标签：#blogging

Last month I moved my blog off a platform and onto a rented server, and instead of installing WordPress I finished something I had been building for it: Quire Ink , a blog engine that is one process and two SQLite files. No database server, no build pipeline, no cloud account anywhere in the path. bun src/index.ts That line is the whole deployment. Point nginx at the port and you have a blog. The part readers notice Opening a post costs about 114 KB , first visit, nothing cached. Of that, 67 KB is fonts I host myself and the JavaScript is 3.6 to 7.8 KB , written by hand. Third-party requests: zero . No CDN, no font host, no tracker. The numbers hold because the build enforces them. Every bundle has a size cap and the build fails if a feature crosses it, so nothing can quietly start costing every reader a little more forever. And the reading page is where most of the work went: Six palettes in light and dark, and four reading typefaces , all switchable by the reader, not just the owner. Fonts ship with Vietnamese and Central European accents included. Book mode : a fullscreen two-column reader on paper, with a drop cap and a page count. Not a filter over the page, a second typography. A five-ink highlighter . Write ==text== and it renders as an SVG stroke with chisel ends that breaks per line, pigments measured off a photograph of a real pen box. Readers can also keep their own highlights. 1.4 KB, and zero if unused. Math is MathML , drawn by the browser's own layout engine. No script, no stylesheet, no font file, so a post with a formula costs the reader nothing over one without. Code is highlighted on the server , 21 languages, so no highlighter ships to the browser. A fence that names no language gets a timid guess, so program output stays plain. Search answers as you type , a contents rail follows the post, and related posts, reading time and a progress bar are all there. The progress bar and the fade-in are pure CSS. The part I use every day The admin just went

Very few posts on this blog explain how to do something in software. On the blogs I ran before this one, and killed later, I wrote a lot more of that kind of content, because I needed it more back then. But I noticed that with AI, this need slowly went down for me too. At some point I asked myself why I don't go back to it, and how much sense that would even make. Just Ask Google I used to open Google, type my problem, and somehow find a solution close enough to what I needed. Now the numbers tell a different story. In 2026, less than a third of Google searches end with a click to any website. For the rest, AI Overviews already answer the question, so the user never leaves the search page. On queries where an AI Overview shows up, click rates sometimes drop as low as 17-20%. So which posts still get clicked? Not the "how do I do X" ones. Comparison posts and posts that share real experience get more clicks. The other type gets pulled out by AI and handed straight to the reader, without the blog in between. That's tiring, honestly. My writing gets picked up by AI before it even reaches my site, gets used, and my site gets no traffic from it. But does that actually matter? Is it worth quitting over? What Am I Even Writing? I sat down and went through my old posts, and a pattern showed up. I wasn't writing "how to use X." I was writing what happens when you actually use X in production, and what I learned from it. Turns out I was already doing the right thing for this era, without planning it. The first type is generic reference material. It's already in the docs, repeated in ten other blogs, and AI can summarize it faster than I ever could. The second type is something that happened to me. Which mistake I made, why I made it, how I noticed it. There's no documentation that can summarize that, because that experience only exists in me. Research backs this up too. AI isn't killing traffic, it's redistributing it. Clicks are dropping on generic, unbranded information que

I started a gaming guide blog six weeks ago. Twenty-one articles later, it's getting traffic from Google, I have four affiliate programs set up, and I have never written a single line of code. This is not a "how to make money blogging" post. This is a practical breakdown of the tools, the workflow, and the mistakes I made so you can skip them. The blog is yxgonglue.com. It covers PC and console game guides — GTA VI pre-order comparisons, VPN setups for gaming, cloud gaming platform rankings, extraction shooter loot guides. Niche stuff. The kind of content people search for when they have a specific problem. Here is the stack that runs it. THE STACK WordPress + Kadence Theme Hosted on a standard shared hosting plan. Kadence is a free WordPress theme that loads fast and does not fight you. No page builder. No Elementor. Just the block editor and Kadence blocks for tables and formatting. The biggest lesson here: your theme does not matter as much as your content structure. Pick something lightweight. Stop theme-shopping. Start writing. Yoast SEO The free version. It gives you a red/yellow/green score for each post based on keyphrase density, subheading distribution, link count, and meta length. Is it perfect? No. Is it a useful checklist for someone who does not do SEO for a living? Absolutely. One thing Yoast taught me the hard way: Custom HTML blocks are invisible to the plugin. If you paste your article into a Custom HTML block, Yoast reads zero words, zero links, zero headings. Everything turns red. Use the regular editor. If you need a table, use a table block. Keep it simple. Google Search Console This is where you see what people actually searched before they clicked your article. The gap between what you think people search for and what they actually search for is enormous. Search Console closes that gap. Submit every new post URL manually. It takes ten seconds. Do not wait for Google to discover your site on its own. THE CONTENT WORKFLOW One Article Per Day Tw

Let me confess something a little creepy. I have a habit of peeking at other people's dev posts. Not stealing the writing — relax. I run a tiny read-only job that fetches the public pages on dev.to, Zenn, and Qiita and counts only the boring parts: titles, post times, like counts. Who published what, at what hour, and how far it traveled. Then it tallies the lot. The reason is petty: my own posts weren't landing. The content is already in my hands — so I wanted to know how much the rest, the when and how you publish , actually moves the needle. By the numbers, not by gut. So I counted across three platforms. And the conditions that make a post fly turned out to be roughly mirror images between Japan (Zenn / Qiita) and the English-speaking world (dev.to). Here's the story. First, my most important disclaimer This post is full of numbers, so let me put up a guardrail before any of them. This is correlation, not causation . A result like "weekend posts don't do well" could mean the weekend itself is bad — or it could mean people who post on weekends are just dashing something off on the side. The data can't separate those. Please read it that way. Also, I only keep aggregate numbers I computed myself . I don't store or reuse anyone's article body (read-only GET, count the features, throw the page away). I peek, but only at the overall shape . Nobody gets singled out here. With that out of the way — four findings I enjoyed. 1. The best hour to publish is just your readers' time zone This one came out cleanest. On Qiita , posts published in the morning win (+32pt in the GOOD group). Midday is +14pt. Evening is -32pt, late night -14pt. Zenn likes midday too (+27pt). Late night is -15pt. dev.to is the exact opposite. Late night Japan time scores +7pt — Japanese evening is actually weak. The trick is obvious once you see it. dev.to's readers are English-speaking, mostly US. Late night in Japan is the US working day. Zenn and Qiita readers are in Japan, so the Japanese morni