Simon Willison’s advice for bloggers

Via Daring Fireball: tech developer Simon Willison offers observations and advice about blogging.

Willison’s advice for someone getting started:

Just start. It’s so easy to get caught in the trap of obsessing over the design of your blog, and planning for content that you never actually get around to writing. As long as each entry has a date on it and a permanent URL, it counts as a blog.

Excellent advice. It reminds me of what my daughter Rachel suggested when I started out:

“If you’re going to be this uptight and worried about it, you’re not going to be a very happy blogger. Just say ‘This is my new blog; I’m trying it out. Thanks to my son and daughter. I hope it works out.’”

Willison also suggests not worrying about readership:

Don’t worry if nobody reads it. People are unlikely to stumble on your blog organically, but what matters is not the quantity but the quality of your readers.

Here too I agree. Thinking of a blog post as a message in a bottle can be a useful mental trick when putting something on the Internets. One sends off the bottle in the hope that somebody somewhere will find it. And that can happen. Bottle after bottle.

A piece of advice with which I can’t agree:

My number one tip for blogging is to lower your standards! Aim to hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all.

Nobody will ever know how perfect the thing you intended to write would have been. The flaws you see in your writing are invisible to everyone else.

I’m always tinkering with posts new and old, even when they may appear to be fine as they are. As I wrote in a 2013 post, I think about writing

as the work of the 職人 [shokunin], the craftsman, whose overriding concern is getting things right, making things better, not for material gain but for the sake of the work.

I’m with Aaron Draplin (quoted in that same post):

“I’m not gonna let it go knowing that I could’ve made it better.”

Besides, what example would I have been setting for my students if I believed in lowering my own standards? Gah!

And besides, not all flaws are invisible. I know, because I get comments: “No need to post this, but shouldn’t the third sentence read,” &c. And I’m always grateful for those comments.

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