Some blogging myths

245 点作者 GavinAnderegg将近 2 年前

17 条评论

simonw将近 2 年前

My three tips for blogging more:1. Write TILs. The only justification needed to publish one is "did I just learn something that was new to me?" - having such a low bar makes it much easier to publish frequently.2. Write about projects you have shipped, no matter how small. I like to think of this as the price I pay for distracting myself with yet another little side-project.3. Learn to hit "publish" when you still aren't completely happy with what you have written. The alternative is never publishing anything at all!

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snewman将近 2 年前

Great post. I'll propose one more "myth": writing a blog doesn't benefit you personally, except by drawing attention. I've found that writing about a topic can also be a great way to solidify your own thinking on that topic. There ideas that I've understood much better after blogging about them. Basically, you're using the entire Internet as your "rubber duck".

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GavinAnderegg将近 2 年前

Julia Evans is a better blogger than I'll ever be, but I've been trying to get back into blogging. These tips are great, and all things I need to keep in mind. "You need to be original" and "writing boring posts is bad" are two thoughts that often keep me from writing on a subject.

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maguay将近 2 年前

Another myth that dovetails with the author's mention that pageviews don't matter: The only way to get traffic is to write about something a lot of people search for, thus the entire industry around Ahrefs and similar Google Search tools.And yet. The blog posts that have been my breakout successes, when measured by pageviews or cold outreach or opportunities, are always about incredibly niche things. How to fix one specific thing on an obscure printer. My rambling ideas about a broader topic. If anything, the more niche, eccentric stuff that only matters to you helps you find your people, and that's where the magical connections happen. And the traffic, weirdly, as no one else is catering to your people as well as you can.

Swizec将近 2 年前

My biggest problem after blogging regularly for 15 years is that I continue to have more ideas and interesting things to write about than I have time to write.And the more I write the more ideas I get.edit: This has especially been a problem for the past year because I’m also under a book contract. Most days writing the book takes priority, but then my mind is exploding with blog ideas that don’t fit in book. But I don’t have energy to do both.

arp242将近 2 年前

I think the deeper issue is that there is no "one right way".I subscribe to the "you need to be original myth" for example. If I don't feel I can contribute anything to the existing corpus of text then I won't write about it. This does not mean that there can't be pre-existing content; I did an explainer on bitmasks for example – hardly a new concept – but I felt I could add something to the existing corpus, so it was "original" in that sense. I also tend to only write on things I'm fairly knowledgable on (with one or two exceptions) and while no one is ever "100% correct" I spend quite a bit of effort ensuring it's as close as I can be. All of this is what works well for me, so that's fine.Fundamentally: it's your site, and you can do whatever the hell you want with it. Purple text on a pink background? It's your site! Lost of swearing? It's your site! Furry drawings? It's your site! Gay leather kink pictures in the sidebar? It's your site!

UltimateEdge将近 2 年前

The idea of editing already-published blog posts is unappealing to me, in case someone bookmarks or saves a link to my article before it was edited. Unless I make it clear what content was edited and when (more work!), the reader might be coming back to something different the second time they visit my page.It's this fact of the web that forces me to go to The Internet Archive's "Save Page Now" whenever I come across something remotely interesting, and I don't want to be part of the problem!Before someone mentions that most likely nobody will care about my edited page - it's a matter of principle! For example, I'm sure many of us here take the time to license our toy projects, even though the vast majority of them are effectively unknown to the rest of the world.

denvaar将近 2 年前

These are all great tips, and I need to keep them in mind. I have a blog post I've been trying to finish for months, and pretty much all of these things have been holding me back.Not really a "myth", but I'd also say: Don't box yourself into writing about one specific topic.I find blogging to be a really rewarding thing to do - but I gotta remember that I do it for myself and not others. When I start to drift away from this then I start to suffer. It's an interesting thing to balance, since you're publishing things online.One strategy that works well for me is to first do all my writing and note-taking in an actual notebook. This lets me write freely and explore ideas. Then I can make a decision about whether or not to polish and publish.

z3t4将近 2 年前

About the "posts need to be 100% correct", I sometimes read through my old blog posts and find a bunch of errors. If it was a post on HN you can no longer edit it, but if it's your own blog you can just edit and make corrections! Sometimes I add a note like "Me from the future..." it feels like time travel.

gavinhoward将近 2 年前

I'm a blogger too, not as famous as Julia, but I'm too famous for my tastes. [1] [2] [3] [4]I agree with Julia's points perfectly! In fact, some of those four posts were "boring" (I thought), but got a lot of traffic.I just want to add two more myths that are unfortunately pushed in today's clickbait culture.Myth: You need to make your posts clickbait.One of the posts linked about used clickbait-ish titles ("Considered Harmful"), but they weren't very clickbait-ish in general. Yes, my thesis may have been opposite of mainstream, but I don't think the titles were clickbait.Myth: You need to make your posts appeal to people's emotions, i.e., make them ragebait or similar.Those four posts are my highest traffic posts on HN, and they were all level-headed posts.I had an earlier version of my "Considered Harmful" post, and it was ragebait, but it didn't get much traffic (thank goodness!).Be constructive.I think if there's a theme to Julia's points, it's that: be constructive and useful. Sometimes, that means being boring. Sometimes it means having a short post, sometimes a long one. Sometimes, it means repeating something. Sometimes, it means skipping concepts.My $0.02.[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34662666" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34662666</a>[2]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30965805" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30965805</a>[3]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28736238" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28736238</a>[4]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29671325" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29671325</a>

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SeenNotHeard将近 2 年前

> I still don’t know if all of those statements are true (is it true that PHP programs can’t have long-lived persistent TCP connections? maybe not!)They can, depending on how the PHP program is coded. PHP even supports non-blocking I/O.

mbwgh将近 2 年前

One thing that comes to mind about comments.I think writing blog posts may be hard, but writing a constructive comment is hard also. People are not good at it, and I often find myself writing something and then just give up in the middle and deleting it again. Not just because finding the right words is hard (especially if you're not a native speaker), but some of the same questions go through my head as well (Who is the intended reader? Hasn't someone commented on this before? ...).Thus I would suggest assuming the commenter has spent more time thinking about what to write than you might expect. And even if not, someone else may get some value out of their comment, so even if it isn't you, give them the benefit of the doubt. The point about assuming they're confused, not angry, is spot on I think.There is probably a connection to the point about writing becoming harder with more experience. Each sentence you write will trigger more warnings in your head, or it might become harder to put yourself in someone else's shoes. To keep going, you probably have to learn to just accept and expect imperfection and just keep going, cut the editorial phase short at some point and just publish or you'll never get done.The next presumably angry/ignorant/dumb commenter you encounter may have just done that, and by necessity. You never know.

hardwaregeek将近 2 年前

Also, if you can write a really long reddit/HN comment about it, you can probably write a blog post about it. A lot of my blog posts come from either that or ranting to a friend.

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brabel将近 2 年前

I blog regularly, and given many other bloggers are commenting, let me ask: how do you do analytics? I am currently using Google Analytics, but they're changing it and a nagging me to change the configuration, but I wanted to move away from them for a long time for something more privacy-oriented (I just want to know how many people are reading my posts, maybe from which countries, and that's all - no ads). Would appreciate honest suggestions (no ads).

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retrobox将近 2 年前

This is nice advice. I ended up with choice paralysis even deciding how to set up and publish blog posts. Static site generators with deployment pipelines? Something more traditional like Wordpress? Other?

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zabzonk将近 2 年前

i wrote blogs simply becauase i enjoy writing and having fun, and i would have thought that is the primary motivator for most bloggers. and i really enjoyed writing training courses. given up now because of health and other problems.a couple of mine:<a href="https://latedev.wordpress.com/" rel="nofollow">https://latedev.wordpress.com/</a><a href="https://punchlet.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/hello-world/" rel="nofollow">https://punchlet.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/hello-world/</a>

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fungiblecog将近 2 年前

i disagree with a lot of this. there's enough incorrect and duplicate rubbish on the internet without encouraging more of it.In the old days - before narcissism became an acceptable personality trait - people were encouraged to think, learn, research and be original before subjecting the world to their writings.I'm not that old but i miss that

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