> Start a blog where you share progress on your project. This will hold you accountable and let people know what you’re working on.
For a long time I wrote off the idea of having a blog because it seemed vain. I don't usually have any great ideas that anyone else needs to know about, and my trials of learning new things are just the same as everyone else's. However, over the past few months I've realized that I was dead wrong. Watching a few good series of blogs like [1] and [2] has shown me that even if you don't have anything world shattering it is still great as a means to make learning more important. After all, you can't let down your readers, can you?
How do you think the chronological, little-bit-at-a-time blog format compares to longer articles, or books?
I've found individual blog posts, linked to from sites like HN or found in web searches, to be greatly helpful, but often when I go to a blog like one of those that you shared here, and try to start reading it from the top, it feels disorganized; the content isn't presented in any ordering that necessarily makes good pedagogical sense.
When blogs first started getting popular, I thought, "Man, chronological organization is the dumbest possible structure. Somebody will soon come up with something better." And so I never started a blog. Now I just feel dumb for waiting.
The best solutions I've seen for this are a) organized post series (e.g., [1]) and posts that aggregate a bunch of things previously written (e.g. [2]). I'd like to see people take that further, so if people have other examples of interesting approaches, I'd love it if they could reply with them.
I will say that editorial work is hard. As I've experimented with writing a book, it's clear to me that whatever I think the plan is up front, it's going to change, and that refactoring the structure as I go is expensive. It's cheaper to do it in large batches. So I think most blogs will just always suck in this regard. I suspect the future is in collaboration, where the author and blog readers can collectively build and maintain the table of contents and intro material. That would mirror the writer/editor collaboration that goes into books.
I had similar sentiments about the vanity of blogging. But I also like to write, and found that posting something publicly forces me to take the task seriously and actually attempt to do a good job and/or follow through. I reconcile with my concerns of vanity by doing nothing to promote the blog. From what I can tell, I have yet to attract a single reader, other than spam bots. The added bonus to not having any readers, is that I don't have to worry if the topics I write about are interesting or original.
I consider the blog to be good writing practice, and if/when the time comes where a job I am pursuing requires some extensive writing experience, at the very least I will have a small body of work to show off.
For a long time I wrote off the idea of having a blog because it seemed vain. I don't usually have any great ideas that anyone else needs to know about, and my trials of learning new things are just the same as everyone else's. However, over the past few months I've realized that I was dead wrong. Watching a few good series of blogs like [1] and [2] has shown me that even if you don't have anything world shattering it is still great as a means to make learning more important. After all, you can't let down your readers, can you?
[1] http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/09/26/hacker-school-day-4-c-unit-te...
[2] http://www.jeffknupp.com/