How to write a blog post

  I see a lot of pages about how to write blog posts. I read them, because I am both curious and sincere in my desire to make my blog popular and spread the knowledge I've amassed here. They are always crap. Take one that says the best tool to get a blog popular is to use Google Trends or Google autocomplete to see what people are searching for. And the results are always incredibly stupid. Like "how to add one to one to get two". I am paraphrasing a bit here, but you get the gist. Go "worldwide" and the first trend is always some Chinese spam. Another post is saying that a blog post should be written as four drafts: one for what you want to say, one for how you want to say it, one for peer reviewed content and the final one that actually is what you want to publish. It sounds great, but it implies a level of work that sometimes is prohibitive related to the subject of your post. Sometimes you just want to share something as a stream of consciousness and be done with it. Is that better? No. But it sure beats NOT writing anything. There is always time to improve your work and get peer review AFTER publishing it.

  There are two big types of people blogging. The first category is akin to reporters and media people. They want to get their message across for reasons that are rather independent of the message itself. They want to earn money or influence or some other kind of benefit. I don't have any advice for people like that. Not because I disconsider their goals, but because I have never blogged for an ulterior reason. The second category of bloggers is akin to writers: they want to get their message across because they feel there is some value in the message itself. I consider myself such a person, although I probably suck as a writer. This post is for people like that.

  The most important part of writing a post is motivation. And I don't mean just the reason for writing it, but the reason for wanting to share it. For me, most of the posts I write are either content that I consume, such as books, or stuff that I think is worth considering or technical stuff that I've stumbled upon and I believe people would want to find if googling for it instead of wasting the time I wasted to solve it. Now, the books and the personal idea posts I totally agree are ego boosting shit: I feel like it's important enough to "share", but I don't really expect people to read it or that there is any inherent value in them other than getting to know me better. And everyone wants to understand other people better on the Internet, right? In the end they are just a personal log of random thoughts I have. My blog is something that represents me and so I feel that I need to share things that are personal to me, including thoughts that are not politically correct or even correct in any possible way. One can use Facebook for this, so I won't write about those posts. They still reach some people and inform their choices, which is something I love.

  What is left is the posts that I work for. You have no idea how much I work on some of these posts. It may take me hours or even days for content that you read in a few minutes. That is because I am testing my ideas in code and creating experiments to validate my beliefs and doing research on how other people did it. A lot of the times I learn a lot from writing these posts. I start with the expectation that I know what I am talking about only to find out that I was wrong. The important part is that I do correct myself and some of the blog posts here are exclusively about discovering how wrong I was. There is nothing more rewarding than writing something that you feel others might benefit from. Perhaps other than getting feedback about how your post benefited others. Publishing your failures is just as important as publishing your successes.

  Yes, I know, if I learn something new by doing what I need to be doing, then sharing the results is like writing for myself, too. It's ego boosting, for sure. However, it would be even more obnoxious to believe no one is like me and so no one would benefit from the same work. There was a time when people came to my blog and asked me about all kinds of technical problems and I worked with them to solve them. There were usually incredibly simple problems that posed difficulties only to the laziest people, but it felt good! Then StackOverflow came along and no one actually interacts with me. But I have solved stupid problems that I still keep getting thanks for, even (maybe especially because) if the technology is really old and obsolete. Many other blogs published cool things about subjects that are not fashionable anymore and then just disappeared. The value of your content is that it may help people in your situation, even if they don't share your sense of now and even if all they take away is how NOT to do things.

  Sometimes you are looking for the solution for a problem and after hours of work you realize the problem was invalid or the solution was deceptively simple. It's the "Oh, I am so stupid!" moment that makes a lot of people shy away from writing about it. I find that these moments are especially important, because other people will surely make the same mistake and be hungry about finding the answer. OK, you admit to the world you were stupid, but you also help so many other people that would waste time and effort and feel as stupid as you if not for writing the post.

  My take on writing a blog post is that you just have to care about what you are writing. You may not be the best writer out there, you might not even be explaining the thing right, but if you care about what you are writing, then you will make the effort of getting it right eventually. Write what you think and, if you are lucky, people will give you reasons to doubt your results or improve them. Most likely people will NOT care as much about the subject as you, but you are not writing because of them, you are writing for them. Some of your thoughts and toils will reach and help someone and that is what blogging is all about.

  The last thing I want to mention is maintenance. Your work is valid when you write it, but may become obsolete later on. You need to make the effort to update the content, not by removing the posts or deleting their content, but by making clear things have changed, how they did and what can be done about it. It is amazing how many recent posts are reached only because I mentioned them in an "obsolete" post. People search for obsolete content, find out it's too old, then follow the link to your latest solution for that problem. It makes for good reading and even better understanding of how things got to the current point.

  So, bottom line: publish only what you care about and care about your readers, keep the posts up to date, publish both successes and failures.