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Comment by benrutter | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the comments here are about blogging to nobody (which I do) but I wanted to share how much I love reading people's personal blogs.

I follow a bunch of developers (surprise surprise) and read mostly technical blogs, I've found a lot of developers mix writing blog posts about their personal and family life alongside technical posts. As I've been reading I've found those are some of my favourite posts, as someone who balancing professional and open source development with parenting, I really love hearing about other people's experiences doing the same. It's not a side that I read much about elsewhere outside of personal blogs.

That's a long way of me saying, keep on blogging strangers, someone might be reading!

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I concur! Several of us also subscribe to your blogs' RSS feeds. If you're one of the nice people who put the full content of their blog posts into their feed, you might not see me as a visitor, but I definitely read and enjoy your blog.

As an occasional blog writer myself, I also like to announce manually on my social platforms I use (Mastodon and LinkedIn) when I blogged, and send a link to those socials post. The [full rationale is here][1]. They make it feel less like shouting in the void, which helps me stay motivated. I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the occasional likes and boosts I get from these, too :)

Simon Willison also has [good advice on how to write more][2], that I must admit I'm struggling to follow myself.

[1]: https://ergaster.org/posts/2024/03/06-welcoming-feedback/

[2]: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3leuudyabks2...

> I follow a bunch of developers (surprise surprise) and read mostly technical blogs

As a follow-up, how do you go about discovering the people you keep up with if they are not personal acquaintances?

I often do this by reading the bio of different HN commenters or X (aka, stalking) and adding the RSS feed to my news reader app (or, bookmarking).

Big one for me is that I follow blogs of developers for open source projects I'm interested in. If I see someone is working on a cool project I'll check out their github profile, and that sometimes turns up a personal blog.

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