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Here, Laravel News creator Eric L. Barnes shares the story behind the official Laravel blog.
Transcript
So the reason I started Laravel News is – it’s kind of a funny story at the beginning, I wanted to be a better writer. And so that’s why I was like: “Well, I can write articles”, you know, “I might not be the best programmer, but you know, I can write some stuff, so I will.”
“I will start writing all this up and keeping the Laravel team not having to deal with it, not to worry about it.” And that was sort of the progression on why it started was I just wanted to write more and I was already in the Laravel community, so I was like, “Well, this just makes perfect sense. I can just write about this and and do it for fun.” And then it just kind of progressed and became what it is.
So Laravel News started, actually, it started as a Twitter account only, so I would go in and see things that were being shared on Twitter about Laravel and I would retweet them, share, share things I learn, things like that.
And then as it progressed, I realized that, you know, Twitter is not the best outlet for this because nothing is searchable. You know, it’s not going to show up in Google search results. It’s not going to do any of this stuff.
So I took that and then created a little Tumblr website called Laravel News. And at that time, I would just post up just whatever I found throughout the day.
It was basically like a link blog at that point. And then so that went on for probably two years. And then and then what we did, I switched it to another, another blog engine and then I would start trying to write a little bit longer form articles, write some more tutorials and basically the same way, just kind of keeping the community informed. Finding cool things out on the internet that’s related to the community and writing about those and then that progressed and progressed. And then I was actually able to make a little bit of money from the website by selling advertising and was able to hire Paul as a writer.
So now he helps write everything up. We still have a lot of the feel from the beginning. You know, we still right about all the packages that are coming out. We write about, you know, all the new big releases and just kind of anything cool that’s within the ecosystem.
We try to do it every we post, every day, Monday through Friday, and we usually keep that going throughout the entire year and been doing it for ten years now.
Thankfully, I’ve been able to hire a writer, I’ve got people running a podcast for us and it’s just progressively grown over these last ten years.
It’s probably averaging more than 100,000 visits a month. It’s got people, you know, from all over the world visiting it and even people, you know, try to translate some of the articles into their into their own native languages. So it’s it’s cool just seeing the progression of Laravel News as well as Laravel throughout these years.
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