RSS 2.0
Journal / Blog
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Thoughts on Blogging: "Turn Up The Good, Turn Down The Suck"
The factors described in this post loosely determine which types of blogs I've been subscribing to.

Quality over quantity: Some blogs adhere to rigid posting schedules. I've never paid attention to a blog's schedule and wonder if anyone (beside the author) does. I find scheduled blogs result in diluted content and that their posts become daunting to sift through. Eventually I start skimming all their content and might unsubscribe altogether.

Consolidated feeds are bad mmmm-kay: Occasionally blogs consolidate posts from multiple authors, or group similar topics into a single feed, this results in excessive noise with no granular filtering capabilities. I won't subscribe.

Personality is important, Professionalism is dull: Personality should permeate your posts. Software development is kind of boring, live it up, inject some originality, show your true colors, try to be funny, take the risk. We're all human, your readers aren't robots and zombies. As a subscriber I'm more interested in getting to knowing you (the developer) than how professional you're trying to be. Professional flavoured blogs run the risk of being too sanitary - a lesson learned the hard way *yawn*.

Easy on the code: I look at code every day. I'd rather read something funny, inspiring, thought provoking, philosophical, or related to the human factor of software development. Code in blogs can often come across as filler, if I really needed more code I'd head down to Google CodeCodePlex, and download one of the many projects (take a look at Chrome). With code, there's a million ways to do the same thing, if you're code isn't in my specific problem domain, then I'm falling asleep already.

Subscribing and reading blogs is important for software developers and knowledge workers in general. Blogs offer cross pollination of ideas between problem domains, organizations, and people. What factors determine the blogs you read?

Page rendered at Tuesday, January 06, 2009 6:12:51 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)