Writing blog posts can be pretty tricky -- it's hard to come up with a topic to write about let alone actually create the content. I've been bloggi...
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This is gooood!
I'm amazed by the detail in the boilerplates. I might do that one day.
At the moment, I'm at that phase where I'm just writing tutorials as I'm learning new things. So my target audience is me few weeks or few days a go.
(I find myself using the word "then" a lot. "first we do X, then Y, then Z.")
Also, a tip that might help someone:
When writing my posts, I use the speech feature on mac and listen as it reads my text.
I'm able to catch my spelling errors and also whether or not the text sounds how I intended.
It has helped me so much that I end up listening to my text few times before I'm satisfied that ... I can't do any better. :)
Oh that's an awesome idea! Thanks!
Hello, Ali !
Can you share this template in Sketch?
I love that -- my target audience is normally the "me" of a couple years ago. I think it makes your posts really real and helpful for people if you can really relate to the material.
Ya, I've got a long trello card of Blog Post ideas that are all just "I should write about how to do the thing I just figured out how to do."
Maybe someone in my same position will Google the same problem and come find my solution, or not.
The bonus of actually writing the post though is that often, the end product of the blog post is different to the solution you found!
For example, I started learning Electron. Read the docs, found few tutorials and I now have the end product. All I need is to copy paste the code in a blog post. However, whilst writing the text to tell the "audience" what the code does, I'm seeing refactoring opportunities all over the place. So for me it's all about placing a stamp of approval to my understanding. If I can blog about the code I found in stackoverflow say, then you can be sure by the time I pressed publish, that code is mine, in that I'm no longer the person that copy pasted the code with his fingers crossed. Because you now need to go and read the section of the docs which the stackoverflow user kindly linked to but you were to excited to bother reading :)
I find this technique quite helpful when learning new concepts, modules or languages as it forces me to explain the material in my own words. This only improves my understanding of the subject, sort of like writing notes.
'Nobody's going to read my post: So what. I've already put all the effort into writing it, worst case scenario I benefit from writing the post but nobody else does.'
This is so true. This approach motivated me to write and publish my first blog post.
Great article!
I have been a developer in Rails for a while now and only recently started to get into blogging. What did it for me was having a platform where I knew people were getting something out of my posts. That platform was dev.to. It is so much more encouraging to see hearts and unicorns and people commenting than just posting to the endless void that is Medium.
This explains the reason your posts are always well thought out and well designed :)
Thank you so much!
See this seems to be too much for me. What I have posted is a single pass thought dump. I tried to start a couple others and it's a little harder to get the right flow, it needs a good put down ideas and reorganize.
Great Article!! Thank you so much for sharing your secret :-) for well-written blogs!!.
I too use VSCode for writing blogs with Markdown support, and I do have the sketch app but haven't used it in a long while. But I really like the idea of having the boilerplate setup in the sketch. Something that I need to work on.
Grammarly is absolutely amazing! Thank you for the tip. I just copy-pasted one of my old, published blog and there were numerous mistakes which I didn't notice :-p. I haven't tried the premium version yet, quite happy with the free subscription. But definitely, switch to premium once I get into the habit of writing blogs frequently.
Really Appreciate your advice!!
P.S: Even this comment, I ran through Grammarly and made two recommended changes.
This is really good. Thank you so much for this inspiration.
I'm really thinking of making a blog in the past of couple of weeks and after I ready this I will surely do it.
I've been using grammarly but not the pro one :D
"What if people are mean on the internet?"
Just ignore them.
When my article gets a high rank, people begin to comment in a negative way. Positive comments make my day! These people motivate me much more to keep writing.
People just don't know that kind and beautiful words are free. These words make a great impact on others, an impact that they can't even imagine.
All in all, "Ali Spittel": this name is shining on social media. Keep it up!!!
I couldn't agree more. How I manage to write at consistent times is I take a web page about a topic, like some documentation, and try to use my own words to explain it. Occasionally they explain a point so clearly that there's nothing more for me to do to improve it, so I quote it with a link to the original source, unless it's clear from my post which site I am referring to.
Some great tips around the visuals. I hadn't really put a ton of thought into this for my blog to date, so those tips are of particular interest for me.
One thing I've found useful for my blog is to try and incorporate some automation to be "in my face" with things I need to do as part of producing a blog post. For example, I have a git commit message template so when I do a commit I'm presented with a couple questions to help encourage me to write a meaningful commit message. It'd be cool to update this template with the "pre-publish checklist" you have so that before I do a commit I'm reminded to check that list of questions.
Good stuff!
That was encouraging Ali, thanks. I would like to hear more on your experience on cross-posting. I like the convenience and audience that platforms like Medium brings but I also would like to archive my posts in my self-hosted blog, you know, in case one of the platforms become the next Vine or even worse, Myspace. Is there a drawback cross-posting everything?
One other thing is, to yur experience do you think Grammarly can bring something for non-native speakers, or is it just an advanced typo fixer for native users (as their YouTube ads suggests)?
When i found this post in feed i was like: “Cool, Ali made another good post ( your post are aleays good). Hmm, i want to post too, Click!”
After reading i am eager to post someting, i have something half baked, but i did not manage to find will to finish and post it.
I had same worries you mentioned in post, so thank you for encouraging! :)
Great article! I generally use Notepad to jot down the ideas when one pops up. It's simple, light weight, free and above all, a PWA.
Thanks for sharing your process! I'll usually write down my ideas into Notion and then write them out. Notion can export to markdown which makes it really good for importing into different blogging platforms.
Absolutely amazing post. I'm so glad someone RTd this on twitter so I could come across this! I have a long list of blog posts/tutorials that I will be writing in 2019 pertaining to what I learned in 2018.
That's what I needed the most. Great article 👏. Thank you so much ♥
Great post! Thanks for sharing :)
Interested in trying out Markdown in VSCode now!
So the pro version of Grammarly is worth it?
I like it! I think the different tone settings are really cool -- there's definitely a huge difference between academic writing and blog posting, and being able to differentiate is awesome
Thank's for your feedback.
I got a subscription now too :D
It works like a charm.
Great article, thanks for sharing. I will definitely check out Grammarly and Sketch 👍
Great post!
We usually use a Figma for prototypes.
But it very good idea to use it that way!
Thank you for sharing!
Amazing article with many insightful tips. I am considering publishing soon here so I have many of the uncertainties you talked. I'll keep that article close to when I get in the game.
This is probably a stupid question, but you mention that you use VSCode, how do you handle the images, and upload your posts to dev.to?
I was struggling with the exact same problem for a few weeks. Thanks for putting this up. :)
Thank you so much for the the detailed one. I will consider these while writing an articles on my tutlane site.
I'll propose to
Ben Halpern