Blogging Principles I Use

I’ve run this site for more than 14 years now. I haven’t published consistently for years at a time, but these rules of thumb from Julia Evans are extremely useful for anyone writing on the Internet. They are exactly the kind of knowledge that personal websites are great for.

I wrote this set of blogging principles on Twitter a while back and thought I’d mirror it to this blog. These principles help me publish stuff. (publishing stuff on the internet is hard!).

Blogging principles I use

Here are her rules from her post, with my own notes for each paragraph.

be honest about what I know

This rule is hard to follow when the entire Internet pushes the “Chaffeur” part of the two types of knowledge.

try to not write anything (too) wrong

Ignoring this rule killed my consistency back in 2015 to 2017 when there was a trend where “short content = social media” and “long content = search traffic”.

Google makes it hard to find short form content on the Internet. But that shouldn’t stop me (or anyone else!) from writing short content.

be positive

Dear lord, yes. This part is a big reason to own your own little space on the Internet instead of using social media (Blogger and WordPress still exist!). Comments kill optimism.

write for a past version of myself

This is the one rule of Julia’s that has been a running theme here. Write what Nate from 20 years ago would’ve found useful.

stick to my own experience

Ditto rule #1.

talk about what I’ve learned recently

I haven’t done this as much, since I’ve spent the last year publishing a backlog of 500 book reviews & drafts. But yes.

remember it’s OK if not everyone likes it

I used to write a lot about digital marketing. And wow, did people come out of the woodwork to send me some nasty emails. I’ve even received hate mail from this site criticizing, what I thought, were pretty bland posts. But! I also learned that usually the ones that drew the haters were the ones that 99% of people thought were useful. And that’s what matters.