Ask HN: Where do you post your writing? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where do you post your writing?

31 pointswhiskey1474 comments

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

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/

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.

RSS subscribed. I hope you write more this year.

I really enjoyed reading that article, the ending was superb

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`.

I love reading opinions from experienced developers. Subscribed, thank you.

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/

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

I'd bet a significant amount of money that in most cases no one will ever bother to look through the commit history...

And if you're really worried about it you do your work in one repo and "publish" to another.

Or git commit --amend and force-push :-)

If you're publishing a site to the internet anyway, anyone could download every page on your site, submit it to archive.org, take a screenshot, or manually copy your posts onto a notepad. I find the GH Pages + Jekyll workflow works really well for my purposes, and it's been a nice way to play around with static site generation to boot.

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?

I have it set up in my basement next to the router; both are plugged into a UPS. UPS claims to run for about 2 hours on battery (with an ear-piercing beep every minute the whole time), so it'll cover most momentary power outages. Admittedly, I got the UPS because I have the drives encrypted and didn't want to re-type the key every time I had a half second power outage.

Oh, and backups. I'm pretty solid on backing up the data and server software (I think), but I don't have spare hardware, so if something physically breaks, I'll be down for a week or so.

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.

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.

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?

If you're planning on using a static site generator that can also generate an RSS feed, it's trivial. Hugo can update your RSS feed and dev.to can consume that feed. No APIs to set up.

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.

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?

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...).

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.

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.

> 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.

Note I didn't say everyone would make money. Did your friend find some other way to do it, or just give up?

He doesn't publish any longer, but he hasn't stopped writing.

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?

> So, statistically, how many more years will it take for me to be hit again?

I don't know, but these are not independent trials. Maybe some of the people who saw your first post will come back for more. Good luck to you.

As for "in five more years": eventually, some of these polished, well-written pieces will be appearing under a single cover, all at one convenient price. We could call it a "magazine" (tm).

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/

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.

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

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!

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

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.

(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.

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.

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.

I guess I'm a bit late since I've just started a blog [1]. Anyway, I've chosen the old self-hosting + Zim combo but also copy articles over to Medium [2].

[1] https://slothblog.org/ [2] https://medium.com/@balle.johannes

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.)

On my own website that I created exactly for this reason.

My first post was a guide on how I did it with Hugo, Netlify and Wowchemy: https://nicolaslouge.com/post/how-to-create-static-website-h...

Owning your own domain and content is important. I run my blog on Ghost. Substack is nice (and you can pay $50 to add your own domain), but my business model (i.e., free content and no business model) doesn't align with theirs.

[0] https://matt-rickard.com/

Medium works out of the box. It should work if you don't want to spend too much time thinking about where and how to write. It is the place I recommend starting for any person interested in writing, not setting up a website.

If you want to have your website, GitHub Pages + a static site generator works well.

Facebook/LinkedIn etc are the most closed gardens, and I wouldn't recommend them unless it's where your audience is and your posts are not intended to be evergreen.

Regardless of the above, I think what is crucial:

- Just write. Where is secondary and can be changed later, don't agonize over that. Just pick the first which is "good enough" and see if it fulfills your needs over the course of your blog posts.

- Make sure to have some backups anywhere. Every server can change its ToS, shut down, or make its usage (and data export) cumbersome.

I (currently) host my own website but over the years, it's been a viscous cycle:

Wordpress -> Static site generator -> Squarespace -> Static site generator

Over. And over again.

It's a constant battle between 1) wanting control over my data/customization 2) writing and publishing.

Never ending battle

YES same with me! Argh.

Always on my own website.

I also used to "syndicate" my posts to Medium, which did help get a few eyeballs on my work, but I didn't like the direction Medium went so i gave it up. Ultimately I got sick of the grind that's required to build an audience.

I haven't posted anything for a couple years now, but I recently decided to rebuild my site to get rid of analytics and all that BS. I'm writing again but won't be posting anything until I have my custom CMS working. Then I'll probably be cross-posting to Substack, because I still crave validation like most people.

https://erellsworth.com/

I write technical and longform articles at https://stonecharioteer.com

My fictional stuff is at https//writing.stonecharioteer.com

The blog is built using ablog + sphinx. I am not very happy about how it looks on mobile. I have to hide the archives and wordcloud because it appears above the article on mobile mode, which annoys me.

I want to use pure sphinx for the articles. Mainlynl because ablog isn't compatible with Furo, the best sphinx theme IMO.

I use Sphinx because it supports the RST format. This is superior to markdown because of the directives, and internsphinx is amazing.

I use my own website. I really want to focus on writing and not on tweaking the code so I’m using Hugo with a minimalistic custom template.

https://alessandrocuzzocrea.com

I publish on my own website (https://colby.so) which I host on Netlify and publish with Jekyll.

For the first year or so I also published every new post on Medium and dev.to (with my site as the canonical URL on both) so that more than zero people would read my articles.

I was lucky enough to get a few of my code-heavy tutorial posts ranking well on Google for the niche I focus on and now that I have a couple hundred organic visitors to my own site each day, I've stopped bothering with Medium and dev.to.

11ty to GitHub then Cloudflare Pages.

This setup replaced my old Django on VPS setup. It's faster for more people, will never have scaling issues (not that Django did). Costs nothing. And I could switch to other services (even self host on a toaster) in a heartbeat. Static site generators are great for blogs.

No interest in a platform. I'd lose autonomy, my gut history, gain a lot of page weight... All for what? An online editor?

https://thepcspy.com/

Custom C# static site generator. Built-in localhost site viewer. Markdown-based (edit in VS Code).

When done, I push to Github. Netlify's webhooks pick it up and auto-deploy by running my site generator (small stand-alone binary kept in the repo). They then host it with custom domain and TLS for free.

Whole process reduces to: edit the content, run local preview, commit, and push. Moments later it's live.

https://kcartlidge.com

I had this exact problem as well when wanting to start a tech blog. I wanted to write on my own space, not a platform like Medium.

This led me to create my own tool [0] to make minimalist blogs with Markdown, no messy code or configuration needed. The end result is my site [1], which although barebones, I think looks decently good for now.

[https://pageful.is] [https://viktor.pageful.is]

I host my website on GitHub Pages. It's built with Jekyll so I basically write articles in markdown in my favourite editor (VS Code). At the moment it's going through some UI changes so I'd really appreciate some web design feedback. I started from an existing Jekyll theme, then I customized it from time to time. In case you want to have a look: https://marcolabarile.me

I've always bounced back and forth on this, but now doing essentially what POSSE is. I write on my own website hosted with Wordpress (https://binarydigit.io/), then share it out to social media or whatever other silo I choose. I really want to like static site generators, but not having a simple admin backend kills me... and setting one up is a PITA XD

I blog on my own site. 4 years ago I bought a domain and just recently I started to have a blog on it. It's powered by hugo and hosted on netlify. I write my post in markdown and as soon as I push the code (on a repository on github.com), the post is live. link: https://www.justinpolidori.it

I don't personally host a blog, but if I were to I'd probably write something simple in vanilla JS, HTML, and CSS and then write the blog articles with Markdown and host it all on GitHub pages. I haven't done it before but I suspect that it would be a feasible way to host a blog for free with (almost) total control over it.

https://miscdotgeek.com

WordPress, Rocket.net (also where I work)

I post on my own website, where nobody gives a shit what I post because nobody visits. I refuse on principle to post on Medium, LinkedIn, etc. If Ev Williams wants my work on his website, he can damn well put me on his payroll as a copywriter. If I want to write for free, I'll do it on my own platform.

on my own site, as static files embedded in a lambda zip like this:

https://github.com/nathants/libaws/tree/master/examples/simp...

will probably switch to cloudflare+r2 soon since egress is cheaper.

r2 is fantastic. here is an mp4 screen recording uploaded adhoc yesterday. a friend was trying to setup tinysnitch and was wondering what prompts looked like when visiting netflix: https://r2.nathants.workers.dev/fcd5ca7a-3d25-4912-9404-2bc0...

site: https://nathants.com

(a.) My own site, https://www.brycewray.com --- currently hosted on Cloudflare Pages, although it's also been on other Jamstack hosts such as Netlify, Vercel, and (briefly) Render.

although I (b.) also sometimes put stuff on dev.to.

I’m still chugging along a Wordpress.

https://fredlybrand.com/2021/10/28/better-writing-better-blo...

On my own website, pushed via Github to CloudFlare Pages (was Github Pages), then served by Cloudflare.

I started two Wordpress blogs (using Cloudron), mostly for communicating ideas among small but disparate circles of friends and colleagues.

EDIT: https://socialism.tools/

Personal static website generated with Jekyll https://denner.co/2021/12/27/jekyl.html

i prefer hidden corners of the net, like the midnight pub. i describe it as a "lofi tech-zen microblogging collective".

https://midnight.pub/

or my blog on a shared tilde server, if i'm doing a project writeup rather than prose.

gemini://anachronauts.club/~voidstar/

(i'm a fan of the smolweb lately. text-only, content-first, no junkware.)

On https://wryttr.com

Own web site(s) using Wordpress.

I like Hugo - S3 - Cloudflare.

It's simple, fast, and I can move it easily if I want to.

In my private github repo.

my own blog. for like 20 odd years now. https://www.splitbrain.org

Hashnode works for me. Dev.to is also a good place.

mov.im a xmpp based social network

I host my blog on Vercel (Next.js app: dsebastien.net). I then crosspost on Medium (behind the paywall) and sometimes DEV.to and Hashnode. All the cross-posts use my own domain as canonical link (for SEO).

I also publish a weekly newsletter (newsletter.dsebastien.net hosted on Revue).

In the future, I intend to migrate my newsletter and blog to Ghost (SaaS, not self-hosted for convenience), but to continue cross-posting when it makes sense.

I use WordPress on Nodehost.

letterboxd.com movie reviews

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