts, PHP, Python, PHP again but this time with MongoDB, back to shell script, and finally settled Jekyll) and for much of this time I didn't have a lot of content. That was okay, because I learned a lot from the process.
I don't know how many times I've had this conversation with friends:
Me: How's that game you were making?
Friend: I realized I should probably write some tooling to make my life easier. So then I started on that, and I got pretty far, but then I ran into some limitations with the engine I was using, so I decided to write my own. I got pretty far on that, but then I had an idea for a different game, so I shelved the first game and now I'm working on this other one.
Me: Right on, how's the second game going?
Friend: Well I'm investing some time to build tooling before I really get started on it.
This. Perfect description of how to avoid the real challenge.
- Spend time on inventing library instead of thinking hard about the customer need for an App
- Spend time on learning productivity tips instead of doing actual work
- And in this case, spend time worrying about the blog platform instead of writing articles
I learn this lesson hard and constantly remind myself to avoid this pitfall.
It's one of the hardest questions and it comes up on every iteration. For me, delaying my next round of features in favor of a CI/CD system was really satisfying. Now it's great that when I write a new feature, I merge to master, wait a few minutes and see it on the live site. But I'm also battling against the temptation to switch from redux to xstate, switch from dagre to cytoscape, switch from fetch to graphql, switch from akka-http to play, switch from akka to akka typed, switch from scala 2 to scala 3...
I feel like I've moved onto the next stage of this =)...
Friend: How's your game going.
Me: I've got some of the map stuff I was working on working, but last weekend I had a brainwave for a new mechanic idea that I really like, so I spent some time quickly prototyping that out.
Friend: Oh cool, can I see it?
Me: Sure, shows them the prototype
Friend: This looks pretty cool, but I don't think it fits what you're currently building?
Me: I could make it fit, in some ways it's just a resource allocation mechanic, but you're right, it doesn't quite fit, but it's done for now and maybe I can use it in something else in the future. Best get back to my game...
So lots of small chunks of progress with asides now and again when I get some zany idea.
This is definitely me... Is way easier to focus on the fun stuff and try to avoid the hard stuff. Which is how you could spend years working on something without actually finishing it.
"fun" in quotes. The tooling around a project may be fun, in the same way that junk food is delicious. But ultimately, it delivers almost no value to you. I think the reason so many hobbyists do this, me included, is that there's no _need_ to generate value from your hobby, and thus, no incentive to push for the actual project completion!
A business that does this same thing will soon bankrupt (or swallow more VC funding!)
Wait! Am I one of your friends?! ;) Reading this comment and the replies made me understand that, despite country/culture differences, we are the same :)
> I think the big number 1 that trumps all others when building a person website is: focus on writing content.
> This is by far the hardest part. All the other stuff: it's just tangential. Wordpress, Blogger, Jekyll, Hugo, Medium, hand-written HTML files: IMHO it doesn't really matter if you don't have any content. Just use whatever is easiest to get started with and gets out of your way when writing. For me, personally, it would be writing Markdown in Vim and converting that. For other people, it's something else.
This is why I find the quest for availability of anything (as opposed to the old world where everything had a high cost to entry) is mostly bad. It's easy to push out noise. Maybe that comment is noise too though :)
Exactly, look at all the free blog websites, medium, wordpress.com, blogger, etc. They are filled with tons of low signal noisy posts of people with nothing to say. It really makes discovery of good content harder, not just for me as a user, but also for the platforms to highlight that. Most often I get good stuff from websites without any styling, just plain text hosted on a little box under the desk.
I can't count the number of times I've stopped reading a Medium article because it contained information that wasn't just objectionable but was actually downright false.
Many Medium articles are even stolen verbatim from other websites. It's a cancer.
I think this follows Sturgeon's law: "90% of everything is shit".
Is it perhaps even more self-published blogs? Probably. I think Malcolm Tucker wasn't completely wrong in his assessment of blogs[1]. Yet at the same time, it also enabled a large group of people to write and get some form of audience who never would have otherwise.
There are a lot of spaces where I see this. Standup comedy (in France at least, can't speak about the US because it's older) have seen a lot of new people due to a booming scene, but after a few years people are all saying the same thing, its hard to keep going. Life is not what it seems and ease of doing doesn't guarantee long term.
I wanted to make blogs but it was not the right spirit, also it distracts you from doing 'actual' things. Anyway time will settle things out.
Oh it's definitely the case in North America too. Comedy is hard and you can't do it all without an audience, so the quality at open mics is always going to be mostly terrible. Same with any artistic endeavour really, but in most things beginners can just bumble along in private. Not so with comedy. If you're into learning it, I would really suggest a course with enough people that you get a semi-private open mic every week. It's a great way to test material on a semi-realistic audience. I've done a couple here where 2/3s of the class time was our private open mic, like a comedy version of toastmasters, and that alone was worth the money. (Hell, given you have to buy at least a drink at an open mic, it wasn't even expensive!)
I'm really not into it besides my own little private open mics in the shower (80% approval rate). It was just the fact that I saw the young dudes star just before YouTube came along and since, between podcasts, or other videos, you can witness their thought process, beliefs, aging and evolution about their business. The usual I want to follow my dreams then 'i need an average quality act so to attract enough people regularlu', the struggle of renewal. Etc etc
> It really makes discovery of good content harder
You make a fair point but do we always have to say something meaningful. Sometimes reading about some randoms day and how their dog was doing a dog version of a crip walk is mindless entertainment before switching context into that behemoth cpp file waiting for you to refactor and debug.
This is a low effort comment but my point is we don't always need to have all the lights on.
Writing is useful even if nobody reads it. Writing clarifies and sharpens my thinking. I have ideas I wouldn't otherwise have.
I wrote for the void for a long time. At the time, some folks on my immediate team found it useful. Now, a few years later, I'm still referencing those posts.
The important hard work was actually writing and polishing the idea until it was good enough to publish.
Agreed. I currently publish a bit of writing about my software engineering opinions to a website that only a couple of my non-software engineer friends know about. It doesn't make much sense to them, but their playful criticisms help me hone my ideas and hopefully simplify my writing (something I have a big problem with).
Once I added stat tracking to my website I realized I had more hits than expected.
Also, in general, it’s not really about the number of people that read it. If it’s important enough to spend time writing about it, then if even just 1 person reads the post that’s good enough.
Later I discovered others have expressed similar sentiments long before I was even born, e.g. "writing is thinking". Ah well, always nice to feel validated when you independently arrived at essentially the same conclusion as other people who are probably smarter than you :-)
One of the best things I've done is keeping a wiki and log of my notes. Turns out that other people found them useful, as well. These days there are many easy to deploy options for hosting wikis and notes, especially if you're fond of Markdown.
> Small b blogging is writing content designed for small deliberate audiences and showing it to them. Small b blogging is deliberately chasing interesting ideas over pageviews and scale. An attempt at genuine connection vs the gloss and polish and mass market of most “content marketing”.
I think Sheldon Brown's website is another great example.[1] It's a fantastic resource if you're into cycling, and Sheldon made it to Wikipedia with that site[2], which is more than most people with fancy sites can say. Actually, it's probably a better example than Paul Graham, Dan Luu, or Christ Lattner's sites as it shows that not only tech folk will read your basic looking website as long as the content is good.
My favourite bit is how to use a u-lock: put the lock around the back tire within the triangle of the frame, not around the frame itself. This protects both the rear wheel (2nd most expensive part) and the frame because removing the lock would mean cutting through the back wheel. This is widely known as the Sheldon lock strategy.
So true. I have stories both private and professional where people got angry at the site I built for them. Because it was empty. I have learned the hard way to insist on content before sinking time into a site.
Cory Doctorow has a good take on this recently. It isn't just writing content but getting ideas out there that can later become something more. [1] Doctorow calls blogging like a Vannevar Bush Memex but publishing as a series of entries that can start to create a better idea and "nucleate".
>If you’re a writer or an activist or anyone else engaged in critical synthesis, then the news-stories, ideas, sights and sounds you encounter are liable to tug at your attention: this is a piece of something bigger, and maybe something important.
>Every day, I load my giant folder of tabs; zip through my giant collection of RSS feeds; and answer my social telephones — primarily emails and Twitter mentions — and I open each promising fragment in its own tab to read and think about.
>If the fragment seems significant, I’ll blog it: I’ll set out the context for why I think this seems important and then describe what it adds to the picture.
These repeated acts of public description adds each idea to a supersaturated, subconscious solution of fragmentary elements that have the potential to become something bigger. Every now and again, a few of these fragments will stick to each other and nucleate, crystallizing a substantial, synthetic analysis out of all of those bits and pieces I’ve salted into that solution of potential sources of inspiration.
Publishing is better than note taking and there is a rigor to make it readable. However, these don't always have to be complete ideas, they can be part of the idea that is interesting. From there other iterations of new parts of that idea emerge. The writing helps you refine the topic, idea and focus. Similar to how spaced repetition helps you learn or comments help you refine ideas. [2] The ideas are sketches like pre-production, entries are inking like production and then one day a fully fledged post-production quality researched idea/product can emerge.
If it's purely personal as well, I think it helps to focus on the content by treating it as a hobby. Write what you want, post it up, and just keep doing it for yourself.
Eventually you'll start to see that you prefer writing about some topics more than others, and that content might become increasingly specialised as you dive deeper into the topic. Not a bad point to consider spinning it off if you think there's more potential there, or if you believe you've found your niche.
I'm doing this with my own writing (after who knows how many reboots), and I've dabbled with tutorial style posts with heavy code examples, silly experiments, and higher level musings about agile, work in general, as well as my personal experiences with mental health. I've learned that I have the most interest in relating my personal experiences to how we work, whether that's exploring agile or some other methodology, getting into compassion and leadership, or whatever else comes to mind. And every now and then I'll spend most of an evening writing something new. That's my niche.
I was in the same boat a month ago. However, I accumulated content that I wanted to publish, without cluttering it with commercial stuff (e.g. on medium).
Focus on writing was my only criteria. But most themes I found for Hugo, Jekyll etc. had too much layout. I finally settled for a stripped-down mkdocs (du.nkel.dev). Primarily because mkdocs has superior markdown code formatting extensions (superfences etc.). The only thing I am missing is easy integration of a self-hosted open source comment system.
Regarding the OP's website: Unfortunately, it feels too cluttered. Examples: Why the header line `Home / Blog / ...`? I can see this from the URL. Why duplicate the title? Why duplicate urls next to the icons (facebook etc.)? Too much space without any content. Links/Contact/Search.. all mostly uninteresting for the majority of visitors.. Yes, mkdocs has search, too. But I disabled it - no one will use the search function on a blog.
Thanks for the feedback regarding the clutter. Some parts have indeed grown beyond what I originally planned. I was able to remove the breadcrumbs and it didn't feel like a loss. I also shortened the social media links at top of the page since you were right to notice on some pages they took lots of space for no good reason.
I have the opposite problem. I started writing content, then started writing custom markup to convert the content to HTML. But I started having so much fun writing marked-up content, it took over. So I have a content surplus.
I know from past experience (personal and that of others) that getting content online is fairly easy. The part I don't get is how to find an audience for content that 'is good' - but doesn't have broad appeal. Publishers know that stuff, who else does?
Blogger, Medium, et.al... will these free services be around in the future after their money dries up as they find a sustainable business model for hosting your thoughts? Will you own the data you published if it's on some social network?
I just started creating content and also sampling ways in which to put it up. The content I am creating is a book teaching technical topics in English and other languages.
I will use formulas occasionally. I expect there will be a lot of diagrams (made via Inkscape and exported as JPG).
What is the easy way to format this material out as a book with chapters? You mentioned Markdown in vim. Could you give some pointers on how I can get started that way
as a corollary, i wish the writing experience for more varied environments was much better. it's hard when you want to jot something down on the go and keep drafts in sync across devices without getting caught in some cloud subscription service. the tablet writing experience without a keyboard is still subpar, not to mention phones.
This is by far the hardest part. All the other stuff: it's just tangential. Wordpress, Blogger, Jekyll, Hugo, Medium, hand-written HTML files: IMHO it doesn't really matter if you don't have any content. Just use whatever is easiest to get started with and gets out of your way when writing. For me, personally, it would be writing Markdown in Vim and converting that. For other people, it's something else.
Later, when you actually have some content going you can start focusing on tooling, layout, and so forth. Converting things to another platform usually isn't too hard. But chances are, you will never actually get any content going. I've seen a lot of people create personal websites, write one or two things on it, and then basically don't do anything with it.
I've built some websites for various friends/non-profits over the years, and about 90% of the time they never actually wrote any content. These days I ask people to write content first, and then I'll build the website for them. Most of the time I never hear about it again. That's okay, it's really hard to write content and a lot of people (myself included, before I had more experience with this sort of thing) tend to be way too optimistic about it and underestimate just how hard this can be.
And people will read your website regardless if your content is good. Is Paul Graham's website the peak of web design? Not really. People still read it. Dan Luu's website? Pretty much the most basic HTML file you can get. Still widely read.
That being said, if your goal is also to learn more if you're young or inexperienced: then sure, muck around with these tools all you want. I learned a lot from building my personal website over the years in all sorts of tools (geocities, hand-written HTML, shell scripts, PHP, Python, PHP again but this time with MongoDB, back to shell script, and finally settled Jekyll) and for much of this time I didn't have a lot of content. That was okay, because I learned a lot from the process.