Excellent post, Jeff.
I have a simple solution to the Giant Blogroll eye sore: I publish my Google Reader Shared Items feed. My readers can see what I’m reading that I think is important without having to sift through noise.
Keep enlightening us!
What does Jeff use to run this blog?
And if you, Jeff, are reading this, I am curious as to what you think of wordpress for effective blogging (assuming that the clichs you’ve listed are avoided during the wordpress usage).
I agree with Jeff’s comments on the blogosphere intuitively, but I am more interested in what he has to say - due to his blogging experience - about the technical side of running his blog. Software, tips for long-term management - I see Jeff has changed several things in codinghorror since the beginning.
You raise some wonderful points. And you negate the value of raising those wonderful points by letting your ego get in the way of otherwise good writing.
Quick quesiton: Is this list a conscious critique of your own blog methods? Or a glaringly hypocritical self righteous attempt at externalizing your own flaws? Either way, congrats on attacking the work of others while turning a blind eye to your own faults. Job Well Done.
Ahem – #10 - you find blogging about blogging incredibly boring? then wtf is this article about? This point was great for a nice laugh at first, given the nature of the post, but the sene of humor quickly gave way to bittersweet pity when it became clear that you were trying to be serious.
also, dude, lose the thesaurus!!! you will seem much more intelligent the moment you stop trying to sound intelligent with clunky, often misused obscure words. your readers will stop suspecting that you’re really compensating for something else when you erroneously substitute ‘vapid’ for ‘boring’ or ‘pernicious’ for ‘harmful.’ Reflect for a moment on your position on visual clutter, which is spot on by the way. Now think of the verbal equivalent - using teacher-PLEASE-notice-my-essay words is not so different from adding lots of stickers, banners, etc. to a visual composition. You should really talk to yourself about flair, if you insist on co-opting jokes from Office Space.
Lastly, your writing will benefit tremendously from your purchasing (and utilizing) both of these books:
A) Strunk White’s Elements of Style. In it, you’ll find lots of useful tidbits to strengthen your own writing, such as avoiding useless lead-ins (“One of the most”), etc.
B) Dale Carenegie’s How to Win Friends Influence People - you’ll win a lot more people to your way of thinking once you hang up the “I’s” “Me’s” and “My’s,” and stop insinuating that your readers must be at fault if they disagree with the almighty You. Alternatively, check out Brian Regan’s ‘Me Monster,’ - the subject of this joke should strike a familiar chord with you.
Once your writing is somewhat worthwhile, your attacks on the faults of others will seem less like an unintentional punch line.
i think two of the reasons for your own success are:
-only post quality. (you don’t ever post unless you’ve written something good)
-keep doing it over time.
people who say “i only have an audience of 3” are needlessly pessimistic: you only had 3 readers at one point. i remember only having one reader initially. so i wrote hard for that one reader, and now there’s… dozens ;-).
Disclaimer: this is purely my own worthless opinion and isn’t meant to offend.
I think that you’re taking things way too seriously. Blogs are by their very form trivial. You toss some words together and be done with it. The push to write something every day results in a weakened form of quality. Blogs are for people to sprout of their unfounded ideas and thoughts. The daily format also prevents a person from creating a consistent structure to their site (as blog ideas can arrive in a random order).
The blog style doesn’t translate well to serious writing. Serious writing can be seen (as an example) in the process of writing a technical book - say on programming. An author (most likely more than one) writes a book over several years. Editors and technical reviewers then tear that book apart looking for faults and ways to improve the work. Draft after draft are written until the book is finally considered acceptable.
To repeat my point: you’re taking blogging way too seriously. If you want a serious medium then enter the world of technical book writing. Blogs are a joke and will remain as such.
I just deleted a bunch of ads from my blog. I’ve been researching whether a personal blog is commercial or noncommercial if it has ads on it. I’m starting to think that the answer has something to do with profit motive, but am continuing to research.
I actually feel better now that some of the clutter is gone.
I’ll be doing more…
http://offonatangent.blogspot.com/2007/08/coding-horror-thirteen-blog-clichs.html
Jeff,
You really nailed a bunch of the “no go” issues for blogging. The one item I will push back a little is lists (#12) only because lists to be among the most-read things on the blogosphere. This inspired my brother and I to start a quirky, list-driven blog - fourreasonswhy.com.
My favourite cliche, as demonstrated about 15 minutes ago right here at codinghorror.com:
I went to http:://www.codinghorror.com/ and saw the :discipline makes strong developers" article. Nothuing new? Oh well. Visit reddit, see a link to a post here, take a look. Realise it’s new. Go back to the main page, hit F5, oh, lookie, there’s two new posts!
I’m guessing something got stuck in a cache, but it could be anything.
Also, there’s the ever-popular calendar showing a post in every second month, and 6 months ago the post ended “this was the problem, tomorrow I’ll blog about the solution” and no more posts ever appear. (Even if you bang away on the F5 key all day.)
I disagree about calandars. You say that you already have a calendar on your desktop - correct - but it doesn’t tell you or link you to the days’ posts on a blog, does it?
The useful blog calandars only highlight days in the month where posts were made.
There certainly is a lot else I agree with you on though. Too many clicklets, huge blogrolls (use OPML instead). Tag clouds are good though.
There are simply different people in the world, and you only appear to see one side/opinion : yours. Which is fine ;p
But some people like to navigate to discover, some like to search. Some browse. etc. Some know exactly what they want.
Ads ARE EVIL though. Why would you create a site to lose the visitor by provide links to irrelevant othe rplaces to something totally differnt : ie : read blog - buy crap.
hmmm… 
Good post!
Kosso
“Isn’t this what I said? Search for the term “cult of personality”.”
Yes, but I think we disagree about the degree you should involve your life in your blog. If you look at a lot of the bloggers that have been around for a long time (Winer, Pilgrim, and others), you’ll notice that they include political views, happenings at home, and recounts of vacations in their posts. Newer ones often just stay on topic, writing what seem to be magazine articles rather than personal insight. I think including things like that goes a long way towards building a “personal brand” than just including pop culture references like “Man that band Boston sure could play a mean tune” or small personal opinions. I understand targeting your content for your audience, which often means putting up multiple blogs.
@Heri:
Not sure you actually read Jeff “Silent But Deadly” Atwood’s comments about tag clouds. His suggestion to include a simple, sorted list of tags and their frequencies addresses your concerns without using some terrible widget from the “Oh look! A shiny object!” school of UI design.
I would have liked your article had you titled it “Learn how to blog Jeff Atwood style!”
Though you make a humble start highlighting that these are “your” opinions, the tone of your article does not reflect it.
Ok, so I want to display a random picture because I came across it and found it brilliant, or say I created it myself. Do I have to write a 200 word blog that suits the picture to share it with my audience? You are stifling creativity.
Besides, who are we blogging for?
In the genuine artist the desire for applause, while it usually exists strongly, is secondary, in the sense that the artist wishes to produce a certain kind of work, and hopes that that work may be applauded, but will not alter his style even if no applause is forthcoming.
- Bertrand Russell.
Anything works so long as it adds value to someone and that someone can be just you.
Excellent, again. If you ever write a book, I’m buying it.
What’s Next after Web 2.0?
I do not like those buzz words like Web 2.0, Business 2.0 etc., however in order to communication, you have to conform to their protocols, otherwise they might think you are speaking in a foreign language. So far Web 2.0/Internet 1.0 lead by Youtube, FaceBook, same Amazon, New Yahoo! and New Google is successful, though at not successful as Web 1.0/Internet 0.0 led by Old Yahoo!, Ebay, Amazon and Old Google. Why? Not a big surprise anymore when from Web 1.0/Internet 0.0 to Web 2.0/Internet 1.0 as opposed from nothing to Web 1.0/Internet 0.0.
I believe the next after Web 2.0/Internet 1.0 is Web 3.0/Internet 2.0, however we’d better to call it Internet 2.0, since at that time, Web is not that important any more. Why?
Web 1.0/Internet 0.0 - Informed, you as a reader
Web 2.0/Internet 1.0 - Inform, you as a writer
Internet 2.0 (as opposed as Web 3.0/Internet 2.0) - formation of Information, you as a reader, writer, and much more
- BTW I am writing this post while I am watching a lecture C++0x (yes, C++0x) on at Univ. of Waterloo made by Prof. Bjarne Stroustrup - Prof. Stroustrup, think about C++ 3.0, borrow somthing nice from Ruby, the world is way too different now as opposed to 1980s
Frontier Space - http://www.hwswworld.com/space
Frontier Blog - http://www.hwswworld.com/wp
How about this one: writing a blog with close to 1000 entries and give your readers one way to browse them: sequentially. Thanks for the search box though!
True. I just fixed up the archives page, and I’ll be linking it from the main page as well.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives.html
There’s a third way to improve readability that you should have mentioned: limit column width.
Agree (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000618.html). I need to adjust my stylesheet, which currently expresses line length as a percentage of width. This works OK up to about 1600x1200, but is probably too long if the browser window is larger than that.
Yeah, sorry, kiddo, some of us are going to keep on running blogs without comments… because they’re ours and we can do with them as we wish.
I hate blogsites with no way to comment. I do have Top (n) lists from time to time; it helps with one of your other points, regular posting. Since I’ve posted every day for over 2 years, it’s helpful. I’ve done far less posting of previous links over time. But I like my blogroll; the idea of the blog, one longtime blogger told me when I started, is to please ME.
“Who reads a blog where the comments are more interesting than the content!? Not me. Not anyone. That’s silly talk. Come on now.”
Err… I do, This one has comments that are often as interesting as the original article and Slashdot where the original article is quite often boring but the comments are (sometimes) interesting and largely the whole point of reading it
An example of this was mentioned above, I go to Amazon for the comments it gives a better idea about the product than many review sites that are more likely to be biased
When I find well-written articles on blogs that I want to cite, I take great pains to get the author’s name right in my citation.
Just link to the page you cite, that would be enough.
obsessively listing every single blog you read-- the so-called “blogroll”-- is just noise. If you’re really reading this many blogs, you should be linking to them organically in your blog posts, in a sort of natural quid pro quo. Wearing a giant blogroll on your sleeve is an empty gesture.
I’m using blogrolls (aka “friend’s feed”) as a kind of a social network. If I’m interested in what you write and you are interested in reading those people I may be interested in them also. So a blogroll is not a noise.
I’d like to talk to you about your flair.
The better (and probably more effective) line from the same movie: “You know, the Nazis had pieces of flair, but they made the Jews wear them.”