Hi,
I'd like to discuss blogging and hear your experience. Also, I want to find some blogs to subscribe to :-)
1) Do you have a blog? Please share it if you do, and if you don't, why?
2) Do you enjoy blogging? How often do you write? How many time does it consume for you? How many times did you start and stop blogging?
3) Has blogging paid off for you? Have you got freelance contracts or job thanks to your blog?
4) How do you host the blog? Which services do you use? What are your plans for the next make-over?
5) Do you follow other developer blogs? How? RSS, Twitter, dev.to?
Top comments (8)
1) I've recently started blogging and just relaunched my website: gonsie.com/blorg/ with an RSS feed connected to dev.to.
2) I enjoy writing and sharing knowledge. It's hard to come up with ideas (or keep track of ideas when they randomly strike me). I try to write for 30 minutes to an hour most mornings.
3) I've been making a conscious effort to write more at work (more articles for the internal newsletter, more documentation and release notes for my projects). I don't have any concrete results, but it I feel like I'm getting more recognition from my peers for the work I do.
4) I use GitHub pages and jekyll for all my websites (with my own domain name of course). My site is currently highlights my CV, but I'd like to make a better, less formal splash page which highlights my blog and open source projects.
5) I follow a ton of blogs through RSS (using digg.com/reader). My favorite programming/developer blog is from Cate at cate.blog.
I don't have one, but from time to time, I'm thinking about starting one, but usually I don't want to do things half-heartedly and creating good content is a time-consuming activity. I have the utmost of respect for those who manage to do that in their spare time. Lately I was thinking about the approach of someone I know takes to his blog, he regards it as his "scribbling paper", where he writes down the result of his side-projects/experiments; maybe that is a suitable way to frame it when you cannot manage to create content frequently.
When it comes to finding other dev blogs: my twitter timeline is the main channel for randomly discovering all those gems that are produced by so many great folks.
1) blog.ham1.co.uk
2) I do enjoy blogging but often I don't find enough time to perfect a post, so they just sit in my drafts. Writing often comes in waves, I will not write anything for months then do a few within a few days. It takes anywhere from 10mins to a 6 hours. I don't often write long posts. Most of my posts are fixes to problems I've had.
3) No, but helping someone solve an issue which I've solved is reward enough.
4) It now uses Hugo with a custom theme, and I host it with netlify. It pubishes on commit which makes a large difference vs. when I self hosted and had to SSH to the server and run a Makefile.
5) I follow people on twitter and read HN.
1) I have one on sergiodxa.com/essays, and a feed RSS.
2) I really enjoy writing on the blog (that blog and many mores I wrote for in the past). I try to write as much as I can but I prefer to do it just when I want to.
3) I got the possibility to give an online course about React and Redux thanks to my blog.
4) I use an exported Next.js site (with a GraphQL API to get the articles content) and use Now.sh to host them. I also have a URL shortening service (sdx.im) which I use to redirect to external services and create shorts urls.
5) I use RSS and Twitter to follow people and of course dev.to, Medium and echojs.com to get articles from people I don't know.
1) Yup, I'm at indeliblebluepen.com. However, most of my tech articles get reposted here. I'm actually in the odd situation of needing to republish some of my recent dev.to articles on my blog!
2) I do enjoy writing articles, and my blog is usually just a platform for publication. An article can take anywhere between an hour and four hours to write, depending on the length and topic complexity.
3) My blog has led to a few speaking engagements, but it's mostly there to share knowledge with others, and that's reward enough for me right now.
4) It's a Wordpress blog, self-hosted on my company's Linode server. I really don't have any concrete plans to make it over, although I'm usually tweaking it to make it easier to add to.
5) dev.to is actually where about 75% of the tech articles I consume come from, now! The rest are usually from developers I follow on Twitter, or else from a blog I bookmarked. I'm personally a fan of Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror) and Ned Batchelder, to name a couple.
1) Yes, auralinna.blog
2) I try to publish few posts every month. Usually it takes several hours to finish blog post but ideation takes longer. And I usually have several draft posts at the same time. So I don't have to start from "blank paper" when I want to write something.
3) I just started couple of months ago so nothing special has happened yet :) Though I have learned a lot while writing blog posts and building my blog with technology I'm not so familiar with.
4) Blog is hosted at Linode. I use Contentful to write posts. Front end is built with Angular. Front end might change in the future but currently I'm happy with it.
5) Yes. Twitter, Dev.to, Hotjs.net, lots of blog RSS feeds via Feedly, newsletters (JavaScript weekly, Web Design weekly, Frontend Focus).
1) Yes, but in my mother language, Vietnamese (thefullsnack.com), and sometimes I translated them into English (thefullsnack.com/en)
2) Definitely! I write a new post every 5 or 7 days, took me about 6-10 hours for each article (including time for research, coding, and proof,...). It consumes too much of my time, but I know, it's for the good reason, I just couldn't stop :D
3) After years of blogging, I got some subscribers, they cheer me up every time I published a new post, hunt me down and correct me whenever I'm wrong in my posts, and my knowledge raised up as well! I never intended to get a freelance contract or make any profit because of blogging (I do not put Ads as well), but some technical recruiter and guys from startups actually contacted me after seeing my posts.
4) Hosted it on my linode server, it's just static pages, converted from markdown, and I spent about 3 months build it up from scratch, no plan for make-over (again) .
5) A lot! Mostly on Twitter.
I did for about a week where I published a few articles and then I switched over to dev.to and use that as my main blogging outlet.