For years, I've been good heartedly losing the blog SEO ranking fight to a great developer and writer who has the same name as me. A football player eclipses us both if you just google our shared name, but if you add any sort of "developer" or "programming", he's clearly got me beat for the top marks. It makes sense — he writes about tech much more consistently than I do, and his articles are likely much more helpful than my sporadic and eclectic posts.<p>Naturally, being vain, when I saw this post, I immediately looked up my own blog and was chuffed to see it at #292.<p>But, guess who I see just above at #289.
Author here.<p>I tried submitting this as a Show HN a couple times but it didn't take, so I'm happy to see some interest!<p>I caught this just before bed, but I'm happy to take any suggestions or questions, and I'll answer in the morning.<p>If you'd like to improve the metadata, I welcome PRs here: <a href="https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data</a>
I find it surprising that Ken Shirriff's blog[1] didn't make it to the top 5000. Does it not count as a blog?<p>Looks like it's explicitly excluded[2].<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=righto.com">https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=righto.com</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/blob/d32ad80a75eba34830b5b572e374330e273c57b2/data/excludes.txt#L940" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/blob/d...</a>
I love that dynomight.net stands out with "existential angst" as a very unique category among the top blogs, as well as being written by an anonymous/pseudonymous author. I'm a big fan of their writing.<p>Also quite surprised to find my own site in the top 5000 for the past 5 years! It feels like Hacker News is simultaneously quite large but also a cozy community where you often recognize names from day to day.
Hi, my blog incoherency.co.uk appears at number 207 but it says the author is David Given.<p>I'm not sure if the error is that you think my blog is written by David Given instead of James Stanley, or if you think David Given's blog is incoherency.co.uk instead of cowlark.com !
I maintain a shuffled list of HN blogs here:<p>[1] <a href="https://blogs.hn" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.hn</a><p>Please add your site or make corrections :)<p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/surprisetalk/blogs.hn" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/surprisetalk/blogs.hn</a>
Wow I am the 511th top blog :O No author, bio, or tags though. Sad.<p>Honestly HackerNews has been a great place to grow up. Started posting here back in college when I was 21 or so. Now here we still are at 37.<p>I credit hacker news with getting me from Slovenia to San Francisco. It's been a great journey so far. Some of which has made it to the front page <3
Slate Star Codex and Astral Codex Ten should probably be combined. Also, it's odd that while ACX's author is listed as "Scott Alexander" (his long-time pseudonym), SSC's is listed as "anonymous." He went by Scott Alexander even in the days of SSC.
Interesting website. I was reading the free chapter about active and passive voice, something I've never really understood or paid much attention to. Excellent explanation that cleared things up. My manager uses active voice when they're taking credit for our work, and passive voice when they do things wrong. It's a neat trick.
I had to fiddle with the dates to find a couple examples of blogs that violate the single-author rule in the methodology (marginalrevolution, ribbonfarm) but it's probably better to have them included.<p>Even though a glance suggests the majority of high-scorers are self-hosted, I wonder if this dataset is valuable for predicting the strength of different blog hosts. Some fiddling did lead to a couple results that are hosted on Blogger or Ghost or Medium, so they are there.
I’ve been thinking of starting an anonymous blog with my thoughts just to record them and any projects I do. I want them to be visible on the internet and searchable instead of behind some facebook or instagram wall. What is a good blog service to use that will be around for decades? I don’t really want to run my own domain. Do things like Blogger and Blogspot still exist and will they continue to in the future?
My blog is both #142 and #274, nice! (Used to use a university domain.)<p>The combined score puts me at #71 all time or #31 since 2019 when I started writing. Very cool.
Where does the "bio" field come from? Mine says "Developer and writer" and I suppose those are both things that I am, but not very close to what I'd have put there.
I found it interesting to notice that a couple of politicians made it to the list, all 3 of them from Pirate parties it seems.<p>But I think one of these entries needs to be updated, see: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Reda" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Reda</a>
Baffled that <a href="https://lcamtuf.substack.com/" rel="nofollow">https://lcamtuf.substack.com/</a> or <a href="https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/" rel="nofollow">https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/</a> isn't in there.
Number 18, Jeff Atwood codinghorror.com is a dead link. The actual link is <a href="https://blog.codinghorror.com/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.codinghorror.com/</a>
A simple statistics of the top 5,000 blog domain names shows that 54% use .com, 14% use .org, 7% use .io (40% of which are github.io), and 6% use .net. These five together account for 81%.
Oh wow I did not expect to make it into the top 500 :D<p>It's only barely there at 480 but still.. that reminds me it's been too long since I've written a post.
Is there a tool which will show me either:<p>- the blog domains which I tend to comment on (relative to other people, not in absolute terms), or<p>- the people whose comments I most often reply to?
4443! Heck yah. Although, it's weird that I'm listed as having "career advice."<p>Nobody should listen to me. I have no idea what I'm doing.
Note that this is gonna be skewed pretty heavily toward domains that have existed for most of HN's history, at the expense of any newer domains that had fewer chances to rack up points.<p>If you look at any 2-4 year period, the ranking tends to be quite different. Well, Paul Graham is there pretty consistently, but everything else changes.
paulg's blog shouldnt count as for its an extension of this and more of a long game sales pitch tailored for different purposes. Not a bad thing, but I just wouldnt consider it a blog.
Interesting that if you were to combine AstralCodexTen and SlateStarCodex it would be around top #20. Even with the traffic split he's in the top 50 twice.
Now we can place bets on personal blogs!<p>$50 that xeiaso.net will overtake justine.lol this year. (Kidding of course, they're two of my favorite sites.)