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Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

henrikkarlsson.xyz

181–190 of 196 posts

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

#181
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I suspect that the issue here is that either the VP was insecure or that the engineer said it in an accusatory way (or both).

In all likelihood, the engineer meant "that approach/idea/decision has risks we should consider." The VP likely heard "you are suggesting something wrong/dangerous/ignorant."

A nuance here is that the engineer probably implied that "(We should be) careful (in our consideration)" and the VP perceived "(You need to be) careful (and you don't seem to be)"

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

#182
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

You say careful, and their ego probably hears you calling them careless. Careless is typically an avoided behavior so this hurts them. They view themselves as careful and wise. You think they're dumb. (Not necessarily a syllogism, but the ego is weird)

I'm possibly paraphrasing and simplifying too much but "How to Win Friends and influence People" mentions being very cautious about correcting people, more so correcting them publically, even when you are correct.

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

#183

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…

there's a lot of good writing advice out there, but some of the best i got was from a college professor, too. i will botch it: each sentence should make sense based on every prior sentence. each sentence should be able to stand alone on its own sheet of paper.

i had the perfect restatement of this pop in my head later during the day and then i forgot it!

write each sentence on a single sheet of paper.

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

#184
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You say careful, and their ego probably hears you calling them careless. Careless is typically an avoided behavior so this hurts them. They view themselves as careful and wise. You think they're dumb. (Not necessarily a syllogism, but the ego is weird) I'm possibly paraphrasing and simplifying too much but "How to Win Friends and influence People" mentions being very cautious about correcting people, more so correcti…

> How to Win Friends and influence People

Such a good book, I'm about due for a re-read I think.

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

#185
post #94
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?

It's already a real problem that the organic blogosphere was destroyed by "blogspam" and overt plagiarism of entire blogs into content farms that existed purely to push SEO, including SEO over the original blog. AI just makes this worse. I'm also worried that if I wanted to find an audience the audience would first have to navigate the AI search hall of mirrors.

I maintain a blog that I write myself, and a blogging bot on a separate site/domain, which I run as an exercise/sandbox.

They both get traffic. Neither site is optimised for SEO. Looking at analytics (Matomo on my blog, Google Analytics for the bot), the stuff I write myself gets "real" visitors. People will stumble on a project, and you can see them navigate to the next article, and the next article.

The content from the bot isn't engaging - people might stumble on it, then bounce.

Absent search, interesting content gets shared. Blog spam does not.

I don't worry too much about my content being used to train LLMs - I don't feel it takes away from me, it a bit feels like content getting indexed by a search engine. And I see value, for me, in just creating it.

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

#186
post #172
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> That's unfortunately a common myth even re regular text

A common myth that seems quite well researched [1], no? Do you have some evidence of the contradictory?

> you can adjust your window to whatever is comfortable

Websites all have different layouts, you'd have to change the window width (and/or zoom level) for each website. That would be quite clunky… on devices where it's at all possible.

Forcing users to resize their windows constantly is not a nice alternative.

[1] https://journals.uc.edu/index.php/vl/article/view/5765

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

#187
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

As stated by another response, it says the speaker thinks the listener is careless.

It also places the speaker in a position of authority, admonishing someone who is still learning. "Careful!" is what we say to children. A high-status person may be particularly sensitive to this, but nobody likes to be talked down to. As I alluded, I hear this amongst engineers and filter it out as verbal fluff, so there are cases where it is ok.

An easy alternative to "careful" is "I'm not sure about that" or even "I disagree." Both are what peers would say to each other. In scenarios where a high-status person is not receptive to being talked to as a peer, well, you get to add all the deference and qualification you need to, but it comes down to stating disagreement in a non-disagreeable way.

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

#188
post #186
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> That's unfortunately a common myth even re regular text A common myth that seems quite well researched [1], no? Do you have some evidence of the contradictory? > you can adjust your window to whatever is comfortable Websites all have different layouts, you'd have to change the window width (and/or zoom level) for each website. That would be quite clunky… on devices where it's at all possible. Forcing users to resiz…

But it isn't well researched, that's precisely the myth that in these areas there's solid science with precise thresholds! I've read your article and it includes many gems such as max line length of 80 cpl, which is useless to determine whether a line of 150 is bad. Or it suffers from a universal issue of this kind science - tiny sample sizes or unrepresentative composition (the perennial college student, here goes your reading skill diversity relevant for making broad conclusions about human eyes). Or it ignores that length isn't everything, there is also density (some research did vary it, but even then it was only doubling), which a simple cpl count used in many cited papers doesn't measure

And the main factor against long lines is errors returning to the next line's beginning.

First, what's the well researched level drop between 130 and 150 for a person with a high reading skill level?

Then, have they "well researched" such simple typographical guides as the varying line widths (check out the layout of this very article, note that it's not rectangular, but one side is continuously growing in length, cool trick!). Or having some alternating line markers at line beginning/end to make visual match easy (similar, but not identical, to tables where you have full line highlighted)?

Maybe the most efficient reading is at line length of 333 with line guides and semantics guides (like those bionic reading extensions) at higher text density? You could be missing out on +10% speed bump and 4% comprehension level! And the head movements would also reduce muscle strain from a prolonged fixed head/neck position! Or maybe the very best is even higher 1234 but requires some curved ultrawide monitor to fit you whole peripheral vision and immerse you in the text without other visual distractions? I'd be curious to know what the real scientific eye limits are when it comes to reading.

But also efficiency isn't the only important metric for casual reading of web blogs, while a lot of research focused on that. There was some research about user perception that found no difference between line lengths. So there is that.

I also don't get why would you ever need to adjust window width per website? Say, for me the best line length is max 133 at font size 14 and char spacing X. So if I set my window at about this width so that no more text fits, and it reflows, I'm set. Yes, there are sites that disrespect user font size preferences, which would require zooming (or reading plugin), but this true regardless of the max width preferences, and also they would disrespect whatever the width guidelines are.

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

#189
I found that a nice compromise between self-hosting and publishing on a Medium / Substack is using Github pages + Notion published links:

- You get one free site per GitHub account

- I forked https://github.com/academicpages/academicpages.github.io and updated the blog posts to link to published Notion pages.

- This gives you a great WYSIWYG editor and all the nice features that Notion provides (collab edit, embeds, tables, LaTeX, view/edit anywhere).

- Notion handles the SEO too.

- See https://mikeshen.github.io/year-archive/ and an example post - https://mikeshen.notion.site/Deepnote-Embeds-Share-Your-Resu....

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

#190
post #2

Do they have something to say, or is this like "I want to be in a band" of a previous generation?

there are two types of blogs - sincere ones, where the author pours out his soul and talks about what he can't keep to himself, possibly raising some important issues, trying to convey them to the masses, and SEO blogs - where there are excrements of hashtags, advertising slogans, constant repetitions, and requests to throw a bone (support the project, you haven't supported the project yet? you can do it here, well,…

sincere ones, where the author pours out his soul and talks about what he can't keep to himself...

Talking head with big microphone, with no editing.

Relevant Black Mirror episode: [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

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