I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
I like most of this post, but I disagree with the idea "If you post it, they will come." I think it sets people up for disappointment; the Disney-like, "if you wish hard enough, you can be anything!".
There are people who have been posting high quality stuff for a long time who do not have a particularly large readership. And that's ok. Someone who makes 1 or 100 posts and has 1 or 100 followers can produce wonderful, helpful things we wouldn't otherwise get to see. A platform like this gives - theoretically - equal weight to every new post. If it's in a topic you follow, it's in the "latest" view for you and you can vote it up based on its own merit.
I don't believe that "the goal should be to hook readers". I think we should encourage people to write because they think something's interesting or think they can offer something to someone, whether that's one person in a bedroom somewhere or a whole industry.
CREATE CONTENT YOU LOVE, NOT CONTENT YOU THINK OTHERS WANT TO ABSORB.
Exactly!
If your blog isn't catching on quickly, be patient. I recognize the fact that my growth was an anomaly.
You say, "for me, success is not a number", but you head off this post (and others) by telling people, specifically, how you have a lot of followers. It's obvious that you think it's important, or at least that you think your readers think it's important.
You made a post a while ago about having a lot of twitter followers, where I made a similar comment: the fact that DEV doesn't show follower numbers to people is one of its strongest features. It's not gamified; it doesn't encourage the persuit of Magic Internet Points and it doesn't make newcomers feel inadeqaute.
My reaction to visiting a site and seeing someone with hundreds of upvotes telling me they have thousands of followers, after pouring my heart into a post and watching it vanish without a trace, is to wonder why I should bother. Suggesting "[i]f you post it, they will come" makes people feel bad when it doesn't happen, and it doesn't happen for 99% of people.
readers love a finite number of tips. Some of my most successful blog posts are of the format: "X Tips For ... "
I think that DEV is seeing a lot more of these posts and an awful lot of them are links to or copies or articles on other sites. These are "good" for pulling in traffic from Google, but they make the feed look like it's full of clickbait once you're a signed-up member.
I wouldn't say that's clickbait! If you have 5 tips I can't see why that would be clickbait
We've been trained to expect certain title templates to be clickbait, and that's one of them, that's all. I'm not saying it's intended to be clickbait, I'm suggesting that people might avoid it for the very reasons you notice them clicking it.
I've occasionally made a post with a title like that. I cant say I've noticed any difference in the number of views, looking back, and I don't think I'd do it again because of the way I think it looks.
Rather than "10 ways I made my portfolio load faster", I'd suggest, "Improving the load times of a presentational website". Maybe it sounds stilted, and less 21st century, but it doesn't sound like it's going to be a bait-and-switch.
I do like your other points about consistency, accessibility and including links to resources.
Explaining acronyms the first time they're used is also a very good point. It's not patronising or irrelevant to say "MAMP (MacOS with Apache, MySQL and PHP)" the first time you use it and thereafter use the abbreviation. I think doing this is really helpful and has the side-effect of making your posts seem a little bit "professional".
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I like most of this post, but I disagree with the idea "If you post it, they will come." I think it sets people up for disappointment; the Disney-like, "if you wish hard enough, you can be anything!".
There are people who have been posting high quality stuff for a long time who do not have a particularly large readership. And that's ok. Someone who makes 1 or 100 posts and has 1 or 100 followers can produce wonderful, helpful things we wouldn't otherwise get to see. A platform like this gives - theoretically - equal weight to every new post. If it's in a topic you follow, it's in the "latest" view for you and you can vote it up based on its own merit.
I don't believe that "the goal should be to hook readers". I think we should encourage people to write because they think something's interesting or think they can offer something to someone, whether that's one person in a bedroom somewhere or a whole industry.
Exactly!
You say, "for me, success is not a number", but you head off this post (and others) by telling people, specifically, how you have a lot of followers. It's obvious that you think it's important, or at least that you think your readers think it's important.
You made a post a while ago about having a lot of twitter followers, where I made a similar comment: the fact that DEV doesn't show follower numbers to people is one of its strongest features. It's not gamified; it doesn't encourage the persuit of Magic Internet Points and it doesn't make newcomers feel inadeqaute.
My reaction to visiting a site and seeing someone with hundreds of upvotes telling me they have thousands of followers, after pouring my heart into a post and watching it vanish without a trace, is to wonder why I should bother. Suggesting "[i]f you post it, they will come" makes people feel bad when it doesn't happen, and it doesn't happen for 99% of people.
I think that DEV is seeing a lot more of these posts and an awful lot of them are links to or copies or articles on other sites. These are "good" for pulling in traffic from Google, but they make the feed look like it's full of clickbait once you're a signed-up member.
We've been trained to expect certain title templates to be clickbait, and that's one of them, that's all. I'm not saying it's intended to be clickbait, I'm suggesting that people might avoid it for the very reasons you notice them clicking it.
I've occasionally made a post with a title like that. I cant say I've noticed any difference in the number of views, looking back, and I don't think I'd do it again because of the way I think it looks.
Rather than "10 ways I made my portfolio load faster", I'd suggest, "Improving the load times of a presentational website". Maybe it sounds stilted, and less 21st century, but it doesn't sound like it's going to be a bait-and-switch.
I do like your other points about consistency, accessibility and including links to resources.
Explaining acronyms the first time they're used is also a very good point. It's not patronising or irrelevant to say "MAMP (MacOS with Apache, MySQL and PHP)" the first time you use it and thereafter use the abbreviation. I think doing this is really helpful and has the side-effect of making your posts seem a little bit "professional".