You should start a blog: A homelabber's case for owning your content

The most valuable technical knowledge I've gained hasn't come from documentation or tutorials, but from writing about my own projects. When you commit to explaining a concept in writing, you're forced to confront every assumption, gap in logic, and missing detail. It's a brutal but effective learning mechanism. My first blog post about configuring a ZFS pool was embarrassingly wrong in three places, but the process of correcting it taught me more about data integrity than any single article ever could.

Why a Blog Beats Social Media for Technical Content

Social media platforms are designed for engagement, not education. Their algorithms prioritize content that triggers immediate emotional responses—anger, outrage, or simple entertainment—over nuanced technical discussions. A detailed post about optimizing PCIe lane allocation for NVMe storage won't go viral, but it might be the exact solution someone searches for three years from now.

Blogs have a fundamentally different lifecycle:

• Longevity: A well-written technical post can remain relevant for decades. I still get comments on articles about configuring Apache virtual hosts that I wrote in 2019.
• Editability: When you discover an error or learn a better approach, you can update the original post. Social media locks you into your first impression.
• Depth: There's no character limit. You can include code blocks, tables, and hundreds of pages of detail.
• Searchability: Google indexes static HTML content reliably. A niche post about "Raspberry Pi 5 PCIe Gen 3 lane configuration" can become the top result and stay there.

The Technical Implementation: Keeping It Simple

My current setup costs $3.50/month at a VPS provider, but that's overkill for most people. The key insight: your blog should be static HTML files. This means:

1. No database to maintain
2. No CMS vulnerabilities to patch
3. Instant page loads
4. Easy migration between hosts

Hosting Options

For minimalists (free):

• GitHub Pages - Host directly from a repository
• Cloudflare Pages - Similar, with edge caching

For control (low cost):

• Any VPS provider (DigitalOcean, Linode, Hetzner) running Nginx or Caddy
• $3.50-5/month gets you a basic instance

For convenience:

• Write.as or Ghost (self-hosted) if you want a managed experience

The critical point: own your domain. Register yourname.com for ~$10/year through any registrar. This decouples your identity from any platform. If you need to switch hosting providers, your readers won't notice—the domain points to the new server, and all links continue working.

Building Your Site

You have three paths:

1. Handwritten HTML: Learn basic HTML and CSS. This gives you complete control and zero dependencies. My site uses a custom static generator I wrote in Python, but you can start with just index.html.

2. Static Site Generators: Tools like Hugo, Jekyll, or Zola generate HTML from Markdown files. They handle RSS feeds, archives, and themes automatically.

3. Minimal CMS: WriteFreely or Plume provide a blogging interface while still generating static pages.

The Content Strategy: Write What You Know

You don't need to be an expert to write something valuable. Documenting your learning process is often more useful than presenting a finished solution. When I wrote about migrating from Docker to Podman, I documented every error, every misconfiguration, and the eventual solution. That post gets more traffic than my "expert" guides because it mirrors the real experience of learning.

Post Ideas for Homelab Builders

• "How I configured my $200 used server for ZFS"
• "Benchmarking 10GbE vs 2.5GbE for my media server"
• "The exact steps to set up Proxmox with GPU passthrough"
• "Why I switched from Unraid to TrueNAS Scale"

Each of these provides concrete value: specific hardware models, configuration files, performance numbers, and lessons learned.

The RSS and Email Advantage

Unlike social media, you control distribution:

• RSS feeds let readers subscribe without algorithms deciding what they see
• Email newsletters (via Buttondown or Mailchimp) give you direct access to your audience
• No shadowbanning: Your content won't disappear because an algorithm decided it wasn't "engaging"

The Reality of Technical Blogging

Your first post will be bad. That's not a criticism—it's a fact. My first technical post had broken code examples and incorrect assumptions. The second was better. The third was actually useful. Writing is a skill that improves with practice.

The response is overwhelmingly positive. Out of hundreds of comments and emails over the years, I've received exactly one piece of hate mail. The technical community tends to be helpful and appreciative of shared knowledge. Corrections come as polite suggestions, not attacks.

Avoid the AI temptation. If you're using an LLM to generate posts, you're missing the entire point. The value isn't in the polished text—it's in the thinking process that writing forces. A post with spelling mistakes but real experience is infinitely more valuable than AI-generated "slop." If you must use AI, post your prompt instead. That's where the actual insight lives.

Getting Started This Week

1. Register your domain ($10/year)
2. Choose a hosting option (GitHub Pages is free and instant)
3. Write your first post (document something you did yesterday)
4. Add an RSS feed (most static generators do this automatically)
5. Share the link (not on social media—email it to three people who might care)

The technical barrier to entry is lower than ever. The real challenge is committing to the process. Your blog won't go viral, but it might help someone configure their first server, or save them three hours of debugging. That's impact that lasts longer than any tweet.

Related resources:

• My companion article on writing HTML (mentioned in the original post)
• The RSS specification for understanding feeds
• HTML5 Doctor for reference

The internet needs more human-written, experience-based technical content. Your perspective—however "beginner" it might feel—is valuable. Start writing.