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Making Your Writing Work Harder For You
- patio11 12y agoThis was partly in response to a conversation Thomas and I have been having lately with some people from the Internets, about the value of blogging in one's professional capacity. His take was "Have a blog, but don't call it a blog." I thought that was generalizable to a larger segment of the operations of product businesses than just blogging. They're generally called "content marketing" these days but I hate that word -- if someone has a better one, please suggest it. By the way, if you're a regular-ol'-geek and wondering "I wonder if writing about technical topics could help me career-wise", the answer is "Absolutely yes." You can use blogging software but it probably isn't your benefit to adopt the blogging format of 500 ~ 1,000 word articles displayed in reverse chronological order about disconnected topics. Instead, you could make it a goal to write three pieces and polish them to a mirror shine. (Related advice that I find myself saying frequently: If you publish OSS and expect to get anything via doing so, don't just drop the OSS on github. Spend the extra bit of time packing it into a site with a getting-started guide, a visual identity distinct from "Github rendering a Readme file", and the request that interested people $TAKE_THE_ACTION_YOU_WANT_THEM_TO_TAKE.
- swanson 12y agoReally like your point on OSS. Even if you don't make a whole "marketing site" - you can get a lot of mileage by considering your README as a sales page (and not just a technical document). Here's an actual example, compare the READMEs for these open source RSS readers: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/SSilence/selfoss/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/SSilence/selfoss/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/swanson/stringer/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/swanson/stringer/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/Athou/commafeed/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/Athou/commafeed/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/feedbin/feedbin/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/feedbin/feedbin/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/gothfox/Tiny-Tiny-RSS/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/gothfox/Tiny-Tiny-RSS/blob/master/README.... Which ones jump out at you? Which ones are memorable? Which do you want to install/contribute to/star? (I'm biased because I wrote one, but I was very intentional which how the README looks and reads!)
- dublinben 12y ago>Which do you want to install/contribute to/star? To be honest, not yours. I'm immediately suspicious of "open source" projects written by OS X/iOS users and demonstrated on said platforms. Without installing your program myself, I can't expect it to work on GNU/Linux, since all of your screenshots are taken in Safari.
- swanson 12y agoThanks for the feedback - I'm curious if you have any suggestions for how I can assure you that it will work on GNU/Linux? The second sentence of the installation instructions links to "setup instructions for a Linux-based VPS".
- dublinben 12y agoJust taking your screenshots from Iceweasel/Chromium instead of Safari would be an easy step. It shows that you've tried your project on a GNU/Linux platform at least once. I don't use any Webkit-based browsers, so it doesn't help me at all if you've designed your site/project to work well with Webkit.
- swanson 12y agoWill take that into consideration - to be fair, the existing screenshots are from Chrome (just running on OS X).
- gohrt 12y agoSo perhaps you should keep doing what you are doing and not get derailed by someone whose goal is not to find a good software, but is to gripe about the marginalization of Linux even when it is completely irrelevant to context.
- eddiedunn 12y agoNo, I would say showing screenshots from all "supported" platforms is a good idea. The cost is very low, and preventing people from feeling marginalized is a win for you and your software. Anecdotally, I can say that I am going to have a look at the software, and this just because the author was willing to consider us Linux users.
- sethev 12y agoTim Conley over at the Foolish Adventure podcast calls it education based marketing (although he uses the term content marketing as well). I think that term matches up nicely with what you're saying.
- yummyfajitas 12y agoBy the way, if you're a regular-ol'-geek and wondering "I wonder if writing about technical topics could help me career-wise", the answer is "Absolutely yes." This is so true. I think the bulk of my consulting work comes to me via my blog - I've put basically no effort into seeking it out. A conversation which happens with some regularity: Bossish person: "We are having trouble with $MATHY_STUFF. Do we know anyone who can help us with it?" Codeish person: "I've been following these tutorials on chrisstucchio.com..." I'll disagree with patrick a bit about "a visual identity distinct..." and formatting, at least for people who never touch the frontend. The people looking for you probably don't care that much. Here are some fugly blogs of people you'd almost certainly hire: http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/08/21/random-inequalities-v-beta-distributions/ http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/08/21/random-inequalities... http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts.html http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts.html http://elem.com/~btilly/ab-testing-multiple-looks/part1-rigorous.html http://elem.com/~btilly/ab-testing-multiple-looks/part1-rigo... That said, dropping $1000 on some pretty visual design probably can't hurt.
- brickcap 12y agoI agree with what you said but these blogs are not ugly. In fact I think stephen's blog is pretty good looking.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago"Fugly" was probably overstating things - you need to do something non-default to be ugly. Stephen Diehl is default bootstrap. Ben Tilly has no CSS file.
- tptacek 12y agoI think you're right about appearances, but design isn't the core of Patrick's point. If you called your posts "short tutorials" and had a little section on your site that listed your "short tutorials", your work would probably get cited more, and do a better job of marketing your services. In particular, some clients will eyeball your list of short tutorials, and see "A/B Testing", "HFT Algorithms", and "Ad Placement Optimization" and immediately form positive associations that they won't by paging through your old blog posts, which is something I just had to do to write this paragraph that very few casual readers will actually do. You write something, you think it has lasting value, you should say so. It's a corollary of "ask for the sale".
- b_emery 12y agoYour suggestion "write three pieces and polish them to a mirror shine" has a long and substantiated precedence: scientific publishing. The fact is, you're judged by the quality of your work. Better to produce something of lasting significance that just throw some 'musings' up on the 'net.
- gohrt 12y agoHuh, the largest complaint about scientific publishing is quality over quantity, incremental papers,publish or perish,milking each idea for as many articles as possible.
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoThat is only true in some communities; not universally.
- josephjrobison 12y agoI'm thinking that adding an "Updated May 2014" intro text to older blog posts that are still relevant can do a lot to show the date, but also show the readers that you still approve of an older post and it's relevant a few years later, and that someone is home, reviewing their old work.
- marijn 12y agoEvery work has a time context. Even if it takes 100 years for it to become irrelevant, it is still useful for people to be able to find out when it was written. Books need a year, pdfs of scientific articles need a publication date. Doing your audience a disservice by not showing a date may have some shallow traffic driving advantages, but is still a dick move.
- patio11 12y agoAre you amenable to the solution "Put it in a header or give it emphasis comparable to the copyright notice rather than the title"? I think a lot of people agree with you in the abstract that it's a huge imposition to not have dates on things, but are unwilling to even right click to actually figure the date out, but they'll start doing measurable discounting of the work immediately if you do the typical thing and put the date front-and-center. I would also bet that people will simultaneously say they're not giving the date undue attention, mostly because people are terrible at introspection.
- marijn 12y agoIf you mean an HTTP header, no, that doesn't work, since you never know whether the thing you get there is an accident or an actually meaningful value. Putting it somewhere where it doesn't stand out is acceptable. What annoys me is if I want to know when something was written (for example because the interpretation of a reference it makes would be different before and after some historical event), and there is no way to find out.
- lauradhamilton 12y agoA lot of good points in here, but personally I hate it when bloggers remove the publish date. Really irks me, and reduces my confidence in the content.
- joshkaufman 12y agoPatrick's advice about taking dates off is spot-on for optimizing conversion rates on key pages. I've taken dates off of my most important evergreen resources. There's sometimes a happy medium - you can deemphasize the date with CSS or by putting it at the bottom of the post. Here's an example of a blog-style post on my site: http://joshkaufman.net/malinvestment/ http://joshkaufman.net/malinvestment/ People who want to find the date can find the date. People who aren't looking for it aren't likely to see it.
- josephjrobison 12y agoWhat do you think of the idea of adding an "Update" intro text to some blog posts that aren't necessarily evergreen resources, but aren't dated sensitive posts. Such as if you wrote a post in May 2012, then in May 2014 adding a quick intro saying "Updated May 2014: I've added x, xy, and xyz, but this post is still relevant today." or something of the like?
- tptacek 12y agoLots of people say that removing prominent datelines "reduces their confidence in the content", but can you marshal any evidence for your observed preferences matching this stated preference? Because I don't think it's true in practice at all. I think people form opinions about content based on the content unless you beg them to do it some other way, for instance by calling your content a "blog post".
- pknight 12y agoIt's pretty simple though, if you're researching a topic you need to be able to assess the chronology of a post. Without it the content becomes less reliable. Now you have to second guess the content to know whether it's still relevant/current and where it slots into other resources. Where's proof that losing the date improves ROI/readership/etc. Let's just be honest about our content.
- iamwil 12y agoI dislike coming upon writing where there's no date. Because then I can't judge for myself from what context or perspective the author wrote something. (Is the assertion that mobile market is growing in the context of pre 2008 iPhone, or after?) There's many assumptions we take for granted, even when we try to write evergreen. And sometimes those assumptions turn out to be overturned after a while. When I happen upon articles, essays, blog posts, etc without a date, I usually trust it much less, and try to find similar information with a date. The only way you'll know if your writing is evergreen, is over the course of time. I'll read stuff from 2002, and find it's still relevant, but we need to judge whether it is for ourselves every year. And not timestamping it robs us of that.
- aytekin 12y agotl;dr - Don't call your writing "blog". Call it essay, guide or article. - Don't put a date on your writing. - Show your best writing up front. - Collect email addresses, send your writing by email, track conversations. - Keep detailed notes about your previous experiences and re-use them. - Don't just write for other experts. Write for beginners.
- hagbardgroup 12y agoIt also helps to think about it in terms of the old print formats. Only blogging is like handing someone a stack of leaflets with some semi-descriptive tags on the side to help you navigate through them. A good test is to ask yourself if this would be useful or compelling if someone handed you a print version of the text. Blogs developed the way that they did, I think, because they really took off as a way to socialize about the news, usually created for print or TV first. Social networks have taken over that role. Now, web publishing is beginning to take a more leading role rather than being wagged by traditional media. It helps to hold your writing to the same standards of quality that you would in a print publication.
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- jellicle 12y agoThe lesson people learn from articles like this is "don't put dates on date-sensitive web spam", or alternately "always put today's date on every article". Both of those are just spamming techniques. If it doesn't have a date it's almost certainly worthless content. Having a prominent date is actually a huge positive credibility sign.
- hbien 12y agoPeople are quick to call other authors' work worthless. Patio11's piece you just read was very valuable to me, but it doesn't have a timestamp on it -- did you think it was worthless? Patio11 calls TechCrunch pink slime. He may find it worthless, but it's valuable to others. The truth is just have an audience/subject in mind and cater towards that. Writing a technical article that depends on current state of technology? Put a timestamp on it. Writing evergreen advice about salary negotiation? No need to put a timestamp on it.
- tptacek 12y agoThat is empirically not true in my experience and in Patrick's: putting a dateline on a piece of content (surprise) dates the content, and creates the expectation that the material is effectively superseded by any piece on the same subject with a newer dateline. It's also quite a stretch to point to any of Patrick's writing (or, I guess, mine) and call it "spam", or its promotion a "spamming technique". You probably didn't mean to say that, but that's the impression you created, by giving undue weight to spamming tactics. And your penultimate sentence is, of course, trivially refuted.
- icelancer 12y agoTaking the date out of the slug made perfect sense and I put it into place right away. Be sure to add rewrite rules if you switch permalinks in WordPress, as simply switching to %postname% will won't automatically 301 the old slugs.
- dwd 12y agoThis worked nicely for me when I switched a while back: RewriteRule ^blog/\d/\d/(.+) http\:\/\/www\.example\.com\/blog\/$1 [R=301,L] Also if you pull the authorship code from the template, make sure you don't leave any class="hentry" unless you like seeing a crap load of structured data error messages in WMT about missing author details. I don't remember seeing any mention of reserved class names in the HTML spec so it would be nice if the Googlebot was a little smarter about that.
- dkrich 12y agoOpen question: has anybody ever considered or tried publishing updated versions of evergreen content? Textbook publishers make a great living doing this so I'm wondering if it wouldn't be possible to apply this same technique to essays. For example "A guide to better salary negotiations, 2014 edition", etc. with some minor updates to reference new examples, anecdotes, popular businesses of the day, etc. I think this could have the dual effect of reengaging previous readers with content they've already read as well as keeping your content fresh and giving you the upside of having a brand new article to (re)publish. In my own experience, I don't mind and actually enjoy rereading articles I've read before and enjoyed so I don't think as a reader, this would bother me at all.
- mikeleeorg 12y agoI like this idea, and could've sworn I've seen it done someplace (but can't find the URL anymore). I get the feeling that Medium.com is trying to build a platform for this too. The date is still there, but it's deemphasized and placed at the bottom, instead of in the byline. Someone could easily append "2014 edition" to the title - or perhaps, Medium could offer that feature too.
- josephjrobison 12y agoYes! Moz.com has a great example of this. They do a bi-annual industry survey and update the persisting URL with the most recent findings and create a new page for the newly outdated survey. Current Survey Results: http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors Past Survey Results: http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/2011 http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/2011 http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/2009 http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/2009
- Tomte 12y agotom's Hardware is a bit like that: "System Builder Marathon Q4 2013", "System Builder Marathon, Q1 2014"
- 205guy 12y agoWhy would I want my writing work to be harder? I'd rather use unambiguous title that don't confuse my readers.
- zrail 12y agoThis is one of those instances where the English title is ambiguous, as you say. The piece is about a few techniques for making a piece of writing more effective, not about making your writing process more difficult.
- tptacek 12y agoPeople on the Internet get really angry about this. "Of course you should have a dateline on your posts!" "Readers are smart enough to understand when something has long-term value!" Don't listen to them. Of course readers are smart enough to perceive long-term value in a blog post. But they don't, because appreciating that value requires them to expend mental energy to fight against the blog format. Instead, they see a blog post and: * Assume that because it's on the blog it was written in a single draft. * Assume that it's part of some larger conversation amongst lots of bloggers. * Assume it's an invitation to a discussion among readers rather than your definitive take on an issue. (For extra fun: add a series of complaints about not having "comments" enabled on whatever you wrote.) * Assume that it'll end up syndicated along with the rest of your blog posts on "Planet People Like You" or whatever blog aggregator you end up on. * Assume that it'll be followed up on in some future post. In general, the reader isn't wrong about this! Those beliefs are continuously validated by the majority of blogs. Which makes me wonder why anyone would sink days or weeks of effort into a piece only to deliberately position it alongside every other dashed-off blog post. I think you can get immediate value just by doing what Patrick said: write a blog, but don't call it that. But you can do things that are much more creative, too. Our crypto challenges started out as a text file of 40 3-paragraph challenges. We thought about putting it up on the website, but we worried that we'd end up getting skimmed by people on (not to put too fine a point on it) HN who wouldn't really understand them, and end up "debating our own posts" with those people. So instead of publishing them, we accepted email addresses for people who wanted them, and doled them out 8 challenges at a time. More than 12,000 people signed up; we're finally releasing them in their entirety, along with solutions in every single mainstream language and a bunch of weird ones, in a Black Hat talk this year. It became one of our most profitable recruiting vehicles. It was originally a blog post. Man, that would have sucked, if we stuck a date and a title on it and hit "publish".
- danielweber 12y agoIf you are publishing the crypto challenges, does that mean you have stopped giving them out as challenges? I requested in on Mon, May 12, 2014 at 2:23 PM Eastern Time and did not get a response.
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- pknight 12y agoRemoving the date from a post/article/essay is like saying FU to a reader who's trying to research a topic efficiently.
- Pitarou 12y agoTips for reading a Patrick McKenzie essay: 1. Get a laser printer Sorry, Amazon, but the truth is that staring at the flickering, dancing lightbulb that you call a computer screen wears the eyes, and can lead to serious sleep disorders. e-ink readers are okay but, for an essay of this magnitude, there's still nothing that beats good old fashioned ink-on-bleached-woodpulp. And don't even think about using ink-jet. For the price of the ink, you could hire Patrick for a full one week consultation. 2. Paste the text into a wordprocessor If you're au fait with LaTeX you don't need my help here. But for the rest of us, a word processor is the way to go. And, for you Windows users, bypass WordPad and go straight to MS Word (if you have it) or LibreOffice Pages (if you don't). Either is fine. (In the past, I would would have suggested WordPad in a pinch, but LibreOffice is free and has important features that we're going to make use of.) Now, at this point, you'll encounter a technical snag. If you just blindly copy and paste the text into your word processor, the formatting will come out all messed up. This is because Patrick uses '90s style tables for website layout. This is no big deal -- just go to the webpage, open up the developers' console, and copy-paste the text one table-cell at a time -- but you need to be aware of it. 3. Find and tag the section headers There are usually 4- or 5- section headers in the text. Pick them out, and tag them as section headers. 4. Style your text If you're a design maven, go knock yourself out here. The system I've found that works for me is: - typeface: Arial Condensed 6 point (hate it all you want, but it's free and it gets the job done) - page layout: minimal margins, 3 column - paragraph style: 1 cm indent, no leading or trailing space, full justification For the section headers, I allow myself a generous 9 points bold font size. 5. Check your printer Make sure you have plenty of printer ink and paper available, because this is going to be a big job. And make sure you're not going to need the printer for anything else for a while. 6. Print! By the way, don't attempt to take a Patrick McKenzie essay with you on a plane: you'll exceed your in-flight handluggage allowance.
- thenomad 12y ago"You can, and should, make the strategic decision that you'll primarily write things which retain their value." I'm a huge fan of Patrick's, but I couldn't disagree more on this point. Choosing to write primarily about evergreen topics is ONE valid approach to creating value, but it's not the only one. It's equally useful to write about topics that people have a burning desire to know more about, even if that desire will fade over time, provided you are building that knowledge into your strategy. For example, one of the sites I run provides accurate, up-to-date information on optimal builds for World of Warcraft characters. That's the very definition of information that becomes rapidly useless. However, the time it takes to write those guides compared to the value it provides to me (in terms of advertising revenue) and my readers (in terms of giving a quick, accessible answer to a question they really want authoritative information on) makes those guides a very solid business proposition. Likewise, I started an information site about the Oculus Rift a while ago. Again, everything on there is going to go out of date relatively fast - but whilst it's relevant, it's extremely relevant. And that allows me to build the site on a very small time investment and be in a good place to ride the wave of the DK2 and consumer release. This is HN, for goodness' sake. Half the things we're likely all interested in are ephemeral. Anyone ever searched for information on Ruby on Rails configuration? Or Heartbleed? Neither of these topics are unlikely to change over time (said he, looking sadly at the wreckage of his Rails 1.0 sites), but it's still a solid decision both for business and value-creation reasons to write about them. However, choosing to focus on evergreen topics is also a valid strategy. (The rest of the article, by the by, is fantastic advice, and by the end of the week my main site is likely to be split into "news" and "articles", the latter of which will have a significantly deprecated - but still visible - date field.)
- jimejim 12y agoI took away 2 things from this article and don't agree with him on everything: 1. If you're intention is to write evergreen content, you should probably separate it from your blog so people don't automatically assume it's less valuable. Like it or not, the date and format matter. At the very least, I would create a separate page to highlight the more important articles. 2. I would make sure to include a date on some topics, like tech that's going to change rapidly. Not every topic needs a date though, like his salary negotiation article. You said some of this too, but just felt like summarizing myself.
- dools 12y agoMan I hate it when people publish articles without dates on them.