# A Blog, If You Can Keep It

DevFeed: [A Blog, If You Can Keep It](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/a-blog-if-you-can-keep-it-1686.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://fly.io/blog/a-blog-if-kept/>)

Published: 2025-02-10T00:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [The Fly Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/the-fly-blog.md>)

Topics: [fly.io](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/fly-io.md>), [Publishing](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/publishing.md>), [Code](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/code.md>)

Tags: [blog](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/blog.md>), [cdn](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/cdn.md>), [close-to-users](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/close-to-users.md>), [deploy-app-servers](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/deploy-app-servers.md>), [docker](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/docker.md>), [elixir](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/elixir.md>), [fly](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/fly.md>), [fly-io](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/fly-io.md>), [go](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/go.md>), [heroku-alternative](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/heroku-alternative.md>), [heroku-competitor](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/heroku-competitor.md>), [hosting](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/hosting.md>), [i](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/i.md>), [networking](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/networking.md>), [postgresql-clusters](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/postgresql-clusters.md>), [servers](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/servers.md>), [technical](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/technical.md>), [writing](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/writing.md>)

## AI overview

A Fly.io team member reflects on the company's use of long-form technical EffortPosts to reach Hacker News audiences. The article argues that strict editorial processes, perfectionism, and concern about exhausting the audience have slowed publication, and describes a shift toward publishing more freely.

## Source excerpt

A boldfaced lede like this was a sure sign you were reading a carefully choreographed EffortPost from our team at Fly.io. We're going to do less of those. Or the same amount but more of a different kind of post. Either way: launch an app on Fly.io today! Over the last 5 years, we've done pretty well for ourselves writing content for Hacker News. And that's mostly been good for us. We don't do conventional marketing, we don't have a sales team, the rest of social media is atomized over 5 different sites. Writing pieces that HN takes seriously has been our primary outreach tool. There's a recipe (probably several, but I know this one works) for charting a post on HN: Write an EffortPost, which is to say a dense technical piece over 2000 words long; within that rubric there's a bunch of things that are catnip to HN, including runnable code, research surveys, and explainers. (There are also cat-repellants you learn to steer clear of.) Assiduously avoid promotion. You have to write for the audience. We get away with sporadically including a call-to-action block in our posts, but otherwise: the post should make sense even if an unrelated company posted it after you went out of business. Pick topics HN is interested in (it helps if all your topics are au courant for HN, and we've been very lucky in that regard). Like 5-6 more style-guide things that help incrementally. Probably 3 different teams writing for HN will have 3 different style guides with only like ½ overlap. Ours, for instances, instructs writers to swear. I like this kind of writing. It's not even a chore. But it's become an impediment for us, for a couple reasons: the team serializes behind an "editorial" function here, which keeps us from publishing everything we want; worse, caring so much about our track record leaves us noodling on posts interminably (the poor Tigrises have been waiting for months for me to publish the piece I wrote about them and FoundationDB; take heart, this post today means that one i