Life of a blog - blogging in 2024 and beyond

Published: 28 October, 2024

Updated: 30 October, 2024

7 mins(s) read

Tags: #opinion

Series: Ricing back to power

Table of contents:

I created my website and started blogging in 2019. The decision to create a website was inspired by 2 posts - Why I Have a Website and You Should Too by Jamie Tanna and Writing HTML in HTML by John Ankarström. While I haven’t gotten to writing HTML in HTML as mentioned in John’s post, I have been thinking about incorporating the end results in Hugo. This was 5 years ago. So is bloggin dead now?

People have been predicting it’s death for a while now. I came across such an article right after I started this website. As a beginner to blogs and blogging, reading it felt like I missed the train. It was very discouraging for me. But having encountered a few of them over the years, I am less worried about them now. I can say with some certainty say that blogs and blogging will survive. In fact, I feel there has been an increase in blogs thanks to next generation SSG’s like Hugo, 11ty and others. Hosting options has never been more accessible thanks to GitLab Pages, GitHub Pages, Netlify and others.

Life of a blog

But why are we seeing that blogging is dead posts from time to time? I mean, I don’t have a clear cut answer for that. Maybe what blogging is for them changed? Maybe life, their interests or any unforeseen reasons made them change? It can be anything. But that is life of a blog. They live and die just like humans. Some live for 5 years. Some for 15 and others dies in just months.

The hardest part of blogging is to keep writing

Maintaining a website and to keep writing is not easy. People who want to host their own website for blogging thinks creating a website is the hardest part. But it is not. Maintaining and to keep writing is the hardest part. Cos when you start a website, you have the beginner’s excitement and motivation with you. But for most, you won’t have it once you are done with your tech project - the website. So once you are done with your hello world post, it’s like a done project for you. When I starting my blog, 70% of among the people I knew and had a website were not updated for at least a year. A lot of them had just a single post. That was the odds I started my website with. So I have kept my website setup simple for maintenance. Not writing or maintaining your website is gonna be your biggest enemy for blogging.

For example, this is the largest gap I have taken since my first post in 2019 for my website. But that is alright. I don’t publish regularly. I publish when I want to and when I feel like. Sometimes that means long breaks. That is the freedom my personal website gives me. But I am also aware that people might think my blog is dead since I didn’t write since January of this year.

Where do I find other personal blogs?

It’s tricky cos personal blogs and websites are very decentralised as you can imagine. Blogging and blogosphere has definitely changed as well. Some people have moved their writing to platforms like Medium, Dev.to, Bear Blog or Hashnode. Even I do. I republish (or POSSE) the articles in Medium, Bear Blog, Dev.to and Hashnode. While it is great for reaching more audience, my main interest in republishing articles is to experiment with different audience and the comment section there. It helps you see how different types of people see your articles. And it helps you interact with people directly since my website is static and doesn’t have a comment section.

But if you are looking for self hosted blogs and websites, you can find a good amount of them from the below places:

I have to also say that I have been enjoying Marginalia search. You can find a lot of new interesting blogs by searching for different topics.

There are more of them with their takes and inspiring stories in the below hacker news threads:

And on top of this, a lot of blogs will have a blogroll. Mine is here. That is an interesting way to find inspirations and interests of blogs you follow.

I don’t have a blog. How do I start one?

I would also recommend you to start writing somewhere. Bear blog, Medium or dev.to will all give you a good amount of audience. It will help you to see if blogging is indeed something you would like to do. And if you are still here, I would recommend static site generators and hosting it in a custom domain. Just like writing, you can experiment hosting part with Gitlab or Github pages. Then see if it is something you want to invest in or not. Custom domains will give you more control.

Blogging starter pack

Hugo
Netlify

Main reason for choosing Hugo is that it is a single package. Install the package and you don’t need any other dependencies for the website itself. Your post can just be HTML & CSS without having to use pip or npm. That is pretty important to me. While I currently use npm for Tailwind CSS, I am in the process of writing a css only version. The ability to do that is important to me. The Go templating language which Hugo uses gives you enough power to do loops and other things as well. Another reason is Hugo has first class support for most managed hosting solutions like Gitlab and Github pages or Netlify. It is pretty straight forward. Their documentation is alright but needs a bit of getting used to. But there are ton of articles all over the internet when you want to setup features. These are good enough reasons for me to use Hugo. But I have heard good things about 11ty, Astro and Pelican.

I have been using Netlify since I started this blog. They are pretty cool. You can also use Gitlab or Github pages as well. Sourcehut does provide a hosting solution for static sites with the condition that you cannot add tracking scripts to the website. I am not sure if this includes analytics. It probably does. I haven’t got the time to investigate this which is why I haven’t moved to Sourcehut pages. I am a big fan of Sourcehut and Drew and intend to move my code there in the future. But if this is true, that kind of sucks.

Analytics in itself is not bad. It helps you know where the audience are and understand your writing quality among other things. In fact, I use a client side analytics provider like goat counter specifically for this. You can just block my analytics script if you care about it. There are no PII collected and the analytics itself are basic. So there is no harm for anyone. But analytics like Google Analytics are bad. Punishing everyone for this seems unfair. Anyways, his house his rules.

Blogs and blogging are not going anywhere

In short, blogs and blogging are not going anywhere. There will be more posts like this which encourages you to start blogging just like posts which declares it’s death. I hope the encouraging posts inspire more people to create a blog and to start writing. And I hope that number is higher than the people who didn’t start a blog because they kept seeing it’s dead.

References and links

← A Linux distro recommendation framework and my picks for 2024