Since the discussion is fragmented between the blog comments and here, I'm posting my comment on his blog here too.
I recently started blogging and my first blog post about why I blog has exactly the same reasons - control over content and flexibility.
I've been posting for a month and a half, two posts a week on average, and now I'm starting to get discouraged - it's not that I don't like the blog it just that it got zero traction outside my circle of techie friends. I launched a small Trello app at the same time and even though both got zero marketing the app is about 3 times more popular by views and tens of times more popular by users (granted it is still only hundreds of views and tens of users).
What has discouraged me the most is that even when I put myself out there and posted something relevant and interesting (IMHO) on Hacker News I got exactly 1 vote and no comments. It's not even that it is bad, it's ignored.
I know that a month is not something substantial and if I continue to create interesting content people will eventually come (with some marketing). I just want to have a counter-point that a blog is not just writing text on your on domain - you have to market it and even than people might not care, just like any other product.
I've been posting for a month and a half, two posts a week on average, and now I'm starting to get discouraged
Would it be possible for you to blog not for the traction, but for the sake of blogging?
I think my blog was closed to everyone but me for the first couple of years I was posting - I just did not want my employer to stumble upon it by random chance, I had no idea what the reaction could be. But I found out that it was still useful - a number of times, when I had to remember something about the way I solved some particular problem, I searched my own blog and found it.
Now it's almost a habit - whenever I do something even remotely interesting, it pops into my head - wait, I could write a short blog post about it in 10-15 minutes. So I do.
It's a balance. I post for myself but I would like feedback on it and to learn from it. There is a huge difference between the documentation and personal knowledge base I have on my personal OneNote notebooks and the public blog - it takes me a few hours for each blog post. I add pictures, format, spell and grammar check since English is not my mother tongue etc. If I see I don't get any benefit from all this polish I will be discouraged from doing it and will just keep it in its raw stream-of-thought form for personal use.
I blogged in a vacuum for almost two years without an audience. An audience has shown up since then but I continue to blog for me. Just being able to google for my thoughts the years later makes it worth it.
Well I'm preparing myself for that, but as I said, this means that getting actual apps out there will still be a priority for me over blogging, or the blog's quality will suffer.
I'm kinda interested at why you chose to reply to the thread here instead of the same comment posted in your blog? I feel that the discussion here is of higher quality (whatever that means), but the blog is, as you advocate, your own space.
I've seen some blogs without comments and all the discussion is happening on Hacker News or Reddit, so I'd like to hear your thoughts about it.
Well, in a perfect world we'd have a single "place" to go that would aggregate content AND comments. That was the promise of clients like FeedDemon and RSS for Comments. However, Google Reader doesn't support comments and as such, that died.
I worry about things like Disqus as well as they are just another place to put our content. It looks like it's on our site but it's not. They WILL die one day and then what happens to the comments?
For now, I go where the discussion is but I'd prefer to own both.
Just a brainstorm here, but would some kind of Disqus like ui that aggregates comments from HN, reddit and blog comment feed would be an interesting product?
(Google search shows two such apps - one has shutdown and one is now a casino site... Maybe it's just not profitable.)
I recently started blogging and my first blog post about why I blog has exactly the same reasons - control over content and flexibility.
I've been posting for a month and a half, two posts a week on average, and now I'm starting to get discouraged - it's not that I don't like the blog it just that it got zero traction outside my circle of techie friends. I launched a small Trello app at the same time and even though both got zero marketing the app is about 3 times more popular by views and tens of times more popular by users (granted it is still only hundreds of views and tens of users).
What has discouraged me the most is that even when I put myself out there and posted something relevant and interesting (IMHO) on Hacker News I got exactly 1 vote and no comments. It's not even that it is bad, it's ignored.
I know that a month is not something substantial and if I continue to create interesting content people will eventually come (with some marketing). I just want to have a counter-point that a blog is not just writing text on your on domain - you have to market it and even than people might not care, just like any other product.
<shameless_promotion>
http://sveder.com/blog
</shameless_promotion>