> Maybe part of the problem is that I'm grossly under-estimating the amount of work involved in "post an interesting technical article to it once or twice a year" for people who don't already spend a lot of their time writing.
I think that's largely it. I've thought of things that would be interesting to write as a short blog post. What's stopping me?
* I don't already have a blog where it'd be easy to post things. I'd have to research what to sign up for. Free sites would spam my readers with ads that I don't agree with, and try to track them. Paid sites cost money, obviously, and may be predatory. The platform could be acquired and/or killed, and I could lose my content or have to transfer it somewhere else. I anticipate 50% of my total blogging effort would be spent just on dealing with all this bullshit. That's time I could be spending with my kids. "Just self-host!" okay now 90% of my total blogging effort, plus server costs.
* I'd want proper code formatting, examples, good visuals; you know, something publishable. I'd simply never get it good enough to post. Perfect would absolutely be the enemy of good. And ideas are constantly evolving and changing. I don't agree now with everything I wrote a year ago; that's what progress and learning is supposed to do. So the temptation to constantly go back and nitpick it, edit it, would be there, all day, every day.
* Nobody would ever read it anyway. It wouldn't hold a candle to the blazing light of SEO spam. Even in the unlikely event someone did read it, they wouldn't care. Even in the unlikely event they did care, it would be different from the way they're already doing things, and therefore they'd become extremely hostile and write hateful comments about some minor point they misunderstood. Which I'd read, despite myself, and then I'd have shower arguments with them instead of focusing on actual work.
So why am I doing all this work? Who am I blogging for? A potential future employer for the one time I'm looking for a job in the next decade, who probably won't even bother to look at it? "You write for yourself, to organize your own thoughts" -- okay, I already do that, I just don't publish it, for all these reasons.
I'm not a blogger and have no horse in the race, but I think you should re-evaluate a couple things on the list if you think you'd be interested in blogging.
For both #1 and #2, there are dozens of static site generators that handle all of this for you automatically. Not all of them are as complicated as the big ones. You can get started with a theme in Zola in a couple hours and that can be your blog forever, with support for code syntax.
For number 3, the idea is not that people will organically stumble on your blog in a search, but that you'd share it to different communities relevant to your blog post. If you're writing about F#, post it on the F# reddit. SEO spam can't really mess with you there. In fact, I feel like SEO spam is only pushed by Google, and communities tend to not engage with that content.
I feel you on the extremely hostile responses, though. Without fail, any article that makes it to the top of HN has lots of people insinuating it was somehow written maliciously, even if it's just about something minor like Sum Types vs Union Types. Unfortunately the answer is to shut off your brain to the hostility but take in their counterpoints. These people likely think about nothing but code for most of the day, so even if they're well-rounded and nice in real life, their brain has temporarily narrowed the scope of their world view, and they make mountains out of mole hills
> Free sites would spam my readers with ads that I don't agree with, and try to track them. Paid sites cost money, obviously, and may be predatory. The platform could be acquired and/or killed, and I could lose my content or have to transfer it somewhere else.
My recommendation these days is to start with GitHub Pages.
3. GitHub have a REALLY GOOD track record of not breaking things like this. I trust them more than most other companies with respect to my stuff there staying online for a long time into the future.
My trick for formatting syntax highlighting is to write my posts in Markdown (with the ```python tags for code) and then run it through this little tool to turn it into HTML: https://til.simonwillison.net/tools/render-markdown - then I publish the resulting HTML.
I think that's largely it. I've thought of things that would be interesting to write as a short blog post. What's stopping me?
* I don't already have a blog where it'd be easy to post things. I'd have to research what to sign up for. Free sites would spam my readers with ads that I don't agree with, and try to track them. Paid sites cost money, obviously, and may be predatory. The platform could be acquired and/or killed, and I could lose my content or have to transfer it somewhere else. I anticipate 50% of my total blogging effort would be spent just on dealing with all this bullshit. That's time I could be spending with my kids. "Just self-host!" okay now 90% of my total blogging effort, plus server costs.
* I'd want proper code formatting, examples, good visuals; you know, something publishable. I'd simply never get it good enough to post. Perfect would absolutely be the enemy of good. And ideas are constantly evolving and changing. I don't agree now with everything I wrote a year ago; that's what progress and learning is supposed to do. So the temptation to constantly go back and nitpick it, edit it, would be there, all day, every day.
* Nobody would ever read it anyway. It wouldn't hold a candle to the blazing light of SEO spam. Even in the unlikely event someone did read it, they wouldn't care. Even in the unlikely event they did care, it would be different from the way they're already doing things, and therefore they'd become extremely hostile and write hateful comments about some minor point they misunderstood. Which I'd read, despite myself, and then I'd have shower arguments with them instead of focusing on actual work.
So why am I doing all this work? Who am I blogging for? A potential future employer for the one time I'm looking for a job in the next decade, who probably won't even bother to look at it? "You write for yourself, to organize your own thoughts" -- okay, I already do that, I just don't publish it, for all these reasons.