If you DO start to get readers things get even more valuable

I like Point No. 4. By now, I have enough articles to point to when people ask the same questions over and over. I have been asked, “Do you always have a blog post for these questions?” Another advice or a deduction that I learnt from reading biographies and many historical books is — write as if you are writing for a stranger, even on your own personal blog/diaries/memoir — when you get older, your younger self will become a stranger and you will have forgotten a lot of things in that life you lived.

Sites like this one really emphasize monetization. Natural I suppose since it's startup-focused. But people used to be fine with blogs not having a monetary element at all.

Struggle quite a bit to share hobby interest via anything including instagram. Might try this. Back to date of html 1.0 and gopher … I still sad about my favorite go to photography blog was gone dark because of the vendor is sort of gone I guess. Might be we have to live with Buddha worldview - nothing is permanent.

This is all true but I'm not sure about establishing credibility with a blog, especially when an LLM can help fudge the details. I like your idea of blogging about TILs. There are shallow posts about TILs(plenty on medium) and then there are posts that mention TILs along with specific gotchas they faced and workarounds on the topic. Those saved me hours of searching/debugging on couple of occasions and I'm glad that they did that.

My biggest problem so far is with cost. I dont like recurring fees. I could pay a one-time fee for say 100 pages and last an eternality ( or 50 years or something ). I also dont like subscription, and it has nothing to do with subscription fatigue, it is just the way I manage my money since before Youtube or Netflix took off. And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I use HN comments as more like a blog post.

I enjoy having a place to write that I can call my own, and it is a major flex when a topic comes up for a client like, say, migrating giant Subversion projects to Git, and I can whip out [1] and say "ah, I happen to know a thing or two about that". [1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/reposurgeon/

Great comment! I was inspired by this article https://every.to/superorganizers/how-to-build-a-learning-mac... about Simon Eskildsen, which led me to his blog https://sirupsen.com/ , which then led me to create https://juliusrobert.site for myself. It's not a traditional blog per se but it checks some boxes and I have the same quote as you do here as a reason to do this https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/#writing-abo...

What are people using to edit entries - because while markdown is fine, a lot of the time I want to be able to drag in screenshots, snippets of other documents like rfcs and so on. So it ends up being easier to make those notes for myself rather than push them into anything publishable.