I’ve always wanted to start an online content creation project.
I would like to start a personal blog and put some of my thoughts there but I’m paralyzed by too many thoughts in my head.
I just realized that it’s been 4 years since I wanted to do that (4 YEARS !!! )
So I would like your help with those evils/questions that are in my head right now:
I want it to be a personal blog where I document my experience. I may talk about things I’m learning, how I’m feeling, my experience trying to start university, games I played, books I’ve read, …
I don’t want it to be a business, after it’s up and running I would like to spend a maximum of 5 hours per week on it.
My question is: is it a bad idea for privacy and networking? Let me explain, I don’t have a personal social media account and I don’t want to. So my blog will be my “social media”. By privacy I mean how do I make it personal while protecting my privacy?
As for networking, I may learn some skills, document on my website and link it to my resume? Is it a good idea?
I saw that you, @Henry have a different YouTube channel. I assume it is your personal YouTube channel.
What is/was your approach to it.
How did you decide what content to put there?
What did you plan to protect (privacy wise) when starting that YouTube channel?
If you don’t mind, is Henry TheLastNameOnThatChannel your real name or is it a nom de plume?
Is it a good idea to start a blog? do people read things online? Wouldn’t be better to start a YouTube channel?
Sure, you can do that sort of blog that documents your experience and have it be your pseudonymous personality. Just dont state your real identity and use an online identity (doesnt have to be human, you know. Just some online nick is enough, like oohjeez). As per skills, sure. Depending on how you do it. If you set up some account on a third party provider, there may not be many skills but if you set it up yourself on a server with a web framework/nginx/whatever you would use, you can claim familiarity with Linux and some programming language if you go the web framework route. It all depends on how you do it.
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Depends on what you write, really. Create good content and there may be readers, and if not then you’ll just be documenting stuff and it still may be fun.
The paralysis that you’re experiencing… I experience it too, regarding some other things. So, what I’m about to suggest is perhaps as much advice to myself, as it is to you
Maybe it’s better to first focus on what to say, rather than how to say it. Once you’ve decided on that, perhaps jot it down on a regular notebook, or on a basic text editor on your computer. If you feel like recording audio/video, do that on your phone. This exercise might give you an idea of what medium you might want to start with. That’d make the search for it more targeted. And more importantly, it’ll switch you from thinking mode to doing mode.
That’d be my 2 bits. Perhaps the others can be of a bit more help regarding the implementation. Good luck!
Let me explain what I meant by that with a real world example:
I’m currently applying for an internship, on the application page there’s a (optional) section where you can put your social media.
There a place for a website, a Twitter account and a mastodon account.
Is it a good idea to link your blog knowing that you won’t create another blog just for “professional stuffs”?
So long as you don’t give personal details out, I don’t see it being too much a violation. You control what you write, so share as much as you’re comfortable with. At the very least, use a nickname/pseudonym. It’s not uncommon for writers to use a pen name, and the same is true for bloggers. As for networking use, it’s actually a great idea, and recommended for certain jobs. Build up those skills, and show a passion in what you write about.
Are you doing this for you, or someone else? Isn’t this just meant to be a hobby? If so, does it really matter if people read/watch? If so, I’d go the blog route. There are better privacy oriented blogging platforms, and you don’t need a Google account, which is always a Plus (pun intended).
Well… be more descriptive. What is it you don’t get? All I said is that if you self host your blog with whatever tech stack you want, you can claim skills. If not and you use something like medium or other blogging site, you probably can’t.
Since you mentioned Obsidian, you could use Obsidian Publish with is built-in ($8/month according to the website), I’ve never used it but it doesn’t seem a bad option.
For Netlify, GitHub Pages and Cloudflare Pages, you’ll probably want a static site generator like Hugo (which I can personally recommend).
I’d encourage you to watch this YouTube video about Hugo if you’re interested
If you REALLY want to write something on your cv, I doubt those will help as they are for static sites. Maximum you can do is familiarity with html css and js. You can get a .com domain for about 11$/yr on porkbun and a low-end vps for ~10$/yr to get started. It will get you a long way. However, the options you mentioned are fine and yes, you may need something like Hugo as GAGB mentioned, or you can write all the html and css by hand and all that good stuff.
I didn’t know you could get a VPS for ~ $ 10 per year, all I’ve seen was $ 20 to $ 50 per month.
That’s why I didn’t look into it.
I don’t want to spend more than $ 50 per year on this website, I’m broke and I would like to be able to do it even if I’m broke (I live in a third world country).
I was planning to buy a domain and host my email at tutanota (before they raise their prices, now I have to find another private email provider that cost $ 15 per year with support for 1 domain name )
Most are about $5-10/month, so you must’ve been looking at some very overpriced or overpowered options.
While I don’t recommend it for a novice self hoster, I self host email (m3r.one) on the VPS I mentioned and its been working pretty nicely. Just keep that in mind once you are more comfortable with self hosting (most providers block/do not allow SMTP ports to be used, but this one doesnt even block as long as you dont abuse it)
The catch is that the specs are terrible lol. You wont be hosting nextcloud or anything like that on it, but for a website it is plentiful. ubuntu 22.04 with the lowest specs you can select there, I host email, website, and can host about 5-6 other websites with a web framework, or pretty much hundreds if they are just static websites that are served by nginx.
I’ve done that before. It is pain. Templating is a godsend because you can change one file, like add a footer, and all your pages will now have a footer. I am pretty sure Hugo allows you to do templating, but for my site im using Flask which uses jinja2, if you are familiar with python and may wanna use a web framework.
PS: It is important to still learn it. So yeah you should of course learn it because using tools like hugo if you really wanna learn what you are doing.
Well, bandwidth denotes the maximum amount of data sent. 1TB means you can send 1TB of data per month (some may give you daily or yearly limits). The number of active connections HIGHLY depends on your tech stack, however you do not need to worry about active connections being a limitation to you right now.
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