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Sell yourself, sell your work

(www.solipsys.co.uk)
449 points ColinWright | 1 comments | 25 Mar 25 21:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.21s | source
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simonw ◴[26 Mar 25 03:06 UTC] No.43478469[source]▶
I have a personal rule which has worked really well for me: if I do a project, the price of doing that project is that I have to write about it.

Back when Twitter threads didn't suck (they could be viewed by people without Twitter accounts) I'd use those - tweet a description of my project with a link, then follow it with a few photos and screenshots.

These days I use my blog, with my "projects" tag: https://simonwillison.net/tags/projects/

I blog all sorts of other stuff, but if I was ever to trim back the one thing I'd keep doing is projects. If you make a thing, write about that thing. I wrote more about that here: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/#pro...

Projects with a GitHub repository make this even easier: describe the project in the README and drop in a few screenshots - that's all you need.

(Screenshots are important though, they're the ultimate defense against bitrot.)

I have many projects from earlier in my career that I never documented or captured in screenshot form and I deeply regret it.

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wcfrobert ◴[26 Mar 25 03:37 UTC] No.43478641[source]▶
Hi Simon, how do you decide when to blog on your personal website vs something like substack? Do you post identical articles on both? Do you prefer one or the other?
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simonw ◴[26 Mar 25 03:42 UTC] No.43478667[source]▶
My Substack newsletter is literally a copy and paste from my blog - I built a custom tool for it: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/4/substack-observable/

Everything substantial I write goes on my blog.

The one challenge I'm having at the moment is where to put short "thoughts" that aren't accompanied by a link. I used to use Twitter for those, but now I'm cross-posting to Bluesky and Mastodon and Twitter - but cross-posting a "thought" doesn't feel great.

Things like this: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3lko5bg3c4s2...

I may have to invent a fourth content type for my blog (which is currently just entries, bookmarks or quotes) for this kind of very-short-form post with no link. Molly White started doing that recently so I may borrow her design: https://www.mollywhite.net/micro

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nmfisher ◴[26 Mar 25 06:19 UTC] No.43479335[source]▶
Do you have any idea whether Substack drives traffic to, or sucks traffic from, your blog?
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1. MattSayar ◴[26 Mar 25 20:16 UTC] No.43486759[source]▶
If you have a blog with RSS and just need something that auto-emails people your updates you can run my project on a raspberry pi. No need to tie yourself into the substack ecosystem if you don't want to

[0] https://github.com/MattSayar/rsspberry2email