
Blog Little Things - shubhamjain
http://coffeecoder.net/blog/blog-little-things/
======
pothibo
This is the most important lesson for anyone who would like to start blogging.

So many times I've started and trashed drafts because I thought it was dumb,
stupid and that everyone ought to know what I was writing about.

But then, once in a while, I start writing a post and decide to post it
whatever happens. Every single time, I get people thanking me for writing it
up. I have people saying how it helped them.

So yes, blog little things. I don't blog little things as much as I should.

And as a side note, comments on blog are usually troll. I have so many
comments saying how I'm dumb and how I don't understand how programming works.
These people are just frustrated by their own lack of knowledge. Ignore the
troll and keep blogging. This might sound personal and what not. Feel free to
ignore this comment if you think I'm full of it :)

~~~
agumonkey
Even for you, many use blogging as a note-for-future-self.

~~~
pothibo
That's absolutely right. I can't count the times I have come back to my blog
to read about something I need to do right now that I did 6 months ago.

~~~
agumonkey
my-own-commandlinefu.com

------
melling
I keep Emacs org notes on a lot of different things. I've published a few of
them as "hidden" pages so I can reference them in Reddit or HN threads, for
instance.

[http://thespanishsite.com/public_html/org/ergo/programming_b...](http://thespanishsite.com/public_html/org/ergo/programming_by_voice.html)

[http://thespanishsite.com/public_html/org/ergo/rsi.html](http://thespanishsite.com/public_html/org/ergo/rsi.html)

[http://thespanishsite.com/public_html/org/ergo/keyboards.htm...](http://thespanishsite.com/public_html/org/ergo/keyboards.html)

The information isn't that well organized, of course, but it's a good start
and might save someone several hours of Google'ing.

At some point I hope to turn some of my notes into small blog posts, like I
did with my Ergonomic Keyboards post last week.

[https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/07/16/the-model-01-an-
heir...](https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/07/16/the-model-01-an-heirloom-
grade-keyboard-for-serious-typists/)

There's definitely something missing one level above a search engines. More
curation and a summary.

------
Strilanc
I find that stackoverflow actually absorbs many of the "little things" I would
otherwise blog. If it's shorter than a page or two, it fits the
question/answer format really well. For example: finding a pair non-
overlapping bit vectors [1].

1:
[http://cs.stackexchange.com/q/43864/535](http://cs.stackexchange.com/q/43864/535)

------
nine_k
Corollary: learn to write and edit quickly. Else blogging about little things
will drain too much time for which you have other plans, and this will be an
incentive to stop blogging.

------
jbranchaud
This is the approach we take with TIL at Hashrocket --
[http://til.hashrocket.com/](http://til.hashrocket.com/)

~~~
thoughtpalette
I remember getting a HashRockets logo sticker at a meetup in Chi a couple of
years ago. Loved the branding!

------
wmat
Wow, did this post ever land at an opportune time for me. I just started
writing a 'first' blog post about my Hugo static site generator setup and
stopped half way through with the thought, "why would anyone care about this,
it's trivial and almost condescending to tell people how to set up Hugo".

Perhaps I'll go finish that post now.

~~~
walkon
I'd like to read it - post the link here when you're done!

------
ctdonath
I'm in the midst of the exercise "post one picture to Facebook every day for a
year". Surprising how many people respond to nearly every post, expressing
their appreciation/joy in the series, and how it gathers my thoughts &
experiences into an otherwise-soon-forgotten collection. At end of year I'll
format it into a one-off book, and have a good summary of 2015.

Next such goal is blogging a daily $1/plate recipe page. Getting that started
takes more concerted effort (having started the blog but not at that posting
rate). The results may suck, but at least it will focus the mind on something
worthwhile, and - as the OP notes - others may find it more interesting than I
expect.

If nothing else, "blog little things" makes it manageable to normalize &
improve one's writing skills and focus on what matters.

------
foolinaround
Aside:

Along with accolades for stackoverflow, I feel Google deserves some as well
for surfacing those SO pages.

------
shanecleveland
I never cease to be amazed by solutions and tips I am able to find to
seemingly mundane problems - both tech and non-tech. Always grateful to the
people offering up these "little things." Wish I found the means to do it
more.

------
rumberg
Wow. Speaks from my heart to be honest. I'm a PR guy and had a few successes
over the last months and years. One example: I helped an unknown startup with
their launch and we reached 500 million people in one month on social media
with no budget.

I know that some of these stories and pitches would be useful for others, but
I always end up thinking: 'Meh, everyone knows that.' or as a non-native
speaker 'Urgh, this is a really clumsy description. My english sucks."

I'm just thinking about making this post my 'new tab' page in Chrome.

Thank you!

~~~
jwdunne
I'm gonna be honest, I'd love to read more about your experiences. If you ever
set up a blog, feel free to email me with a link.

~~~
rumberg
Thank you! I will definitely do that. Sometimes my most successful stories
which ended up in TechCrunch (of course), WSJ, Forbes, The Guardian, etc. were
five or six sentence emails - which is a bit embarrassing sometimes.

But hey, I think I just should get started sharing the details. I think these
stories and shared knowledge could be useful after all.

------
jasonlotito
I like to turn lessons like this into triggers. In this case, the trigger is
whenever I look up something and find a solution. The trigger should activate
me wanting to document this: the original problem I searched for, and the
resulting solution.

------
GCA10
Fine advice. I write for a living, and two of my most popular posts ever were
fleeting little creations that I dashed off in 45 minutes because something
caught my eye.

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20130611180041-59549-the-
no-1...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20130611180041-59549-the-no-1-job-
skill-in-2020)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2014/02/19/he-
wante...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2014/02/19/he-wanted-a-job-
facebook-said-no-in-a-3-billion-mistake/)

You never know what will break through the clutter.

------
3pt14159
I started doing this recently while I've been learning the programming
language Nim. It's been fun putting together little answers as I go:
[http://nim.community/](http://nim.community/) I'm hoping that as Nim gets
more traction these answers can get more accurate and there can be a breadth
of answers that constantly stay up to date since the website is open source :)

------
dyates
I taken to writing up tutorials for tasks that take me a non-trivial amount of
effort to accomplish and are obscure enough to not have decent existing
writeups on the first page of Google searches. Little things about [automating
file upload in Ruby]([https://davidyat.es/2015/02/26/automated-file-upload-in-
ruby...](https://davidyat.es/2015/02/26/automated-file-upload-in-ruby-with-
nethttp-and-multipart/)) and [setting up a UniFi controller with
SELinux]([https://davidyat.es/2015/03/02/unifi-centos-
selinux/](https://davidyat.es/2015/03/02/unifi-centos-selinux/)). I had doubts
about whether I was actually providing worthwhile content that hadn't been
provided elsewhere before (especially in the latter post, where I paraphrased
another person's post for half the article (with credit) just to get to my
part), but they've ended up some of the most popular posts on my blog.

Even when I discover [I can't do
something]([https://davidyat.es/2015/05/13/notes-on-csrf-and-json-
apis/](https://davidyat.es/2015/05/13/notes-on-csrf-and-json-apis/)), it's
good to blog about it, just to straighten out my thoughts, contextualise my
work and aid the research of future people going down the same tracks. And
even if it's just something tiny and silly like [this awful injection-focused
SQL query]([https://davidyat.es/select-only-nth-row-in-t-
sql/](https://davidyat.es/select-only-nth-row-in-t-sql/)), it's nice to have
it written down for easy public access -- for your own benefit as much as
anyone else's.

And even if very few people ever read them, I find writing posts about little
things helps improve my understanding -- it's just a good way to organise my
thoughts and make sure I remember the stuff later on. And the benefit of
publicly accessible blogposts over a personal notebook is that I can reach
them from almost any situation I might need to, and refer friends and co-
workers struggling with the same issues to them. It's a great feeling having
someone ask "how do I do XYZ?" and being able to say "I wrote a blog about
it!". Plus it saves you the trouble of remembering long terminal commands and
exact syntax offhand.

~~~
nindalf
Hey, just one suggestion. HN doesn't support in-line links so it would be
better to replace them with references like [1] and add all the links at the
bottom of your comment.

------
thenomad
Great post - and well-timed, too. I shall get on with writing my "Lessons
Learned" post from my latest project now...

------
Taek
Stack overflow is great because its easy to find and index, and easy to figure
out which posts might be relevant to someone looking for answers via a search
engine.

Blogs are generally not as accessible. Something I put on SO or Reddit is
likely to get a lot more attention than something I put on my personal blog.

------
agentultra
Be not afraid of knowing too little. There isn't enough time in our lives to
know everything.

This is good advice: write about what you know and don't be anxious about its
significance. Just writing about it will help you remember it better. And it
might help someone else too.

------
Yhippa
I will read almost anything that shows up around here on development. You
never know what can end up being helpful. On the flip side I feel that if I
write something it's been done before. If I Google for it it probably has.
What a sad personal paradox.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Assume that _everything_ has been done before. Your personal approach to it
has not.

------
hawngyeedun
Interesting, so basically a middle ground between the conventional length of
blogs and microblogs. I wonder if that begs for a new way of
organizing/producing medium-length contents of this sort.

~~~
pyre
I think that part of the advice is that the little things can be mixed in with
more long-form content. Your blog doesn't need to necessarily be one or the
other.

------
Mz
"Light one small candle..."

------
duiker101
[https://coderwall.com](https://coderwall.com) is very good for this sort of
things.

------
chinchang
Nice piece of advice :)

