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I think you're conflating SEO blogspam with genuine passion for writing.

One claims to be the other in order to shield itself from accusations of being SEO blogspam, the other is just a person wanting to share their experience.

I have no issues reading about how someone discovered how TTL can help in a Wireshark investigation, even though I already know it. I do have issues with someone's blog showing in online searches simply because they figured out which keywords to place (and where) in order to get to page 1 of Google, displacing actual articles of relevance to what I'm seeking. It's an absolute shame that actual companies have fallen to the same trap and even intentionally push preferable articles that result in fewer Support cases while burying the actual issue under SEO'd garbage. (The less said about Microsoft "dead-links" where they retroactively remove the content, the better)

I would love to read about a first timer understanding recursion; my hopes would be either that I would learn a new way of understanding it myself because of the enthusiasm they had as a result of their moment of inspiration, or I can add to the discourse on my own understanding.

I want to read about discovery and education! I don't want to read inspirational articles or how to monetize/appeal to investors when I'm looking for technical things.

My favorite part of mentoring is seeing my mentees make it work by their own inspiration and mental skill; I don't care if it's inefficient as long as they did it on their own. We can discuss optimizations later, I just want to see people pushing themselves to a new level and be excited about it. They can write an entire Russian-Novel length post as far as I'm concerned, I will read and revel in every word as long as it's their excitement because of their success.




I think the truth is somewhere in between. If someone wants to write about what they've done for writing's sake, then fair enough to go the extra step of posting a blog about it. But there are plenty of blogs that seem to exist because the person first decided they wanted to have a blog and then came up with something to write about. Not SEO spam, more like résumé spam maybe? Those are still awful to wade through on search see l results.


I've always wanted to write a blog but never dared to do it because I feel like I have nothing of interest to add to what already exists. Now after reading that article, I feel like I could indeed start a blog, and there would be a good chance that it will be boring and/or low quality, at least at first, but it would be my content and I could be proud of it. If I hold myself to a high standard that makes me want to only increase the quality of the blogosphere, I'll never write a single line, because inevitably the first thing you ever do in something new will be shitty.

So I think I'll start my blog, and I think it will be shitty, and I think I won't give a damn about SEO and what people might think about how I contribute to the blogosphere. I have a hundred TILs a week and a few ongoing projects, so I'll definitely have stuff to write. Thanks for that article.


That sounds great! Sorry I didn't mean to put off efforts like this (not that I have by the sound of it but you see what I mean).

Maybe it's not the motivation for the blog but how it's distributed that can cause problems? If someone writes a half-arsed article about what they've recently learnt about C++ references, for example, then posts it to /r/cpp where everybody already knows that stuff better than they do - that is annoying.


Just stay away from analytics. I added it to my site, then I realized I was spending most of the time looking at the dashboard to see how well I'm doing. I disabled it, and now I consider my site as just a more public version of my notes systems.




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