Own your platform. If you host your own blog, you have the ability to make it do literally anything you want. It's such a superpower that's severely underrated.
Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
171–180 of 196 posts
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#172Why do you insist on only using the middle third of my screen to display content? I'm over 50 and my eyes are not quite what they used to be. Your 12pt (ish) text is largely legible to me but why do you insist on your idea of presentation, rather than mine? The whole point of the www as far as I recall is that you send a message and I receive it. How it is formatted should largely be a matter for the recipient, with…
Content width is an odd thing to complain about: - everybody limits it. This is because no matter the size of your screen, the human eyes are somewhat limited to lines of 70-130 characters. Higher than that, and your eyes have hard time finding the next line at the end of the previous one because the travel is too high. As a web page writer, you need to take care of that, because the default presentation will be bad…
> human eyes are somewhat limited to lines of 70-130 characters. Higher than that, and your eyes have hard time finding the next line at the end of the previous one because the travel is too high.
That's unfortunately a common myth even re regular text (even more so re code with all the extra structural helps) that's responsible for a lot of vertical space waste.
But at any rate you can adjust your window to whatever is comfortable, no need for the author to incorrectly guess what's best for you
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#173The 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…
In high school I did a report on a local poet and author.
What struck me back then was he said in an interview that you need to go through at least a thousand sheets of paper before you start producing anything good.
As a high schooler dreading to write a 4 page report on the guy, a thousand pages sounded ludicrous.
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Do you want to be a Writer, or do you want to write ?” I think that almost any question of the form “Do you want to be an X er, or do you want to X ” is useful these days.
100%. As a kid growing up near a golf course I knew lots of kids who wanted to be a pro golfer (me too). Did they want to spend 10 hrs a day at the range hitting ball after ball? Not so much. Lots of people want to be Warren Buffett - do they want to read 10-ks for 10 hrs a day? Not so much.
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Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#175Serious 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?
You can’t worry about it. It’s the world we live in now. The alternative is to not write anything of significance on the internet, which would be of no benefit to anyone.
"This is the world we live in" is a good excuse to never right any wrongs.
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#176Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#177Bear Blog looks like a good option for a new (minimalist) blog. Can anyone recommend it? https://bearblog.dev/
It was my likely first choice before deciding to roll my own. I’d recommend getting a domain which will cost you $5/month or so to use with bear iirc.
Mataroa is another option similar to bear.
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#178I 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 it took less time to write than it would take someone to read, it’s probably not worth writing. Disagree. If it took less thinking than it will take reading, then yes, probably not worth it. But if you can trim your writing to the pith in every paragraph or even line, people will love you. Too many people babble to keep the underlying lies and fraud and their complicity burried in narratives.
I like this post about the value of brevity that starts with “disagree”, immediately agrees with what it’s responding to, and then goes on to talk about a completely unrelated thing
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#179I've been blogging for just over 20 years at this point, my main takeaways 1) Blog for yourself and no-one else. Write things up because you find them interesting or you learned something. Trying to second-guess things like what will be popular or get engagement is not a fun time for what is likely to be a hobby. 2) Keep it low maintenance and simple publishing process. I use Github pages and Jekyll, but other simila…
Why publish at all? Why not just write privately?
I echo the other responses to your question. Just recently I had two instances where an old blog post of mine contained a solution to a problem a coworker encountered. I publish these notes mostly so that I don't forget about them, but it's an added degree of satisfaction when it proves helpful to others. I wrote a bit about this in one of my recent posts [1]. Don't be afraid of the rabbit holes!
Re: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 Careful. While I agree with the premise, you make it sound binary. You can have broad-er appeal while still being individual.
> Careful. I witnessed a memorable moment at work when an engineer responded to a VP and started by saying “careful.” Had it been another engineer, it would have been ignored as authoritative-sounding filler. But the VP did not take it well.
Do you mind explaining why this was problematic? I'm working to track down things that I say that might be interpreted in ways other than I intend, and this sounds like a mistake I would make. What's the problematic message that's being sent here from the engineer to the VP?