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> As colah.github.io has grown in prominence… Well, it’s been very rewarding, but it’s also been a bit uncomfortable. > For one thing, it’s created very high s

> As colah.github.io has grown in prominence… Well, it’s been very rewarding, but it’s also been a bit uncomfortable. > For one thing, it’s created very high standards for my writing. Most of my articles took 50-200 hours to write. I feel like I needed to live up to that quality with every post, but that means I can’t put out thoughts without investing a huge amount of energy. I've done a bit of blogging and this echoes my experience as well. One successful posts precedes another, then you start to feel like you can't put out off-the-cuff type posts. It's tough to follow up a rockstar post with an intermezzo. So you invest more and more energy into each topic and post to ensure it'll be successful in whatever metric, and that mostly works, but then you publish few posts in very specific niches. If anyone has advice for effectively blowing one's standards out of the water and publishing more smaller general pieces, I'd love to hear that. From this perspective, I admire how Fred Wilson blogs. Edit: fixed typo

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
kalid 10y ago
I had this issue too, and realized you can frame it by setting expectations in the title. Some posts have needed the 100-200 hours of thinking/visualization, labeled with things like "Interactive Guide to the Fourier Transform" (https://betterexplained.com/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-the-fourier-transform/ https://betterexplained.com/articles/an-interactive-guide-to...) Others are smaller insights, written in a day ("Quick Insight: Easier Arithmetic With Calculus" -https://betterexplained.com/articles/calculus-arithmetic/ https://betterexplained.com/articles/calculus-arithmetic/). Others are more essays/thought pieces, learning strategies, etc. Setting the expectation up front that not every post is a big thesis-style conclusion can take away the pressure to only create those. (You can have appetizers, entrees, and desserts on the menu!) Often your big articles are built after working through ideas in smaller ones. (The Fourier Transform emerged after getting insights on e, imaginary numbers, Euler's Formula, degrees vs. radians, etc.).
zem 10y ago
two bloggers i admire tremendously are james hague [http://prog21.dadgum.com/ http://prog21.dadgum.com/, now retired from blogging :(] and julia evans [https://jvns.ca/ https://jvns.ca/] while pretty much everything they write is high-quality and worth reading, there are clearly different levels of effort that went into any given post, so there's a good mix of content.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Thanks for sharing. The layout of her posts on the homepage is really nice. I got to see Julia Evans give a great talk at PyCon a few years ago, and I really like her style and approach, so it's great to see she has a blog too.
pc86 10y ago
> If anyone has advice for effectively blowing one's standards out of the water and publishing more smaller general pieces, I'd love to hear that. Stop measuring whatever it is you're using to define "rockstar" v. "intermezzo" for one. If you're not advertising and you're not trying to grow an email list, there's probably little use in Google Analytics or similar.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  It's easy advice to hear and hard advice to do. As a programmer, I just naturally want to measure everything. Something feels so weird about putting a thing into the world and not measuring it, not knowing if or how it impacted people and how the community reacted. Some successful entrepreneurs like garyvee prescribe similarly not using analytics for the first year of building a blog.
Swizec 10y ago
I struggle with this a lot and here is a truth: nobody cares. Your blog is not a destination, each post is its own page. Those that are good are going to float and give you recognition and get a lot of traffic and build your brand and your audience. The others nobody will see and they affect nothing. The more you publish the more hits you'll have the better you'll get. Here is a fable: The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
- JohnJamesRambo 10y ago
  I don't know why you are grayed out. I found your post right on the money. Perfectionism is crippling and it seems to be increasing in our society. So people do nothing, which is infinitely worse! I'm reminded of a little cartoon Fellini scribbled that I saw in a book about him once, and I have always found it funny and helpful. I'm paraphrasing from memory, but it was a funny little guy and he was saying "I can always do a poo" or something to that effect. One of the most creative minds that has ever existed seemed to be saying that no matter what, you can always at least do a poo.
DiThi 10y ago
One of the bloggers I follow is Tim Urban at http://waitbutwhy.com http://waitbutwhy.com and it has four levels of posts in four distinct categories: Big, long and thorough articles; "minis" for smaller ones; "the shed" for sharing things found on the internet, humor or just whatever that don't fit; and "dinner table" for asking interesting questions frequently and receiving answers from the community.
lkrubner 10y ago
Paul Krugman handles this by using certain keywords in the title. In particular: personal trivial wonkish music All other blog posts fall into the middle zone that he generally aims for. But the very technical stuff he marks "wonkish" and the personal stuff is "trivial". He does one music post every Friday, which he marks "music".
lhnz 10y ago
> I've done a bit of blogging and this echoes my > experience as well. One successful posts precedes > another, then you start to feel like you can't put > out off-the-cuff type posts. > It's tough to follow up a rockstar post with an intermezzo. I get this but perhaps we should all relax and just create some categorisation to show whether a blog is a full-size article or a small point about something.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Yeah, categorization helps, but how would you address this with respect to a mailing list? Currently I send one message to all per post. Personally, the blogs that mail me multiple small posts per week are the ones I filter (then rarely or never read) or unsubscribe from. Perhaps there'd be value in letting people subscribe to "all posts" or "big posts only".
comex 10y ago
Maybe setting an arbitrary length limit would work. I don't blog - I'd like to - largely because of the same feeling you're describing. But I use Twitter, sometimes posting random thoughts there (either in single tweets or in small chains). That's a severe length limit, of course, but it does make me more confident posting things without spending a lot of time thinking about them and elaborating. I think this is a big part of the reason for Twitter's success. For a blog, the limit would have to be considerably higher, but still low enough that you relatively quickly get to a point where you're 'done' and can't really add more (without sacrificing something else, at least). Alternative suggestion: write a script to automatically syndicate your HN comments to your blog :)
- tedmiston 10y ago
  > Alternative suggestion: write a script to automatically syndicate your HN comments to your blog :) It's funny you mention that as it's an idea I've considered several times. I find it so easy to crank out a few hundred word post here in response to an article or its tangential discussion. I agree that the form factor is a part of it, so something more than a tweet but less than a blog post is interesting. I've also been thinking about a blog post format of summarizing long / deep HN comment threads, similar to what r/tabled does for AMAs.
DrNuke 10y ago
Blog posts should be very short post-it memos imho, not semi-papers. Any r&d endeavour must go into a proper paper instead: industrial, academic, tutorial or even into a conference poster.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  I definitely agree with this. If nothing else, I like the idea of re-using bits of content across mediums. The blog just seems to be the easiest way to hit the masses without the constraint of a once a year conference schedule.
redler 10y ago
Perhaps you should set expectations by creating a category literally called "intermezzo", if that fits the voice of your writings. Use a little metadata and UX design to allow a tick-tock-tock-tock cadence.
z1mm32m4n 10y ago
I just keep two blogs: one for the elaborately thought out, and one for everything else.
jvns 10y ago
I have been following up "awesome" posts with less-awesome posts for a few years now. It sometimes feels weird, but my experience is that sometimes off-the-cuff short posts are surprisingly popular, and that even when a blog post isn't popular, sometimes, a year later, somebody I really respect will tell me that they loved it. for example I worked for weeks on this post: http://jvns.ca/blog/so-you-want-to-be-a-wizard/ http://jvns.ca/blog/so-you-want-to-be-a-wizard/ and then followed it up with a few very quick thoughts on careers in http://jvns.ca/blog/2017/03/17/career-narrative/ http://jvns.ca/blog/2017/03/17/career-narrative/. My thinking is that people who read my blog can decide for themselves what to read and what to skip. My only guidelines for blogging that I follow are basically these: https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/823183090554126336 https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/823183090554126336.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Thank you. The blogging principles look great. I hadn't really seen anyone else do zines in tech short of some old school hacker zines. Cool approach!

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

kalid 10y ago

I had this issue too, and realized you can frame it by setting expectations in the title. Some posts have needed the 100-200 hours of thinking/visualization, labeled with things like "Interactive Guide to the Fourier Transform" (https://betterexplained.com/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-the-fourier-transform/ https://betterexplained.com/articles/an-interactive-guide-to...) Others are smaller insights, written in a day ("Quick Insight: Easier Arithmetic With Calculus" -https://betterexplained.com/articles/calculus-arithmetic/ https://betterexplained.com/articles/calculus-arithmetic/). Others are more essays/thought pieces, learning strategies, etc. Setting the expectation up front that not every post is a big thesis-style conclusion can take away the pressure to only create those. (You can have appetizers, entrees, and desserts on the menu!) Often your big articles are built after working through ideas in smaller ones. (The Fourier Transform emerged after getting insights on e, imaginary numbers, Euler's Formula, degrees vs. radians, etc.).

zem 10y ago

two bloggers i admire tremendously are james hague [http://prog21.dadgum.com/ http://prog21.dadgum.com/, now retired from blogging :(] and julia evans [https://jvns.ca/ https://jvns.ca/] while pretty much everything they write is high-quality and worth reading, there are clearly different levels of effort that went into any given post, so there's a good mix of content.

tedmiston 10y ago
Thanks for sharing. The layout of her posts on the homepage is really nice. I got to see Julia Evans give a great talk at PyCon a few years ago, and I really like her style and approach, so it's great to see she has a blog too.

pc86 10y ago

> If anyone has advice for effectively blowing one's standards out of the water and publishing more smaller general pieces, I'd love to hear that. Stop measuring whatever it is you're using to define "rockstar" v. "intermezzo" for one. If you're not advertising and you're not trying to grow an email list, there's probably little use in Google Analytics or similar.

tedmiston 10y ago
It's easy advice to hear and hard advice to do. As a programmer, I just naturally want to measure everything. Something feels so weird about putting a thing into the world and not measuring it, not knowing if or how it impacted people and how the community reacted. Some successful entrepreneurs like garyvee prescribe similarly not using analytics for the first year of building a blog.

Swizec 10y ago

I struggle with this a lot and here is a truth: nobody cares. Your blog is not a destination, each post is its own page. Those that are good are going to float and give you recognition and get a lot of traffic and build your brand and your audience. The others nobody will see and they affect nothing. The more you publish the more hits you'll have the better you'll get. Here is a fable: The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

JohnJamesRambo 10y ago
I don't know why you are grayed out. I found your post right on the money. Perfectionism is crippling and it seems to be increasing in our society. So people do nothing, which is infinitely worse! I'm reminded of a little cartoon Fellini scribbled that I saw in a book about him once, and I have always found it funny and helpful. I'm paraphrasing from memory, but it was a funny little guy and he was saying "I can always do a poo" or something to that effect. One of the most creative minds that has ever existed seemed to be saying that no matter what, you can always at least do a poo.

DiThi 10y ago

One of the bloggers I follow is Tim Urban at http://waitbutwhy.com http://waitbutwhy.com and it has four levels of posts in four distinct categories: Big, long and thorough articles; "minis" for smaller ones; "the shed" for sharing things found on the internet, humor or just whatever that don't fit; and "dinner table" for asking interesting questions frequently and receiving answers from the community.

lkrubner 10y ago

Paul Krugman handles this by using certain keywords in the title. In particular: personal trivial wonkish music All other blog posts fall into the middle zone that he generally aims for. But the very technical stuff he marks "wonkish" and the personal stuff is "trivial". He does one music post every Friday, which he marks "music".

lhnz 10y ago

> I've done a bit of blogging and this echoes my > experience as well. One successful posts precedes > another, then you start to feel like you can't put > out off-the-cuff type posts. > It's tough to follow up a rockstar post with an intermezzo. I get this but perhaps we should all relax and just create some categorisation to show whether a blog is a full-size article or a small point about something.

tedmiston 10y ago
Yeah, categorization helps, but how would you address this with respect to a mailing list? Currently I send one message to all per post. Personally, the blogs that mail me multiple small posts per week are the ones I filter (then rarely or never read) or unsubscribe from. Perhaps there'd be value in letting people subscribe to "all posts" or "big posts only".

comex 10y ago

Maybe setting an arbitrary length limit would work. I don't blog - I'd like to - largely because of the same feeling you're describing. But I use Twitter, sometimes posting random thoughts there (either in single tweets or in small chains). That's a severe length limit, of course, but it does make me more confident posting things without spending a lot of time thinking about them and elaborating. I think this is a big part of the reason for Twitter's success. For a blog, the limit would have to be considerably higher, but still low enough that you relatively quickly get to a point where you're 'done' and can't really add more (without sacrificing something else, at least). Alternative suggestion: write a script to automatically syndicate your HN comments to your blog :)

tedmiston 10y ago
> Alternative suggestion: write a script to automatically syndicate your HN comments to your blog :) It's funny you mention that as it's an idea I've considered several times. I find it so easy to crank out a few hundred word post here in response to an article or its tangential discussion. I agree that the form factor is a part of it, so something more than a tweet but less than a blog post is interesting. I've also been thinking about a blog post format of summarizing long / deep HN comment threads, similar to what r/tabled does for AMAs.

DrNuke 10y ago

Blog posts should be very short post-it memos imho, not semi-papers. Any r&d endeavour must go into a proper paper instead: industrial, academic, tutorial or even into a conference poster.

tedmiston 10y ago
I definitely agree with this. If nothing else, I like the idea of re-using bits of content across mediums. The blog just seems to be the easiest way to hit the masses without the constraint of a once a year conference schedule.

redler 10y ago

Perhaps you should set expectations by creating a category literally called "intermezzo", if that fits the voice of your writings. Use a little metadata and UX design to allow a tick-tock-tock-tock cadence.

z1mm32m4n 10y ago

I just keep two blogs: one for the elaborately thought out, and one for everything else.

jvns 10y ago

I have been following up "awesome" posts with less-awesome posts for a few years now. It sometimes feels weird, but my experience is that sometimes off-the-cuff short posts are surprisingly popular, and that even when a blog post isn't popular, sometimes, a year later, somebody I really respect will tell me that they loved it. for example I worked for weeks on this post: http://jvns.ca/blog/so-you-want-to-be-a-wizard/ http://jvns.ca/blog/so-you-want-to-be-a-wizard/ and then followed it up with a few very quick thoughts on careers in http://jvns.ca/blog/2017/03/17/career-narrative/ http://jvns.ca/blog/2017/03/17/career-narrative/. My thinking is that people who read my blog can decide for themselves what to read and what to skip. My only guidelines for blogging that I follow are basically these: https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/823183090554126336 https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/823183090554126336.

tedmiston 10y ago
Thank you. The blogging principles look great. I hadn't really seen anyone else do zines in tech short of some old school hacker zines. Cool approach!