The List Problem
13 May, 10:07 PM
The problem with guidelines like these is that they amount to “how to write a weblog that the author might like to read”, or “how to get lost in a crowd”. If I cared enough, I could easily find a counter-example to every post on Scott’s list (and Dave Winer would probably be half of them). So here it is, my guidelines on how not to suck:
- Write often, ideally every day.
- Write about what you’re interested in… no, what you’re passionate about. ERH posts more about birds than tech, but that’s what the N key’s for. And sometimes, those birds are damned interesting.
- Don’t do posts that are simply lists. The world has enough lists. Lists are Powerpoint lite. I can’t remember what’s in a list, that’s why I carry them around with me. I can quote lengthy sections from the Bible, Walden, and any number of other books, but anything in list form gets shunted off into the part of my brain that I destroyed during my misspent youth.
- Break your own rules once in a while. Yes, I had to cover my ass on that one.
- For the love of all that’s holy, don’t write for google rank. I run into weblogs every single day while I’m searching around for who knows what, and yet maybe 2% of my reading list was found via Google. You’ll get tons of hits from Google and probably next to no readers.
- If you’re going to mess around with a fancy license, make sure you know what you’re doing. Since you’re not a lawyer, by definition, you don’t know what you’re doing. Copyright works really well in most cases. There’s a large body of well tested case law and the idea of fair use for textual work is pretty well understood.
- Comments are fine, but you can live without them. One problem I’ve found is that I have to play moderator for commercial use – for some reason, vendors of testing tools find my blog and post comments and I really don’t want to have to play cop and figure out if they’re legit.
- I still think referrers are the best thing since sliced bread. Part of the point I was trying to get across in Blogging for non-Bloggers is that I don’t comment, I blog. I’ll comment for something throwaway, but once my brain actually kicks into gear, I’ll move it to my blog. I swear, at least a quarter of my posts are composed in a textarea on someone else’s blog.
- Oh, and don’t use the term “folks”. I hate that word. I can’t for the life of me figure out why one would prefer “folks” to just about any other term… “people”, “homies”, “y’all”, whatever.
- And don’t use Textile for markup, because it does screwy things with all those ordered lists that you’re posting. I’m pretty sure it’s a feature, not a bug.
— Gordon Weakliem
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