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Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

henrikkarlsson.xyz

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Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#51

Post by darig »

deadbabe wrote: post #16
idlewords wrote: post #13

The best writing advice I ever got was from a college professor—"everybody's got 100 bad essays in them. You just have to get them out." I feel like this is what blogging is especially good for. You can clear out the awful stuff and then try to incrementally improve. I would diametrically disagree with point #7—if you want to write well, you need to revise the hell out of it. I guess pick whose writing you like bette…

It’s better to get those bad essays out in the form of comments, you get instant feedback and you’ll know what works and what doesn’t work when you go to write a real blog.

[dead]

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#52

Post by 7thpower »

deadbabe wrote: post #16
idlewords wrote: post #13

The best writing advice I ever got was from a college professor—"everybody's got 100 bad essays in them. You just have to get them out." I feel like this is what blogging is especially good for. You can clear out the awful stuff and then try to incrementally improve. I would diametrically disagree with point #7—if you want to write well, you need to revise the hell out of it. I guess pick whose writing you like bette…

It’s better to get those bad essays out in the form of comments, you get instant feedback and you’ll know what works and what doesn’t work when you go to write a real blog.

Sadly, that hasn’t helped me.

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#53

Post by masutaka »

rednafi wrote: post #43

I have been maintaining a semi-successful blog [1] for the last five years and have learned a few things along the way: - Own your content: Medium, Substack, Hashnode, Dev.to—all of them suck. Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time. - No one cares about the technology behind your site unless it’s huge. So it should be the least of your concerns. Don’t be that JS guy who rewrites their entire site every w…

The term POSSE is new to me. It is a great learning experience.

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#54

Post by [deleted] »

masutaka wrote: post #53
rednafi wrote: post #43

I have been maintaining a semi-successful blog [1] for the last five years and have learned a few things along the way: - Own your content: Medium, Substack, Hashnode, Dev.to—all of them suck. Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time. - No one cares about the technology behind your site unless it’s huge. So it should be the least of your concerns. Don’t be that JS guy who rewrites their entire site every w…

The term POSSE is new to me. It is a great learning experience.

[deleted]

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#55

Post by alxexperience »

idlewords wrote: post #13

The best writing advice I ever got was from a college professor—"everybody's got 100 bad essays in them. You just have to get them out." I feel like this is what blogging is especially good for. You can clear out the awful stuff and then try to incrementally improve. I would diametrically disagree with point #7—if you want to write well, you need to revise the hell out of it. I guess pick whose writing you like bette…

While I agree, I know it can be hard to start writing as well, because you are so worried about the quality. One of my professors from college brought up a great point that "No one will read your shitty first draft except you."

I find that phrase very helpful, because usually when I write, the first draft is always a giant mess. But you're able to craft it and edit it the best way that you can. So you can push out what you think is good work, and continue to improve as you write more.

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#57

Post by snackbroken »

rednafi wrote: post #43

I have been maintaining a semi-successful blog [1] for the last five years and have learned a few things along the way: - Own your content: Medium, Substack, Hashnode, Dev.to—all of them suck. Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time. - No one cares about the technology behind your site unless it’s huge. So it should be the least of your concerns. Don’t be that JS guy who rewrites their entire site every w…

> If you don’t promote your work, no one else will.

This has not been my experience. If you do interesting things then there are plenty of people who are willing to bring attention to it. I've been cold-emailed by journalists wanting to interview me without ever doing anything other than a) make my work publicly accessible and b) collaborate with like-minded people.

Perhaps I'm lucky (probably). Perhaps my work would've gotten more attention if I spent more effort promoting it (probably). The things I do because I find them interesting are not things I feel the need to promote, because I'm not doing them for attention.

If your goal is to grab a lot of attention, you will inexorably have to do things that are not interesting because the only way to achieve broad appeal is to not offend anyone's tastes and the only way to do that is to be bland.

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#58

Post by SteveVeilStream »

My favorite two reasons for blogging:

1) Because sometimes you are right about something and it's nice to show that you were thinking about it ahead of time. An example would be my prediction in 2023 (which is fairly late in all fairness,) that one of the most important improvements in AI in the near future would be the ability to interact with any GUI as if it was an API.

2) Because often you are wrong about something and having it written down and in public will keep you honest about hindsight bias. An example would be predictions I made about lasting impacts of the pandemic on how we approach healthcare and minimizing respiratory infections in general.

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#59

Post by jopsen »

SteveVeilStream wrote: post #58

My favorite two reasons for blogging: 1) Because sometimes you are right about something and it's nice to show that you were thinking about it ahead of time. An example would be my prediction in 2023 (which is fairly late in all fairness,) that one of the most important improvements in AI in the near future would be the ability to interact with any GUI as if it was an API. 2) Because often you are wrong about somethi…

Also nice that people you interact with online or old friends who look you up, can see some of the stuff you do. Without having to resort to Facebook.

Whether that's hobbies, a home renovation project, a public presentation you did at work, a life event (wedding, kids, etc).

Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

#60

Post by colonial »

semking wrote: post #24

Serious question, as someone who recently started writing: • How do you guys feel about your thoughts, ideas and creativity being scraped and secretly added to the training corpus of AI models?

Pissed. Almost everything I publish online is licensed, usually in a copy-left manner.

These companies are violating that agreement for their own gain, and respond to any pushback by invoking bogus legal arguments and ridiculous machine anthropomorphism. Brute force statistical analysis is not "learning."

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