Comment by pembrook

5 days ago

Great stuff, looking forward to your next blog post in 1 year: “How I rebuilt my blog on…”

A fun hobby of mine is Googling “how I built this blog with [next.js/Gatsby/etc etc]” and going to page 10 of the Google results.

It’s just hundreds of developer blogs with no blog posts other than the ones announcing how the blog was built.

I’ve noticed this a lot, too, and made this drawing as a joke: https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/

  • I love that graph! So many occurrences of "that's me" or "I know somebody exactly like that".

  • *scnr:

    ooof.. this chart is making my day, not because of it's content, but it's presentation. Apparently it only works if you have very different scales for x and y axis. As you have the same metrics on both of them (number of posts), it only worked if like x axis is from 1 to 10 while y axis is either log or from 1 to 100 or so. Or you choose a differnt metric for the x axis, like "share of posts about blog setups".

    • My thoughts exactly! Originally I wanted to also add a 2nd vertical axis on the right to signify "share of posts about blog setups".

  • Can I use this image on my blog?

    I will off course link to you site. It’s to illustrate a point about my blogspot blog haha…

    I’ve been looking to switch over to something else. But I’ve been actively blogging since 2006 and I haven’t found a good enough way and platform to switch over to.

    • >I’ve been looking to switch over to something else. But I’ve been actively blogging since 2006 and I haven’t found a good enough way and platform to switch over to.

      Would you consider participating in a private beta of https://exotext.com/, a simple blogging platform I'm building? (example blog: https://rakhim.exotext.com/)

      If so, please send me an email: hello at rakhim.org

    • Of course, go ahead! Please, share a link to your blog, I'm gonna add it to minifeed.net :)

      (I'll update my website soon and will make the licensing clearer.)

      1 reply →

I started with and used Jekyll for almost ~10 years and ~500 posts before switching to Hugo.

I have a 7,000 word blog post on how and why I switched which I didn't publish yet because I wanted to wait 6+ months with Hugo to make sure I ironed out all of the kinks. I guess I'm the anti-case for this one! Maybe I should post this one next week. It's been quite stable.

This reminds me of people who will make an entire YouTube series on crafting the perfect Notion architecture. Only to not actually use it.

  • I am in a worse group. Changed my blogging platform, wrote the obligatory post detailing why I changed platform and couldn't even get that obligatory post out. I hang my head

A bit unfair to the OP, given that he actually does write posts on his blog.

  • Unfair in general. Building and hosting a blog is a cool learning experience and worth blogging about to remember and teach others.

It's our Hello World of sorts.

  • I remember someone presenting a development framework and saying something similar to this, "Of course, I used it to build a blogging platform..."

I’ve been through a couple of different tools for my personal blog, and, having seen this trap, every time I did the migration I made sure to write a blog post about something completely unrelated instead. A few years ago I built my own static site generator and I vowed that I would never try to publish it for other people to use, another trap[1] that often springs on enthusiastic developer-blogger types.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21616774

Haha, been there. But this setup’s actually working really well for me. It’s not chasing the "hot new thing," it’s going back to stuff that’s proven and solid.

Haha. I guess discovering & teaching how to do X is more rewarding than doing X. It applies to blogging, PKM and productivity too.

Is there a name for this phenomenon where this actually turns out to be true? Closest I can think of is "During a gold rush, sell shovels".

Is there a support group for this? I have not rebuilt my blog since Feb 21 2024 though I have been sorely tempted :P

  • There probably should be one, maybe taking turns with the biweekly Authors of custom static site Generators Anonymous meeting