A4a4isms·Mar 17, 2023
Way back when Joel Spolsky was a high-profile blogger in the "starting your own software business" genre, I asked him for advice about my blogging, and he replied "Stop what you're doing and get your blog onto your own domain."
I had procrastinated because other platforms made everything so damn easy, and hosting my own blog meant being a part-time web admin. But I took his advice, and set up http://raganwald.com.
Some years after that, Posterous launched on HN, and I gave it a try. It was great, so very convenient! But I carefully kept copies of everything I posed there, and sure enough... One day it closed its doors, and I republished evrything on raganwald.com (some of my urls are raganwald.com/posterous/xxxxx.html, this is why).
But what about all the links to the old posterous articles? All dead, so some threads right here on HN poin
Read the rest
t to dead URLs. This is bad for me and for HN. For this reason, I personally reject the strategy of posting on my own domain and republishing it simultaneously on some other platform. Everything I write is on a domain I control, and if I get less traffic, so be it. Running my own blog on my own low-traffic domain is like running a store in a building I own. The mall is very attractive, but I'm done with landlords.
p.s. There are hosted solutions that respect you your own domain. Some are free, like... Github Pages. And that's what I use. It is not essential that I own the server, just the URLs.
https://github.com/raganwald/raganwald.github.com