

If you aren't blogging, you're doing yourself a disservice. - atiffany
http://twintechs.com/how-blogging-can-advance-your-career-a-personal-perspective/

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greenyoda
On the other hand, if you start a blog and all it contains are silly articles
like "What I learned by writing 'Hello World' in Go, and why you should do it
too", then you're probably doing yourself a disservice. If your writing has
poor grammar and is full of typos, that won't reflect well on you either. If
you want your blog to enhance your reputation, you're going to have to put
some real effort into it.

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harrystone
If I blogged about my job and my boss read it, I'd get fired. He once said
that the solution for alternative energy is cars with huge springs in them.
When you wanted to go somewhere you'd just wind them up.

There's no way to put a positive spin on that.

~~~
NoahTheDuke
And yet here you are posting on the internet about it.

~~~
harrystone
He's not going to find this, but someone would eventually tell him about what
would be my internet-famous blog with all the dumb boss stories.

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robisen
@greenyoda,

Good point. First draft of this post actually talked about constantly curating
your forward facing blog, github, or whatever. I ended up taking it out
because this blog post was originally just for internal consumption within
Twin Technologies. I often encourage people to try to highlight the things on
their blog, github, or etc that advances their goals the most effectively.
That might be your latest project, your most popular project, or the thing you
are most passionate about. Having your Hello World code and the like in your
GitHub along with code that no one cares about from 10 years ago is probably
not a very good idea. In those cases either get rid of that stuff or make a
spate personal blog or repo where you archive that old stuff. That being said
though I often find people still searching out articles, code snippets, and
content I wrote 8 or even 10 years ago (my personal record is a blog post from
2000 that people still look for). So it’s not a bad idea to curate your
content and reorganize it but then again you never know what might be
important 10 years from now.

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trosen42
I couldn't agree more. A single blog post my company's founder spent just an
hour crafting got us over 30,000 views and almost over night we went from a
couple hackers to a company that people trusted and wanted to work with.

~~~
robisen
@trosen42,

Thats awesome. Would you please share that post?

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Johnie
Are there any recommendations on low overhead blogging platforms? I've been
looking for something that I can turn on and start writing without a lot of
setup. In addition, something that has an easy interface that I can just focus
on the writing.

I've looked at Medium and it looks pretty good. Any other recommendations?

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lauradhamilton
I think it's valuable to own your own domain vs. being at the mercy of Medium
/ Tumblr etc.

Blogger has free hosting, and it's easy to use.

Another good option is Wordpress. You can get an account set up (it's
basically turnkey) on a full-service hosting provider such as Mediatemple.

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feralmoan
How long are people usually spending to write a blog post? Is 1-2hrs
reasonable, because i get an hour in creating some story that people probably
won't read and just go 'to hell with it'. Whats an average time investment,
for those who are out there doing it?

~~~
robisen
@feralmoan, I think this is one of those cases were its sort of hard to
compare aggregates since your return on investment is personal to you. In some
cases my blog posts have literally taking man weeks to create because they are
based on efforts for customers. The code, data, and experience end up getting
written down then at some point I might spend 10 minutes to a few hours
writing a blog post. Some of those very same blog posts, that have consumed
massive amounts of time, have been more or less ignored. Some have ended up
being very popular. So what I would say is ignore your average investment time
and focus on your goals. What are you goals for blogging? Is it just
expressing yourself, communicating to others, sharing your hard won
experience, driving a brand (maybe brand you), or just storing information for
latter retrieval. Depending on what your goal you will find that you time
investments will be very different. For example if you’re really want to show
the world how deep your understanding of certain technologies are you might
need to spend significant time writing rich and deep content. If your just
sharing news articles of interest with a brief bit of insight maybe just 10
minutes a day.

