How To Write Compelling Content For Your Blog | Hacker News Reader

How To Write Compelling Content For Your Blog

dragosroua.com

14 pointsedragonu22 comments

This was interesting because it wasn't so much about how to craft compelling content, but about the business of producing content consistently.

I have several blogs that are pseudonymous, a couple of which people here have probably read. One thing I've noticed is that my popular articles fall into two categories:

1) Crystal-clear how-to articles 2) Counter-intuitive or controversial insights

Maybe I should write a step-by-step guide to forming opinions against the status quo. I'll be e-famous!

Do you do anything in particular to promote your posts, once written?

Yes, he submits them to HN, over and over again.

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=edragonu

Only discovered HN less than a month ago and I think it's one of the most interesting news agregator at this moment.

Yes, I do promote what I write and I believe it's ok to do it, as long as I believe in what I write. You can like it or not, of course, that's the beauty of it. But as long as I don't spam - and I saw some contributors posting several links per day, while I kept my posting under 1 link per day - I think it's ok.

If I did something wrong, or outside HN policy, please let me know, I'm not here to do more bad than good.

Thanks.

Since you asked, here's my take (I'm certainly not the arbiter of anything on here):

Some edragonu stats:

Member: 26 days Submissions: 26 Own Blog Submissions: 23

When you attend a party, do you walk in anD start blasting everyone with your conversation? Other people come in, introduce themselves and take time to see how the thing is going and then mingle.

People can interpret your behaviour to be spammy. It looks like you're more interested in publicizing your blog than anything else.

You haven't broken any rules per se, but that's because there aren't a lot of rules. There's nothing necessarily wrong with submitting your own posts, but maybe you can understand why other people are reacting to the rate and quantity.

A conversation goes both ways. So far, it looks like you've been doing all talking and no listening.

As for the quality of your posts: I don't specifically remember anything standing out in the ones I've read. I also notice that I haven't upvoted any of your articles yet.

Well, I see it like this. If your content stood on it's own two feet it would find it's way here on it's own. Call it the HN peer review process.

Instead you submit your own posts here, and refer to it as " one of the most interesting news agregator at this moment."

Like you don't give a shit about the community but instead think of it only as a tool for your own needs and will be gone as soon as the next most interesting agregator appears.

Well, if you look carefully, I try to submit content which is both HN compliant and personal development (which is what I do) compliant. Meaning I'm not just hijacking the HN momentum (if this is what you suggest).

It's not just a tool for my own needs, as I do submit what I think it would interest people and help maintain the same level of accuracy and usefulness. I use HN for my own research and this is why I call it "one of the best news agregators". I'm here talking to you, I'm not blindly shooting randomly...

if you'd like someone other than the author to say it's good as your qualification of what can get posted here, here it is: it's good.

i came across this blog outside of hn, i ended up bookmarking like 10 pages (pretty extensive compared to other sites).

it's not like every post on hn is going to interest you. for me, when reddit was the only place i knew of, quality articles were 1 in a thousand, you learn to scan...here it's 10 out of a 100, pretty damn good -- but i don't expect to find an aggregation site where every link is meaningful to me.

take a look at the hn headlines, there's plenty of industry gossiping, and just waste of time speculations about the future.

sure it's not fart joke equivs thaty you find on many aggregation sites, but just because they were spell checked and the grammar is nice, and the person talks intelligently, or has a job remaking the same jquery code everyone else is remaking....doesn't make it quality -- quality is tough to find.

this dragon guy puts thought into what he writes, that's for sure. i don't expect him to be right, i expect to find another person truly exploring. he's not some 'wanna be a blogger so i don't have to work' delusional mess-up spamming the world with the latest hunches he came up with while reading cereal this morning...you can tell this is another person who takes life very seriously, wants a rich experience, has spent lots of time thinking about these things, and is sharing, and he's pretty good at that..sharing his perspective.

browse around the site, and compare it to the other headline articles from this last week on hn...if this doesn't make the cut, then there's a whole bunch more that doesn't make the cut which should could use your criticism more than this post.

No, totally not. I've not submitted to HN yet. I don't know who that is.

If you want to write well in any medium, revise, revise, revise, revise, and revise again. You may find this whittles your "content" down to nothing. This is a feature, not a bug.

Sometimes I think that if you removed all the blogs about blogging, there'd only be 7 blogs left.

Kind of like if you removed the comments about commenting

Which 7?

Have not read the article, but to answer the question:

By doing compelling things in your real-life and writing about them in your blog!!

Did that too :-)

Also make sure to use lists, citations and images in your posts. Last but not least don't make your text all bold. Yours is. Underestimating the formal aspects of readability can render a compelling blog post useless.

Also, and this is probably highly subjective, but do not make your blog light foreground on dark background. It burns my eyes everytime I switch focus from that to any other application or website I'm using.

Yes, it's highly subjective, for me it works, it gives some contrast. People tend to be really "polarized" around this design pattern, with a 50/50 split... I guess I'm on the "use it" 50 percent :-)

Do you see the text on my blog bold? It's a different font, but it's not bold for sure... What browser / platform are you on? Thanks.

It looks like this http://imgur.com/EkUmj.png on FF 3.0/Win Vista

Seems like Vista doesn't recognize the default font and uses something else, that's not my font. On Mac and other Windows installations looks fine.

Thanks for the heads-on though :-)

Maybe it's just me then, I deactivated anti-aliasing in Vista as most traditional fonts look crappy and barely readable with it. Nonetheless, I'd rather stick wit the classic web safe fonts like Arial/Helvetica and Verdana.

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