This is the most important lesson for anyone who would like to start blogging.
So many times I've started and trashed drafts because I thought it was dumb, stupid and that everyone ought to know what I was writing about.
But then, once in a while, I start writing a post and decide to post it whatever happens. Every single time, I get people thanking me for writing it up. I have people saying how it helped them.
So yes, blog little things. I don't blog little things as much as I should.
And as a side note, comments on blog are usually troll. I have so many comments saying how I'm dumb and how I don't understand how programming works. These people are just frustrated by their own lack of knowledge. Ignore the troll and keep blogging. This might sound personal and what not. Feel free to ignore this comment if you think I'm full of it :)
As a side note, your markdown parser story was an interesting read. I felt disappointed when I got to the end, I wanted to read about the rest of the implementation journey!
That post is a perfect example of my bloggin issues. I wrote the first part and felt nobody cared so I didn't write the second one. I guess I should take my own advice and write that second part ;)
I have a blog where a few years ago I started posting stupid little problems I'd solved.
Usually, they involve obscure combinations of technologies, or using a common technology on an obscure platform.
Some of the things I thought were almost too stupid to bother publishing generate the highest traffic. It's admittedly tiny traffic across the board. But I get a few comments like "thanks, mate, didn't know how to solve this!" which makes it worthwhile.
I keep Emacs org notes on a lot of different things. I've published a few of them as "hidden" pages so I can reference them in Reddit or HN threads, for instance.
I find that stackoverflow actually absorbs many of the "little things" I would otherwise blog. If it's shorter than a page or two, it fits the question/answer format really well. For example: finding a pair non-overlapping bit vectors [1].
Corollary: learn to write and edit quickly. Else blogging about little things will drain too much time for which you have other plans, and this will be an incentive to stop blogging.
Wow, did this post ever land at an opportune time for me. I just started writing a 'first' blog post about my Hugo static site generator setup and stopped half way through with the thought, "why would anyone care about this, it's trivial and almost condescending to tell people how to set up Hugo".
I'm in the midst of the exercise "post one picture to Facebook every day for a year". Surprising how many people respond to nearly every post, expressing their appreciation/joy in the series, and how it gathers my thoughts & experiences into an otherwise-soon-forgotten collection. At end of year I'll format it into a one-off book, and have a good summary of 2015.
Next such goal is blogging a daily $1/plate recipe page. Getting that started takes more concerted effort (having started the blog but not at that posting rate). The results may suck, but at least it will focus the mind on something worthwhile, and - as the OP notes - others may find it more interesting than I expect.
If nothing else, "blog little things" makes it manageable to normalize & improve one's writing skills and focus on what matters.
I never cease to be amazed by solutions and tips I am able to find to seemingly mundane problems - both tech and non-tech. Always grateful to the people offering up these "little things." Wish I found the means to do it more.
Wow. Speaks from my heart to be honest. I'm a PR guy and had a few successes over the last months and years. One example: I helped an unknown startup with their launch and we reached 500 million people in one month on social media with no budget.
I know that some of these stories and pitches would be useful for others, but I always end up thinking: 'Meh, everyone knows that.' or as a non-native speaker 'Urgh, this is a really clumsy description. My english sucks."
I'm just thinking about making this post my 'new tab' page in Chrome.
Thank you! I will definitely do that. Sometimes my most successful stories which ended up in TechCrunch (of course), WSJ, Forbes, The Guardian, etc. were five or six sentence emails - which is a bit embarrassing sometimes.
But hey, I think I just should get started sharing the details. I think these stories and shared knowledge could be useful after all.
I like to turn lessons like this into triggers. In this case, the trigger is whenever I look up something and find a solution. The trigger should activate me wanting to document this: the original problem I searched for, and the resulting solution.
Fine advice. I write for a living, and two of my most popular posts ever were fleeting little creations that I dashed off in 45 minutes because something caught my eye.
I started doing this recently while I've been learning the programming language Nim. It's been fun putting together little answers as I go: http://nim.community/ I'm hoping that as Nim gets more traction these answers can get more accurate and there can be a breadth of answers that constantly stay up to date since the website is open source :)
I taken to writing up tutorials for tasks that take me a non-trivial amount of effort to accomplish and are obscure enough to not have decent existing writeups on the first page of Google searches. Little things about [automating file upload in Ruby](https://davidyat.es/2015/02/26/automated-file-upload-in-ruby...) and [setting up a UniFi controller with SELinux](https://davidyat.es/2015/03/02/unifi-centos-selinux/). I had doubts about whether I was actually providing worthwhile content that hadn't been provided elsewhere before (especially in the latter post, where I paraphrased another person's post for half the article (with credit) just to get to my part), but they've ended up some of the most popular posts on my blog.
Even when I discover [I can't do something](https://davidyat.es/2015/05/13/notes-on-csrf-and-json-apis/), it's good to blog about it, just to straighten out my thoughts, contextualise my work and aid the research of future people going down the same tracks. And even if it's just something tiny and silly like [this awful injection-focused SQL query](https://davidyat.es/select-only-nth-row-in-t-sql/), it's nice to have it written down for easy public access -- for your own benefit as much as anyone else's.
And even if very few people ever read them, I find writing posts about little things helps improve my understanding -- it's just a good way to organise my thoughts and make sure I remember the stuff later on. And the benefit of publicly accessible blogposts over a personal notebook is that I can reach them from almost any situation I might need to, and refer friends and co-workers struggling with the same issues to them. It's a great feeling having someone ask "how do I do XYZ?" and being able to say "I wrote a blog about it!". Plus it saves you the trouble of remembering long terminal commands and exact syntax offhand.
Hey, just one suggestion. HN doesn't support in-line links so it would be better to replace them with references like [1] and add all the links at the bottom of your comment.
Stack overflow is great because its easy to find and index, and easy to figure out which posts might be relevant to someone looking for answers via a search engine.
Blogs are generally not as accessible. Something I put on SO or Reddit is likely to get a lot more attention than something I put on my personal blog.
Be not afraid of knowing too little. There isn't enough time in our lives to know everything.
This is good advice: write about what you know and don't be anxious about its significance. Just writing about it will help you remember it better. And it might help someone else too.
I will read almost anything that shows up around here on development. You never know what can end up being helpful. On the flip side I feel that if I write something it's been done before. If I Google for it it probably has. What a sad personal paradox.
Interesting, so basically a middle ground between the conventional length of blogs and microblogs. I wonder if that begs for a new way of organizing/producing medium-length contents of this sort.
I think that part of the advice is that the little things can be mixed in with more long-form content. Your blog doesn't need to necessarily be one or the other.
So many times I've started and trashed drafts because I thought it was dumb, stupid and that everyone ought to know what I was writing about.
But then, once in a while, I start writing a post and decide to post it whatever happens. Every single time, I get people thanking me for writing it up. I have people saying how it helped them.
So yes, blog little things. I don't blog little things as much as I should.
And as a side note, comments on blog are usually troll. I have so many comments saying how I'm dumb and how I don't understand how programming works. These people are just frustrated by their own lack of knowledge. Ignore the troll and keep blogging. This might sound personal and what not. Feel free to ignore this comment if you think I'm full of it :)