The best part about blogging is in how it forces you to reflect on what you know.
It is easy to have an opinion, but until you write it down, release it and see what happens it is only wishful thinking. In trying to communicate your ideas, you quickly realize how fragile they are, how often they sound better inside of your head then they do outside.
In that sense, feedback is the key. I have no real idea whether the stuff I am writing is reasonable, madness, rambling or idiotic. I do my best to weed out the weaker stuff, but what I am often talking about is in a very raw state. Unless it's something that I've been harping on for a while, the ideas only get shaped as they turn into sentences. Although I write a lot from personal experience, trying to generalize that or examine it in a global context can be difficult. Just because I can easily do something, doesn't mean that I understand it, or can teach it to others.
In periods like now, when there has been little feedback I always get worried that I've somehow disconnected from my readers. That I'm no longer writing relevant or interesting things. I realize that I'm not a particularly great writer (or editor), but I do believe that communication is the only way we can collectively grow. It's better, I think, to write poorly about something, then to not write at all. If we're not talking about it, then we're probably making way too many assumptions about it, and we certainly aren't growing our knowledge.
If you're out there, I'd love to hear what you think. What you like and/or dislike. Feedback would be awesome. Also, if you have any questions, I'd love to answer them. I could write up my thoughts as a full post, or for short answers I could post them in the comments, or perhaps combine several together as a post.
Thanks for reading this blog.
User Poll:
Perhaps post a survey of what your readers would like to see? Google Docs can be embedded within an iframe in a post. I think there are various other survey widgets which could be used.
ReplyDeleteSome ideas:
+ An "Ask the Engineer" format, where you'll take question submissions and write a blog post to answer them?
+ Specific technology areas to cover? Web? Enterprise?
+ Non-technology topics? Random musings on social topics?
Hi Denton,
ReplyDeleteGreat Ideas. I added a Docs form, that was really easy.
I do post non-technology topics, but I do so under some of my other blogs, such as Irrational Focus:
http://irrationalfocus.blogspot.com/
I don't really post anything ultra-personal since I've never been really comfortable with letting that type of information get out there :-)
Paul.
In fact your posts are usually quite long, quite dense and I would say somehow "closed", kind of "self-contained".
ReplyDeleteIt's a good thing, and I think they somehow provide food for thoughts in the long run, when they match the reader's current concerns.
But on the other hand their density make it hard to come up with a valuable comment. The problem is, I think, that there's a lot of (more or less) valuable things to read on the net; and by the time one comes up with some thought that may make a valuable comment, one has lost the primary source of this thought, or the blog entry have been burried under one or two new blog entries - even though you do kindly answer to "late" comments.
Another "'problem'" I think is that your articles can be put in 10 categories: either nearly philosical ones that ask questions no-one can answer ("Truth and it's consequences" for instance), or articles that put together well known facts and depicts sharpely a given situation about which a man alone cannot change, but needs a community scale effort (the first of them being to agree on solutions) ("Why?" for instance).
So your articles are dense and intimidating; worse, they rarely leave openings for trolls :-)
It's not a bad thing, and the low feedback not necessary a bad sign.
> Thanks for reading this blog.
Hmmm... Gratuitous Thanks Syndrome I guess. Thank YOU for writing this blog.
Hi Astrobe,
ReplyDeleteYes, I often feel like one of those crazy people rambling on in public. The type that are obviously nuts, but just interesting enough that you sneak a little listen for a while.
I keep saying I'm going to do shorter and lighter pieces, but as I write them I keep finding more and more related things to add. One of my friends calls me 'preachy', it seems to be part of my personality :-P.
'Truth and its consequences' is really about a design idea: an application or web site that relates natural language back to a structural perspective of our knowledge. 'Why?' was my answer to "why bother to blog?", which was a question someone asked me when they found out I wasn't nearly (remotely) as popular as Jeff or Joel, and that I didn't ever really expect to get to that level. "So, why do it?" they asked.
Given that I'm asking people to look beyond my flawed writing style, I don't think 'thanks' is too gratuitous. I would have given up by now if I hadn't had any readers :-)
What were your favorite posts?
Paul.
> What were your favorite posts?
ReplyDelete"The end of coding as we know it",
"the nature of simple",
"testing for battleships",
"normal forms",
"chinese plumbers"
are the ones that quickly ring a bell if I browse your blog archive.
That's neat. The list contains many of the posts that I most enjoyed writing. :-)
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised that "the end of coding as we know it" is there. It received some very nasty feedback. It's another loosely coated 'design' idea, but because of the premise it really bugged some programmers. It's one of those projects that I'd really like to get the freedom to pursue. I can visualize how it works, which usually means I can build it.
Paul.