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I do https://wordsandbuttons.online/ as a personal-ish website. I don't append my face to every page but a visitor is usually a few clicks away from my other works so the site is de-facto more or less personal.
First of all, it's a nice hobby. No bullshit programming, no frameworks, no dependencies, no annoying editors. I just write my code and text and enjoy doing so.
Second, it gives powerful motivation to study. I'm now writing a new page on rational interpolation and just yesterday I accidentally found a very simple way to avoid the Runge effect. I was just playing with interactives and it came out of the blue. There is no way I would have learned it otherwise.
Third, it helped me cement a publishing deal with Manning. They came to me and proposed to propose them a book on geometry. And so I did. The book is called Geometry for Programmers and it's coming this summer.
Fourth, I do public lectures (or at least I used to before the war), and the audience loves interactive illustrations. So I usually turn my site pages into presentation-like pages and do lectures with them.
So for me, having a website pays off in multiple ways.
My way around just toying with site generators and actually write was:
Start by writing to yourself. I started with writing down ideas in a private markdown system. (I’d recommend https://obsidian.md today.)
I became less self-conscious about my target audience was myself. It also became easier to make assumptions about what they (I) know, which is still a game of “will I understand this in a year or two?” For me, writing about tech to a near-future version of myself was the beginning.
Another tip: You may be in control of your documents (you maintain them, not some online system you don’t own), but if you use someone else’s blog platform, you won’t have a chance to rabbit-hole the site making. There’s something liberating about only caring about the content, not the layout.
For some subjects, it helps to write under a pseudonym, because you can experiment with what’s on your mind and not how people will treat you based on what you say. I’ve wanted to write about things like pornography and past jobs (those are unrelated, hehe), but I don’t want to upset past colleagues or seem obsessed about pornography.
When I was a kid in the late 90's making a personal website was my motivation to learn programming. In my 20's it was my blog while I traveled around the world, which I used as a way to communicate with my family and friends. Now in my 30's it's helped me excel my career in web/software development as I have turned it into a side project to build a desktop environment in the browser.
Feel free to check it out: https://dustinbrett.com/
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 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 point 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
Helped to me reflect into my areas of interests, interests that changed over time, interests that remained, and helped me reflect or realize on my core values as a person. I wrote for myself most of time. I spun off some projects[1] based on repetitive patterns I had seen in my blog.
[1]: https://github.com/orsenthil/fortune-browser-extension
on my local PC ...
https://github.com/guilt/mblog
I do write about other thoughts on my public blog.
https://blog.karthikkumar.org
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