"Jeff started out as a blogger, and he still treats his blog readers as first-class citizens. He structures his articles to fit the text medium rather than just lazily scraping dialog from his videos. You can read his post about upgrading storage on his Mac mini and not even realize it’s adapted from a video."

For most of my favorite projects, I write the blog post _first_, then adapt that to a YouTube script. I still consider the written word to be vastly superior to video form.

But the videos earn an income (about 1/2 what I earned as a software dev, but it's sustainable and lets me do whatever projects I like), whereas the blog has earned maybe a few thousand dollars with Amazon Affiliate links each year (it covers the hosting, at least, and gives a little extra cash, but I try to keep the blog as "old school web" as possible.

Just finished upgrading it to Hugo today! (After being on Drupal for 16 years)

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/en-us/three-chapters-at-cloudfla...

Here's a SQL query run against this data using Datasette Lite (SQLite and Python in WebAssembly via Pyodide): https://lite.datasette.io/?csv=https://hn-popularity.cdn.ref...

I find this is a surprisingly valuable thing. The AI space is moving fast, and a lot of the interesting, imaginative experimental stuff is happening on Twitter, Reddit, and other platforms I really don't want to engage with - but I do want to keep roughly up-to-speed with what's happening there.

(I’m not sure why the data from my old domain, cyhsu.xyz, hasn’t been aggregated to the new hsu.cy, despite the methodology page saying it should. Must I return the canonical header in addition to a 301 code?)

It was also during the past year that I came to realize how powerful and versatile Hugo is. I had used Hugo for many years, touching only the most basic feature set. Last year, I decided to be done with Twitter and Instagram and make my own timelines of text and photo posts with similar layouts. Initially, I thought it might require separate instances of GoToSocial and Pixelfed. It turned out that Hugo could do it all with a few tweaks, and now they are live at hsu.cy/notes and hsu.cy/gallery, respectively. I highly recommend it to everyone who wants to start their own blog.

Here's what my data looks like:

  | Year | Rank | Domain    | Score | Stories | Avg. Score |
  |------+------+-----------+-------+---------+------------|
  | 2025 |   41 | susam.net |  2544 |      16 |        159 |
  | 2024 |   98 | susam.net |  1530 |      13 |        118 |
  | 2023 |  236 | susam.net |  1026 |      11 |         93 |
  | 2022 |   96 | susam.net |  1652 |      21 |         79 |

It includes the 92 of those blogs that have RSS/Atom feeds.

Unfortunately he doesn't show in the top 100. Also unfortunately, there is no blogger described in the top 100 as having a geospatial interest/focus.

Made it to #369 in 2025 with morling.dev; let's see what's in stock this year :)

  year  total_score  rank  days_mentioned
  2025  903          369   8
  2024  604          581   2
  2023  547          861   3
  2022  450          1165  4
  2021  188          2308  2

There are also a number of other blogs I read that are semi-regularly on HN and aren't on the list that I expected to be. Maybe just didn't quite make the top 100, and I'm over-indexing on my personal preferences. eg. Matt Levine's Money Stuff crops up semi-often, and Bret Devereaux of ACOUP gets most of his posts on HN.

https://github.com/paprikka/heed

The repo contains links to: OPML (bulk import into RSS readers), Markdown (clickable links), and CSV/JSON

It's not perfect, some feeds are not being captured, then some sites publish multiple feeds whereas I pull just one atm. I'll share a writeup once I clean it up a bit, but I hope it's useful / entertaining in the meantime.

I keep a separate list of people I know, or met via HN in my RSS reader, so I'll needs to review/clean it up anyway. ok I'm late for a gig, bye!

  | Year |   Rank | Domain        | Total Score | Stories | Avg. Score |
  |------+--------+---------------+-------------+---------+------------|
  | 2025 |    719 | evalapply.org |         661 |       5 |        132 |
  | 2024 |   2138 | evalapply.org |         154 |       1 |        154 |
  | 2023 |   1674 | evalapply.org |         296 |       2 |        148 |
  | 2022 | > 5000 | NPC           |         NPC |     NPC |        NPC |

(edit: fix missing column header)

There's some data issues in the full dataset, expectedly. My blog got around 200 points this year, which should be enough to hit #2077, but the blog does not appear at all.

Also baseten.co is not a personal blog.

1. https://x.com/jonobelotti_IO/status/2005737476069933272?s=20

In an era where search results are flooded with SEO-optimized slop, these blogs have become trusted nodes primarily because they verify their own reality. Whether it's Jeff physically plugging in a PCIe card or Rachel debugging a weird server issue, the value proposition is "I actually did this thing, and here is what happened."

It seems the best SEO strategy for 2025 is simply proving you are a human doing actual work.

I don't see how and why I wouldn't fall into the dataset, does anybody know please?

    9 idiallo.com 5,539 17 326 Ibrahim Diallo Software developer and blogger

Actually I wonder if the dreaded profanity filter has caught me out again. I've had a couple of posts do well, and it's a .github.io subdomain, so it should have showed up.

I've been writing about building tools for bookkeepers (not exactly a glamorous niche) and the compound effect is real. Posts from 2 years ago still bring in readers who then find newer stuff. No algorithm decides to bury you if you take a month off.

The POSSE approach someone mentioned is interesting too. Own your content, syndicate to platforms. Too many people build their entire presence on rented land and then wonder why they're invisible when the algorithm changes.

scattered-thoughts.net author is Jamie Brandon. :)

Times, they are a changin'...