Year: 2006

I am about to explode. And it has nothing to do with food. It’s rather information-related. So much is happening around me right now that I can barely take it. Changes are happening in my life as well as in lives of many people around me. These changes are (or seem to be) totally independent of each other, yet they are so connected to one another that it’s almost unbelievable. Especially considering the wide range of changes – from personal to professional.

And do you know what’s the worst thing about it? It’s that I can’t blog about it all. I talk to some of you about bits and pieces. But that’s just not the same. And it …aargh… it kills me. Because I can’t make up my own mind about many things without discussing them with others, and I can’t discuss them with others because so many people are involved in all of it on so many levels.

Now… this is about as much as I can tell you…

Here are a few more tips for becoming a better writer. Blogger even.

Care about one reader — real or fictional.

By the way, that blogger vs. writer thingy – Heather, who IS an excellent writer, has recently mentioned it.

Somehow this led into a discussion about what I do for a living, and I suddenly realized that I have a hard time telling people that I am a writer. I’m always saying that I have a website, or that I write things online, but I’m reluctant to use the word WRITER because when it comes out of my mouth it sounds like I’m pleading with someone to PLEASE TAKE ME SERIOUSLY. It also makes me sound like I’m fond of wearing fedoras and plaid capes. And beige orthopedic shoes that smell like cabbage.

Here are a few tips on how to fight the writer’s block (again). Looks like this is first part in the series.

Writing is easy, it’s quality that’s hard. Any idiot who knows 5 words can write a sentence (e.g. “Dufus big much Scott is”). It might be grammarless, broken, or inaccurate but it is writing.

Also, while you’re at it, note how good the writing is.

With blogosphere being all nice and shiny, there’s this one thing that usually annoys the hell out of me – ‘Subscribe to’ area.

I’ve seen one of the two extremes on pretty much every blog out there.

The ‘minimalist’ extreme – which I excersise myself – is when there is no special area for the RSS feeds or mailing lists subscriptions on the website. RSS feeds particularly. They are there, but you can’t find them. Sometimes there’s a tiny orange icon. Sometimes there’s a link saying ‘RSS feed’. Sometimes there’s nothing at all – open up the source code of the page and look for the ‘alternative’ at the top of the HTML.

The ‘maximalist’ exterme is when there are icons and links to all possible RSS aggregators and readers, with images, with different formats like RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.4, etc. That’s just too much and it looks ugly too.

The Golden Mean is so rare that every time I find one, I am ready to bookmark the website, blog about it, dedicate poems to it, and do all sorts of other silly things. And all that for what? Just for a few moments spared by the webdesigner thinking about what the hell he is doing.

Below is one of the most recent examples of the nicely done ‘Subscribe to’ area. I came across it when someone pointed me to the this article (note, how nicely it all fits together).

It’s small, functional, with only a handful of aggregators linked, with a mailing list option, with description of what it is (“Subscribe to this blog”), with a nice little icon… Beautiful indeed!