Hello everyone
I know it’s a rather far-fetched idea, but I’d like to start a blog in the 21st century, when nobody reads them anymore and people prefer to look for information in other ways, I’d love to hear what you think. The idea is to post content about Rust, such as news and troubleshooting guides. I’m also hoping to share my knowledge. I hope this post doesn’t get moderated – any advice? I love this community; it’s welcomed me so warmly and makes me feel like part of a family.
This is not true at all. Blogging is alive and well and how I like to keep in touch with the latest developments and trends in software. I have a RSS reader, I regularly browse lobste.rs and I used to like hacker news too, before the comment section was as toxic as it is these days. Plus, outreach probably does not matter that much? Blogging and other forms of writing is an intrinsically worthwhile pursuit. Doesn't really matter who or how many people will read it. (Technical) writing and getting better at it in the process will be the real reward.
For reference, in case you are looking for inspiration, these are the blogs from people in the Rust community that I follow: Working with mistakes - #6 by jofas.
And for advice: don't use LLMs. Find your own style and don't be afraid to make mistakes. Not every post has to be a polished masterpiece.
I completely agree with what @jofas said. Wanna add that in our time there's so much information but most of it is just repeat the same things in different (or even the same) words. People quite often describe how they fight with borrow checker or other "difficult rust concepts" but around this information it became harder to find something unique and things became even worse when LLM come in play.
I believe that small human-written blogs with personal thoughts about anything is what makes this world a little bit better. Even if it will be interesting for let's say 5 guys at the start, hey you make life of the 5 guys a bit better! That's absolutely worth it IMO.
I really like reading blogs, and I consider them one of the best sources of information on the internet.
its just that the major search engines make finding them very difficult so I often can't find blogs that I would have wanted to read if I found them,
which is likely intended as good blogs almost never have ads and thus make no profit for google.
Slightly unrelated but I found https://marginalia-search.com/ today, which has a mode for only searching blogs and I spent a lot of time just reading random blogs, the majority of which don't appear on google/ecosia/etc.
Please ping me when you start your blog so that I don't miss it.
There's also Kagi Small Web which solves similar problem. It's almost impossible to make a small blog appear in google search but more and more people start using alternatives like Kagi or duckduckgo where it's more realistic. Small web - is all about small blogs. Kagi has dedicated page for looking around small blogs and also if your blog is in list, you'll appear in "common" search results too.