Blogging

Blogging Tips

Jason Olson — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 01:15:00 GMT

I was recently contacted by Allan Hoffman (the "tech jobs expert" for Monster.com) about some quick thoughts and tips I had on how to have a successful technical blog (which alone is a shock to me as I wouldn't even start to think of my blog as "successful", but to each his own I suppose :)). I thought I would reprint my response here (with permission, of course). I hope you enjoy :).

Obviously, these are just my opinions so you can take them with a grain of salt if you wish (at your own peril, I might add :P). Feel free to add your own as well. I know many of other more capable bloggers have already talked about this, so I'm merely sharing my own experiences as a blog reader myself.

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What are the ingredients for a good technical blog? In my opinion, the recipe is pretty simple: accurate technical information + personality + reliability (at least semi-frequent posts) = good technical blog. I have certainly suffered from time to time on the reliability aspect. And I believe that at certain points in the history of my blog, infrequent posting has actually caused me to lose readers. Personality is an aspect that I still am feeling my way through. At times I feel I become too personal and lack the amount of technical information that people desire. At other times, I had tried to be so technical that my personality had stopped showing through. It's definitely a balancing act.

Here are some quick tips that I could think of:

Tip A / B. Have Something To Say / Be Unique. It seems like nearly everyone has a blog these days. Even in the technical world there seems to be an over-abundance of blogs that exist now. There is an incredible amount of noise that exists that people have to sort through in order to get to the juicy stuff. Let's face it, you want to have one of the blogs that gets noticed. You don't want to simply be adding to the noise. In this vein, make sure that you have something to say. A quick way to get a reader to hit the "unsubscribe" button is to write many "check out this link" posts. And whatever you do, don't simply post to apologize for not posting. With how much noise that exists out there in the "blogosphere", if you're not adding signal, you're out of my aggregator.

Another way to add signal? Be unique. Even if you're not always technical, there is a good reason that blogs like http://www.neopoleon.com are becoming extremely popular (dare I say, near cult-like). If you are unique, you give your readers the opportunity to look past some of your shortcomings (and face it, we all have them). Not only that, but maybe you'll make people laugh in the process (which is always a good thing in my book).

Tip C. Blog About Something You Enjoy. You have to enjoy what you are blogging about, it's as simple as that. If you don't, it will feel forced and your readers will notice. If you would like people to enjoy reading your blog, you should enjoy writing it! When reading blogs I believe people don't want to feel like they are reading a text book. Which leads to Tip D.

Tip D. Let Your Personality Show. One of the major advantages of blogs is that they can be a uniquely personal communication medium. When reading your blog, let people know who you are. I've noticed recently that the majority of blogs in my RSS aggregator are from people who let their personality show. I enjoy the fact that while reading a person's blog I get the unique opportunity of getting to know them a little bit. So, remember to be yourself while blogging.

Community Site Blogging Etiquette Tips

Jason Olson — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 16:52:00 GMT

I've come to the realization that many people on community blogging sites (like GWB) don't know how to positively contribute to the quality of the site. Either that, or they just choose to completely ignore proper etiquette altogether (God knows I've certainly been one of these people in the past (right Chris?)). I'm writing this post for some of you here who could use a tip or two. I will not name names here in a public forum, but be aware that we're watching you :). So, without further ado, here are five easy tips to help you be a good contributer to the GWB community.

Tip #1 - A community blogging site is *not* a mass blogging service

The first thing to realize is that a community blogging site is not the same thing as a mass blogging service. We encourage people to subscribe to the main GWB feed to get the best coverage of content. We want people to be able to subscribe to this main GWB feed and still get a good amount of real content. With this in mind, you have a responsibility as a blogger on GWB to ensure you are adding quality content to the community as a whole. When you make a post (unless you follow Tip #5), everyone will read it. Did you just write four link posts in a row? Beware, that action might have contributed to even a single reader dropping the GWB main feed from their aggregator. And, I think I'm preaching to the choir here, we want to keep and attract as many readers as possible to GWB.

Tip #2 - [Question] Am I adding anything valuable to the community? Do I have anything valuable to say?

Are you adding an opinion to what you're linking to or are you just "b-linking" (blog linking) and providing a one sentence post. When syndicating to the main feed, you should avoid these one sentence posts. Not only do they not contribute to the content of the community, they can actually harm you as a blogger. Meaning, if you make too many of these one-line posts, readers will start to “tune you out“ and stop paying attention to you. And then when you do having something to say, they won't listen (a variation on the Boy Who Cried Wolf syndrome). I know that this is one that I've had problems with in the past and (if you browse my archives) it is one that I'm still working on (although I like to think that I'm getting better).

Tip #3 - [Question] Have others on the community already linked/discussed/blogged this to death?

Be aware of what others have written so that you don't contribute to mass news floods on the main feed. An annoyance of mine as a consumer of the main feed (which I became when I ventured out on my own for a while) is when a major news announcement is made and the main feed then gets flooded with 25 posts (all from different people) that are one sentence links to the news in question. This ties in with the first question, make sure you are adding something valuable to the community.

Tip #4 - Learn to be a good blogger

Rory and others have already thrashed this through. I will simply link you to this post over at Coding Horror that will help you out in this regard. (Ironically, this tip itself is nearly a violation of Tip #2; however, I am fine with this as it is in context of a larger post that does contribute (I hope 8=)).

Tip #5 - Learn to use the “Include in Aggregated Site“ option

If the post you are going to make doesn't really adhere to the above posts, does that mean you shouldn't post it? Absolutely NOT! After all, it is your blog and you should blog about _what_ you want to blog about _when_ you want to blog about it. However, there is a cool feature in the blogging engine on GWB that you should start familiarizing yourself with. If the post you are going to make doesn't add content but you still want to post it, don't include it on the main feed. If you expand the “Advanced Options”, you'll find a check box called “Include in Aggregated Site”. Uncheck this box and your post will not be included on the main GWB feed. I leave this tip with a quote from Johnnie Cochran himself (not really, but it sounds like something he would say):

Remember, if the post, on content, is light... Do not include in aggregated site!

In Closing

Nobody is perfect. I know that I could be reading these tips myself every once in a while. The important thing is that you are at least trying to help make GWB a better place. I (and others) just want to make GWB the best community blogging site out there. I want you to be able to positively contribute to this site. I want all of us to be able to possibility contribute to the site. It's really not that difficult. Once you are familiar with these tips, they become just natural questions you ask yourself before hitting “Post”. So, help contribute to the community today and making GWB a great place to be :).

New Blog

Jason Olson — Fri, 13 May 2005 09:01:00 GMT

Once the DNS changes propogate, you can find my new blog at http://www.managed-world.com. If you are reading this from an aggregator, you will want to point your feed to http://www.managed-world.com/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss instead.

Just to explain a little. I made this decision largely because I've been thinking about doing it for a long time. I also really want to leverage what I have over at Managed World. I began to feel like I had all sorts of things going in all sorts of different places. I felt it was time to bring all my interests under one roof over at my domain. It's been a long time coming.

I would like to take this moment to say that this move has NOTHING to do with the events of the last couple of days. NOTHING. The last post was me mostly bitching and moaning and being a cry baby. Hey, what do you expect from a grotesquely obese child trapped in a fat man's body :D. I would also like to take a moment to thanks Jeff Julian and everywhere here at GeeksWithBlogs. This sight has grown so much since I first started here and I'm so proud of the content that all of you are contributing. This site will stay in my aggregator for a long time to come, I'm sure.

So, it is with a sad heart, that I finally turn off the lights here and move on to future things. Stay in touch!

Dear Robots and Clones

Jason Olson — Wed, 11 May 2005 19:07:00 GMT

You know, I'm to the point in my blogging life where I tell the whole SNR thing (Signal to Noise Ratio) to shove it. Chris recently made an earth-shattering, enlightened comment per one of my posts yesterday: “Now try actually blogging instead of just lowering the SNR.” And I just have a couple things to say about that. In this case, I'm not going to worry about being eloquent either, so prepare yourself (and no offense to the maintainer of this fine site, but I'm a little miffed right now).

Before I go and insult numerous people, just let me make this clear that this might be my last post here if I end up insulting the people that I think might be insulted by this rant. And, the thing is, I don't really care anymore. I guess the GeeksWithBlogs main feed is not a feed for people with a sense of humor or for bloggers that simply want to brighten up people's days.

As a little background, yesterday I made a couple of seemingly useless posts. I say “seemingly“ because they were NOT useless posts. I happened to think they were funny and also showed off the quirky personality I have from time to time (at least, one of my true friends liked it). What did that experiment prove not once, but twice? In my opinion, it proved that there is no room for any humor here (“Excuse me, Sir, only PROFESSIONAL posts are excepted here“ [insert a demeaning look here] [insert an “adjusting the bow tie“ action here]). Granted, I will say that I probably shouldn't have syndicated those posts to the main feed. And the reason they were is because, well, that's the default and when I blog, I simply blog what I feel like and don't think about “should this go to the main feed?“ Shame on me for thinking that my personality might be of interest to some people. Shame on me for thinking that character is interesting. Shame on me for thinking that you don't have to be a genius who always contributes priceless thought-turds to “society“ in order to be viewed as “valuable.“

What this has helped me realize is that perhaps I'm just not cutout to have a blog on a “community“ site. Truthfully, I don't want to have to worry about only posting “technical“ posts because that's what the *community* posts. That's the whole reason that I don't post that often. The fact is that sometimes, I don't give a flying rat's tail about technology. I don't want to have to think about “Am I providing worth here?“ I want to blog about what I want to blog when I want to blog about it. After all, Rory, my all-time favorite blogger, doesn't give a rat about that, so why should I? To all of you who are thinking “Well, you're no Rory“ (and I know there are a couple of you), you can take your precious tech-goo aggregator (NOW WITH LESS PERSONALITY (for the one-time low price of $0.99)) and shove it.

Personally, I like blogs because of the person BEHIND the blog. Without that transparency, I might as well be reading the encyclopedia all the doo-dah-day.

Now, here's where I compromise and try to be somewhat sane and realistic. From now on, if I want to post about anything that might show any sort of personality or invoke any type of emotion response, I won't syndicate on the main feed. That way, the whole “SNR“ of the main feed is preserved, and all the robotic clones won't be forced to try to perform any tricky emotions.

As far as Jeff's “strategery“, it does offend me that I'm the example of why it needs to be done. The whole time I've been here at GeeksWithBlogs, I've seen *far* more egregious sins again the SNR than I committed yesterday. Remember, I've been here a *long* time. One need only look at the blogger list to see how long I've been around.

On the other hand, I think it's a sad day when Jeff feels that it is now a requirement of the main feed. All of us (including me (I'll admit I made a mistake (although I feel like it shouldn't be a mistake if you're blogging))) should be responsible enough to determine what is “valuable“ and what is not. Think of it as “the Greatest Hits“ of GeeksWithBlogs. For me though, it's just yet another hurdle that I don't think I should have.

[Note: I realize this is largely an emotional response, but I'm going to post it anyways since I did try to curb my emotions at least a little bit. I might regret it later, but I don't currently care. This way, perhaps you'll get a better idea of who I am, even if I can be a jerk sometimes (even though that is apparently exactly what people DON'T want.]

And with that, I now submit my humble apologies if I offended anyone in charge of this operation as it truly is a great site (and I'm not kidding, I'm serious; without GeeksWithBlogs, I wouldn't have been able to say this in the first place).

Well, +5 points to the “Get your own site up and running so you can blog about whatever the hell you want to blog about” category for me.

Peace out!

Conclusion

Jason Olson — Wed, 11 May 2005 00:17:00 GMT

Okay, .Text apparently doesn't like me doing posts within the same minute. Here is the actual order in which to read the prior posts (consider it a table of contents to my twisted and broken mind):

1) Am I Back? Probably Not. But oh well!

2) And.........

3) One More

4) And Another.......

You're welcome!!!

And another...

Jason Olson — Wed, 11 May 2005 00:15:00 GMT

Just because I feel like it.

Am I back? Probably not. But oh well!

Jason Olson — Wed, 11 May 2005 00:14:00 GMT

I was told by an ex-coworker at lunch today that I need to blog more (Hi Megan!). So, here I am blogging. Yeah, that's about it. If anything exciting happens I'll blog about it. I largely live a boring life though, so you may not hear from me much.

Oh yeah, Forza Motorsport kicks much tail. More on that to come.....

Oh yeah, Cubase + Garritan Personal Orchestra = long nights composing music and getting no sleep. More on that to come.....

And after the break, more of the same. Meaning, NOTHING!

And.......

Jason Olson — Wed, 11 May 2005 00:14:00 GMT

BOOOOOOOO!

One more

Jason Olson — Wed, 11 May 2005 00:14:00 GMT

Just another one for Megan.

Another Managed DirectX Blogger

Jason Olson — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 04:36:00 GMT

And another Managed DirectX blogger enters the scene. Mykre's blog chronicles his early playings with Managed DirectX. Keep it up the good work, Mykre, you're doing great!