by petterroea
7 subcomments
- One of the tough pills I and probably many other developers have had to swallow when maturing is that "non-programming skills" from schools are useful and very valuable, actually. Writing is one of them. Everyone loves a programmer that can explain themselves. An opinion isn't worth having if you aren't able to defend it either. Maintaining a blog therefore seems like a great way of improving your writing skills while also testing your own opinions.
Writing down opinions on things have done wonders for my ability to reason about them, especially when the opinions are built on 10 years of "hunch" and no discussion.
by GMoromisato
4 subcomments
- [Self-promotion warning] My blog that nobody read turned into a published book. An editor for a small publishing firm happened to come across my blog and thought that it might be good as a book. He contacted me and after about a year of work (more than I expected) I finished the book and got it published. It's not that popular, but I'm very happy with it.
My point is that you don't need a massive audience. If you can reach one person and make them laugh, or teach someone something new, or give someone hope when they really needed it, then your writing will be worth it.
- "I often write "too much" and struggle to really condense my thoughts into a sharpened essay. Most of my posts are 2000+ words...nowadays I'm trying to restrict myself to 1000 words. The limit forces me to really think about the core idea I want to share."
I clerked for a judge who helped us become really good writers. I know this is shocking to some, but some judges actually really do care and don't try to write thousands of pages. He really cared about trying to write opinions everyone could read and understand.
We would all get together as clerks, read the draft we had written out loud to the judge and the other clerks, and remove excess words, rewrite sentences that were too complicated, you name it. For every sentence, he encouraged us to think about who the audience really was and what we want the reader to take away from it.
If you want to make your writing shorter, this is a good approach whether you read it out loud or not. Lots of engineers write very long things because they are unsure who the audience is, or they don't think about how each sentence helps them convey something to that audience. Or they are trying to guess what questions they will get asked. Pick an audience. Go through every sentence. Remove the ones that don't actually help you convey something to your audience. Be ruthless to yourself. It's better to answer questions people have later than try to guess what they will ask you and answer it in the piece.
If you are trying to be persuasive, i'd double down on making it short, and add "order your writing and arguments in order of strength", and then "remove all the weak arguments". People won't read all the way through most of the time, and either it's convincing or it isn't. If your strongest arguments don't convince someone, your weak ones will probably make people feel like you are grasping at straws, and make the whole thing less convincing overall.
- The scraper bots probably read it and now it is ever so slightly altering the weights in some massive AI model. That's not nothing.
by paulorlando
1 subcomments
- If you want happiness through writing, write only for yourself. Never check site visitor analytics, comments, shares. Only care if you're enjoying the writing. To make it easier you can also write under a pseudonym.
Some of my worst habits formed seeing early posts go viral and then getting addicted to that endorphin hit. The amount of time I wasted checking analytics and new subs would probably equal the time it would take me to write 10 more posts or read a couple books.
But congrats at sticking to it for 10 years!
by riazrizvi
4 subcomments
- Writing a blog is like talking in the town square. Except because it’s digital, we seem to forget how communication works. If you just start talking in the town square, you’re standing alone talking. Sure a person who passes by might pause, but the odds you’re saying something really relevant to them are low, so they’ll move on.
The whole question of how you get in front of the right people and tweak your message based on their reactions, and then setup a routine so you have a dependable performance-audience, all seem to be lost on many folks.
- Look on the bright side. Firstly, I just read it. Secondly, AI will likely read it, so your thoughts may become part of the great AI world consciousness someday. Finally you're really doing this for yourself; I find writing my thoughts out in a blog or a novel gives me some satisfaction knowing I have tried, and now have something out there forever that you or your friends can look back on someday.
- “It's redundant to say "I think" at any point in an opinion piece.”
“But is there still value in human produced writing? Subjectively, yes. Objectively? I'm not sure. I think there's a lot of personal value in writing though.”
There is value because I felt compelled to engage, but if it turns out you’re a bot then I’ll feel cheated and less likely to read other blog posts.
- Ten years? I've been doing it for over twenty. Readership is something you have to chase, and if that's what you want, that's fine. But for some people, like me, it's the writing that's important.
by splitbrain
1 subcomments
- Shameless plug: Submit your blog to https://indieblog.page and you'll get the occasional random reader who might even become a RSS subscriber.
- In 2004 https://paradies.jeena.net/weblog/2004/apr/ersteintrag I started my blog in German. I have a migration background (at 11 years old from Poland to Germany) and that made so I would do a lot of spelling mistakes when writing, even though I could express myself fairly OK. Writing a blog was a way for me to get better at it, and I would encourage my readers to tell me when they found something odd.
Because I moved to Sweden just about a year later, I started a new blog https://jeena.net/something-new where I would write in English, because I thought then both the people from Germany (to a lesser extend) and the people I know in Sweden would be able to read my blog.
It was a good decision to switch to English (which back then I didn't speak fluently at all, but writing was ok), because 5 Years ago I again moved countries, now I'm in South Korea and am still blogging in English.
It definitely helped me to learn English, which now is my main language at work and at home.
- I also write blogs for 10 years and few people come to read. Actually I don't want people who I know in real life read my blogs. I don't why. Maybe I'm too much an introvert!
- I've self hosted my blog across several platforms (Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, and now pelican) since about 2007 and the best thing I did was disable comments.
I had a friend message me saying they came across my blog googling how to run home assistant on k3s. And that's a satisfaction no money can buy.
by PunchyHamster
2 subcomments
- I don't want to break his streak, what it is about ?
- Totally random rant.
I have a lot to say. About lot of things.
I don't blog because, most of the time, I'm worried about what people might think. Sometimes I speak up in public and people are confused, so - I think - it will only be amplified online. Sometimes I want to share a bit of code, and I'm not sure if the formatting will please everyone. Or naming convention.
But most of all it's putting it all together.
There was this famous kid who only talked in tweets because he had ADHD. Sometimes series of tweets. Like 20 of them. But always in tweets, because that gave him control, and removed - or add, depends on your point of view - constraints.
Anyway - don't be like me. Speak up. Tell people what you want them to hear.
- When I write in my native tongue I avoid mentionning myself and try to disappear from the text; "I", "me", "my" is forbidden and also I try to compress sentences into the smallest most precise set of words — being precise and concise is the funniest writing game.
- Recommendation: use Hemingway (hemingwayapp.com) or something similar.
That apps spots problems I often don't see in first drafts. Weakeners like adverbs/passive voice. Complicated sentences. Fancy words over simple words. Etc. Stuff that makes writing harder to read.
Not perfect here at all! Always practicing. But more and more use helps me spot problems in first drafts, or avoid them altogether.
- > My goal now is to use less words to convey an idea.
This is what I'm encouraged by Grammarly as well. To some extent, perhaps the book "Elements of style" encourages this too.
However, I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. She writes long (wordy?) sentences that are clear, and even feels beautiful to read. I really enjoyed her writing.
But I'm not a native speaker. A question for the native speakers: what's your take on this? Has Shelly's writing style gone out of fashion, or are these two (Shelley's style and succinctness) different things?
by digitaltrees
0 subcomment
- I didnt read it, but keep it up.
by dSebastien
0 subcomment
- I've been having fun with my blog for many years. And now it's a big source of revenue for me. Still, I treat it almost the same way as before: a place where I get to share my ideas and discoveries.
The sheer act of writing helps me structure my thoughts and helps others grow. Win win!
https://dsebastien.net
What I did a while ago was splitting notes and articles: https://notes.dsebastien.net
Publishing unpolished notes is a great way to remove needless pressure
- My current blog uses Ghost, and this is first time in ages that I convinced myself to use a pre-packaged solution instead of hand-rolling the whole thing. That took a lot of willpower....
by reactordev
1 subcomments
- I felt this. The had the same experience when I blogged some 15 years ago now. Different times, same ghost town, but still had good content and useful information that I could look back on to jog my own memory. So it’s good to keep a diary. It’s usefulness is useful to you if you let it.
- The beginning of this article neatly captures why writing your own thoughts -- as difficult as this can be sometimes -- is so crucial. One of my biggest fears from the unchecked proliferation of AI is society deciding that writing "the old way" should go the way of cursive and mentally calculating tips, that is, into the archives.
- > My style has certainly improved since my early days of writing. Reading my old stuff is painful.
I've been blogging since 2006 and I feel the same way. The past few years I blog less, but I do try to write more to the point and use less idioms and spoken writing style.
by endymion-light
0 subcomment
- as someone that also has a blog nobody ever reads, i begin to quite enjoy it - I find it really useful when discussing something specific with someone, as i have a very weird collection of random writings
- I notice web searches now hide blogs unless you search through that site specifically. All part of suppressing the democratising effects of the internet... Shame I've found some good info via blogs.
by phendrenad2
0 subcomment
- It seems like the author wants writing to be a bigger component of their life than it is. I hope the author is able to accomplish that goal. Maybe 100x their output and turn their blog into something a few people read. Hopefully the "20 years of writing a blog nobody reads" is a revelrous experience for the author's handful of readers.
- I am not so sure about the "keep all that pondering to yourself buddy" point. The world would be a better place with a little more epistemic humility.
by ToddWBurgess
0 subcomment
- Writing a blog nobody reads is called a diary.
- Remember the days when people actually made money out of writing blog posts?
- I found Stephen King's On Writing a worthwhile read for anyone thinking about writing, no matter your opinion on King's other works (I am not a fan). A hard lesson well expressed is using fewer words, which King describes as "kill your babies".
- I will never not find it insane that in college they have word minimums for essays, instead of maximums. Imo going to college ruins many people's ability to write clearly.
- Shameless plug of my own blog
https://www.rxjourney.net/
- blogs made sense before social media.
good times.
- If you want to become a better writer, write comments, not blog posts. And if you engage with others, it becomes more fun.
- Cool. I know 1 person read my WEB site, they sent me a email :) But I do not keep track so I have no idea nor do I really care. So now you have 1 more who read it.
But since then I moved it to Gemini, the real Gemini, not google's thing. I find that far easier to maintain.
- Have you considered that your thoughts on Writing Well might be wrong, and that's why people don't read your blog? I tuned out after realizing you have no idea what you're talking about.
by globalnode
1 subcomments
- > My goal now is to use less words to convey an idea. Everyone's interpretation of words is different, so using more precise language will just muddle your ideas.
What?
- [flagged]