

How to write a better weblog (2002) - henning
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/writebetter/

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petervandijck
I hope blogging won't disappear. It was really good for a while, when we still
had blogrolls. Now it's all walled gardens, that make it even easier to share
and comment. I kind of think it's time for the pendulum to swing back.

~~~
NathanKP
What do you mean by walled gardens? Is not blogging still open, with anyone
being able to start a blog, and in most cases anyone read it as well?

~~~
petercooper
If I had to guess, I think he's lamenting the relative death of blogs as indie
publications of sorts (with novel designs and formats) and the migration of
people to tools like Twitter and Facebook which are basically glorified,
controlled forums.

I'm convinced the former type of blog has significantly gone away, but merely
the marginal fringe of people who don't care too much about format seem to
have swung away from them.

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acangiano
Interestingly his blog is no longer online: <http://www.0format.com/>

~~~
InfinityX0
Was going to make the exact same point. Good name, too. I think blogging is
something we do until our time can't scale with it due to the success of the
blog, very few times does the blogging itself carry it's worth past some lofty
modicum of success.

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NathanKP
I especially liked the point about pith. From what I have seen the mark of a
good writer is the ability to say a lot with just a few words. It is all to
easy to ramble on and on, without getting the point across.

~~~
petercooper
Brevity is the soul of wit.

~~~
pigbucket
Irony is the soul of wit.

"My liege, and madam, to expostulate What majesty should be, what duty is, Why
day is day, night night, and time is time, Were nothing but to waste night,
day and time. Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, And tediousness the
limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief: your noble son is mad: Mad call
I it; for, to define true madness, What is't but to be nothing else but mad?
But let that go."

~~~
petercooper
Ah, but it is a proverb in its less nuanced sense all the same.

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anonymousDan
A (non-compsci) friend recently asked me for advice on setting up a blog,
however having never written one myself I wasn't of much help. I'd be
interested to know which sites/hosting services people recommend and why. The
friend was an economist/financier in case that's relevant.

~~~
dreyfiz
Average person: Tumblr. The easiest way to blog isn't just their tagline, it's
also true.

Average person who is a little geekier: Posterous. The easiest way to blog
that also has some more anorak-friendly features.

Unhealthy interest in politics: WordPress/Typepad/Blogspot, because that's
where most of the other politically opinionated people tend to blog. The
hosted services, not the ones you install on your own server. That way someone
else has to worry about security updates, maintaining performance, etc, and
your friend doesn't have to learn anything about servers just to be able to
write.

Programmer blogs: the latest fashion seems to be using github as a blog (e.g.
raganwald) or else using a git-based blogging engine and deploying the blog to
heroku (e.g. with toto) [http://www.rubyinside.com/deploy-blog-with-toto-and-
heroku-2...](http://www.rubyinside.com/deploy-blog-with-toto-and-
heroku-2962.html)

------
imp
I love this quote:

 _No matter what your audience size, you ought to write as if your readership
consisted of paid subscribers whose subscriptions were perpetually about to
expire._

~~~
tokenadult
_No matter what your audience size, you ought to write as if your readership
consisted of paid subscribers whose subscriptions were perpetually about to
expire._

Presumably that advice applies here on HN as well.

