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Comment by prmoustache | Hacker News Reader

I love personal websites but I don't really like blogs. I prefer when people can rework/refine some of their pages instead of publishing new blog posts related to previous ones when revisiting a topic. And as a writer it allows me to write whenever I feel like to. With a blog you kind of feel guilty if you don't publish on a regular basis, and end up abandoning it altogether too easily if you cannot sustain a rhythm. A web page doesn't force you into a rhythm. A blog might be useful for historians in the future, when chronology might be useful but as a publisher and casual reader I find it lazy and unwelcoming for the reader.

I do like however personnal pages that have a small log mentionning the updates to which I can subscribe to.

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Agreed completely. From a reader perspective, blogs are also often not friendly to new visitors. How do I find the best entry point? Which entries are fluff and which are deep dives? The best you can usually hope for is some tagging mechanism, but blogs generally expend little to no effort thinking about architecture, discovery, browsability, or the reader’s progression through the site. Don’t get me wrong - that’s a lot to ask of a casual effort. But I do wish we had a genre/format for sharing one’s thoughts online that did encourage reflection and iteration on that level.

One thing I've tried to combat the chaos of blog structures is to include links to other posts in series as a header (when it makes sense).

The biggest hurdle of moving away from a blog to a static format is that blog posts are timestamped and there's no real expectation that they're maintained. With static pages, however, I try to keep them up-to-date.

>From a reader perspective, blogs are also often not friendly to new visitors. How do I find the best entry point? Which entries are fluff and which are deep dives?

A lot of that is a flaw in the blogging software and the failure of the author to realize they need to customize the design to make it accessible to readers.

you might be interested in the concept of digital gardens: https://maggieappleton.com/garden

Can you share some examples of what you're describing. I enjoy blogs, have one of my own that I haven't added to in quite a while. I don't feel under any pressure, for many of the reasons stated in TFA, to update it regularly. But I'm now interested in exploring this alternative you describe.

Any personal homepage of the pre-blog era is a good example.

See here the personal homepage of the late Sheldown Brown, famous for his technical articles on bicycle maintenance, that is still maintained by his spouse Harriett Fell[1] who still add content regularly. I still visit once in a while: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/org/personal-pages.html

It may look like a big mess and it is ugly by modern standards[2] but it is a real pleasure to visit with tons of articles classed by topics. I find it more interesting to visit than a blog.

Here some humor pages Harriett Fell added in recent year to make fun of Zwift or OpenAI:

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/time-travel.html

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/openai.html

[1] which also happen to have her own personal page: https://www.khoury.northeastern.edu/home/fell/

[2] it doesn't have to be, this one simply was built in the late 90's

I think https://gwern.net/ is a pretty good example of a "personal site" that in another universe could be a regular blog. https://gwern.net/changelog is the only log part of it.

like a wiki-blog? But then, when is a refinement to something a new work (like a part 2), a small refinement to the original, or a noteworthy modification e.g. such that subscribers would be notified of the change?

You don't need dated entries, just a topic name, a few subheadings for different parts of related text, and a history page; but presenting update notifications can still be a problem? maybe different levels of notification, or subscribing to specific articles(subheading)/topics?

100%. Reading blogs feels 'messy' exactly for this reason. It's not 2008 anymore when blog posts had a vibrant comment section, so changing the content of the post felt dishonest. Maybe it's modern social media that makes people treat their blogs like a tweet - uneditable, frozen in time.

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