alt Hacker NewsI've gotten a ton out of this community (much of the time research I've done in the past year stems from various comments and articles I found here), and regarding:
"Jeff started out as a blogger, and he still treats his blog readers as first-class citizens. He structures his articles to fit the text medium rather than just lazily scraping dialog from his videos. You can read his post about upgrading storage on his Mac mini and not even realize it’s adapted from a video."
For most of my favorite projects, I write the blog post _first_, then adapt that to a YouTube script. I still consider the written word to be vastly superior to video form.
But the videos earn an income (about 1/2 what I earned as a software dev, but it's sustainable and lets me do whatever projects I like), whereas the blog has earned maybe a few thousand dollars with Amazon Affiliate links each year (it covers the hosting, at least, and gives a little extra cash, but I try to keep the blog as "old school web" as possible.
Just finished upgrading it to Hugo today! (After being on Drupal for 16 years)
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It's always a pleasure watching your videos, even when I don't like the topic; you seem like a genuine person that enjoys tech. Thank you for the content.
I found Hugo to work well for the most part. Seemed everytime I went to publish id run into a new error if I wasn't consistent enough about posting. I moved over to Docusaurus for the new year and off of Hugo.
Thanks for the work you do, really inspirational honestly.
Jeff, your /books and /blog links appear to be broken here: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/about/
I know it is a choice but would you mind turning on full RSS with your blog.
I don't doubt that writing the blog first forces you to create the framework from which to create the video. You dot the "i's" and there too you remember the thing you almost forgot.
The blog no doubt makes the videos better.
Oh hey, I think I first started running into you via our chef-drupal cookbooks ;) that community treated me so so well, but it's certainly better to move past it these days
Thanks for sharing what platform you’re using to run your blog! Been meaning to message you about it and ask. I see this model being quite attainable as somebody looking to advance myself professionally, following a similar approach.
Respectable to see this candor on how it's done, wishing much success in 2026.
> Just finished upgrading it to Hugo today! (After being on Drupal for 16 years)
I did this exact thing back in 2020 It was the smartest move I ever made.
I always enjoy watching your videos Jeff, appreciate your honest, no-hype approach. As a bonus it's great to see you active here and on Reddit as well.
> For most of my favorite projects, I write the blog post _first_, then adapt that to a YouTube script. I still consider the written word to be vastly superior to video form.
Thanks for this context! I've re-worded that sentence to remove the assumption that the Mac Mini post was adapted from the video.
>blog has earned maybe a few thousand dollars with Amazon Affiliate links each year (it covers the hosting, at least, and gives a little extra cash, but I try to keep the blog as "old school web" as possible.
Wow, I'm surprised it's that little. I assumed all the popular homelab creators were making much more from affiliate links because I'd assume it's $500-5k in referred purchases per day ($12.5-125/day @ 2.5% commission), so I'd expect $10-20k/yr.
If it's an insignificant amount of your income, why bother? Affiliate links create a bias that goes against the interests of readers.[0] I get it when it's the only way to be sustainable, but if it's a pretty small percentage of annual earnings, it seems not worthwhile.
[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...
This really highlights the misalignment between information density and monetization mechanisms.
Text is random-access, searchable, and respects the reader's time (I can skim a blog post in 2 minutes to find the one command I need). Video is linear and demands a fixed time commitment.
It is somewhat tragic that the format which is often technically superior for documentation and reference (text) relies on the format that is optimized for engagement/retention (video) to subsidize it. Kudos to you for maintaining the blog-first workflow despite the incentives pulling the other way.