Blogging about blogging

December 26, 2006 —

I started posting to this blog as a way to force myself to keep up on (and then, hopefully, act on) what was happening on the web. After 10 years as a professional web developer, I was finding it a little too easy to gauge success based on revenue rather than innovation. And like anything else, I figured the more I blogged, the more efficient I’d get (allowing me to start sleeping again.)

With a little less than a year of dedicated blogging now at charisma18, I can say with certainty that I was right about the blogging forcing me to stay plugged in. I have blog topics finding their way into production now all the time. As a case in point, a blog post about out of control rss was actually the hard push for feed rinse.

But while the first part of my prediction seems to be true, I can’t say the same about posting getting any easier. Deane Barker tells me he spends 15 minutes on each post with the exception of an occasional chapter on cms practice/theory. I spend an hour (or more.)

I know this probably isn’t the most intriguing topic if you aren’t a blogger yourself, but, hopefully, soliciting some thoughts on the matter will improve my posting and make this blog a better place to troll. Here’s what I have so far:

Stefan Hartwig: don’t post to post. One entry every 1.5 days is great timing. (Stefan is like me, he likes the c-list bloggers that preach what they practice and vice versa.) I’m trying for 1 per day, but I did take Christmas off.

My wife: write like you speak. In other words, don’t use words or grammatical structure that would sound funny to you if used them in typical conversation. This is a simple reminder that has already helped me greatly in email communication.

Greg Veerman: save your title for last. I think this actually came out as a jab to second-rate copywriters, but what I retained was this: “build your copy around your point, not around a title – that comes last.” I’m constantly working to break my habit of writing titles first.

Jason: don’t be afraid to mix up post length. Try out a short post, short post, long post cadence – or something entirely shook up. It’s your little world, and it doesn’t always have to fit into eight paragraphs.

David Hunnicutt: structure your writing. David actually gave me an outline a few weeks ago to try to push into practice. It goes like this:

1. give your point
2. prove your point
3. illustrate your point
4. demonstrate how to put it into practice

Here’s a fictional post he gave that follows his outline: 1. Cheesy Poofs cause cancer. 2. Studies show that Cheesy Poofs cause a high rate of colon cancer. 3. I was visiting with a client the other day that couldn’t put down his bag of Cheesy Poofs…(you get it.) 4. Don’t eat Cheesy Poofs.

Blogosphere: don’t blog about blogging. Obviously, I need to work on this one.

Anybody care to weigh in? I’m all ears.