Blogging Advice

Blogging is an area where some advice might be helpful, even if you’ve never considered blogging.?

I enjoy blogging. How well I do it, well, opinions may vary.?

If you don’t mind writing or if you actually?like?writing, perhaps you should consider blogging? Assuming you have something to say.

So the following blog shares some of my somewhat-organized thoughts and advice about blogging.?

Why Do Blogging?

Blogging is a great way to demonstrate and share knowledge, and to enhance a resume. Well, I think it enhances a resume – opinions vary on that. It also shares knowledge with the community, which is always a good thing.?

That assumes you stick to tech topics you actually know something about, or have a good perspective to share. Or non-tech topics where you think you have something fresh to say.?

Blogging is also a way to increase your visibility (community, potential employers, etc.). It is a way to get your name known (a good thing unless you’re trying to hide). It may help you get your next job. Unless of course your blogs cause people to say “oh yeah, that obnoxious clown”. (Definitely an impression NOT to make!)

There are other ways of sharing: audio or video blogging or discussions. You may find them more to your taste, or do them in search of perhaps a wider audience.?

I may be a bit old fashioned, but I prefer the written word.?

Why? It is a lot faster to consume.?

Audio and video generally contain a lot of extra talking, with social and other content. That makes them more personal, and maybe more interesting – but takes up time. I can’t often afford to take up 30 or 60 minutes of my own time listening to or watching other people’s opinions, bad jokes, comments on baseball, etc. Even if they are more entertaining!?

Good audio podcasts or video also takes more prep time to achieve good results. Yes, as you gain experience with the format, the prep time likely drops off somewhat. And if you are just having a conversation, prep is probably more building a list of questions and topics.?

The written version might take only 5 minutes to read! And probably stays more on topic!

Your experiences and preferences will of course likely vary.

When blogging, you do have to know your subject well, and be able to write reasonably clearly. It may not show, but I often have to go back and do some research or fact-checking. There are sometimes “darn it, I thought this was going to be an easy blog to write!” moments. Concerning the researching part, I keep coming up with questions I can’t answer from what I can get to online. Vendors who hide documentation behind registration / support walls don’t help. In general, the amount of written documentation and level of detail does seem to be decreasing. Perhaps vendors view it as a cost item they can skimp on.?

It helps to be correct about your subject matter. Most of the time – nobody’s perfect. I’m sure I’ve published some incorrect things. Nobody has let me know about them, so I have no idea where I made mistakes. That’s life! (And experience suggests that when you start patting yourself on the back and telling yourself “well done”, that’s when an embarrassing blunder is likely to show up in something you published.)

So do your best, re-check lab results, get someone more skilled to review the blog, and in general do what you can to make sure anything you write is technically correct.?

By writing a lot, and reading about good writing, your writing will improve. I hope mine has! Having someone review and mark up your writing can help. Especially if you are writing in a foreign language, for instance English, if your native language is something else.?

Having said that, you’ll probably find that you pretty much must do the checking yourself – others tend to be pretty busy.?

LinkedIn is a great way to get started posting. The process is very simple, their editing tool is simple and has minimal features (a good thing, in this case).?

I draft in MS Word (too many years writing in it) then paste into LinkedIn, touch up section headers, add images, and proof-read, then post.?

There is one caveat: I do get the feeling that LinkedIn articles aren’t very visible in google search. I once tried some unique keywords in Google search and my LinkedIn blog that I was looking for with didn’t show up. Maybe I didn’t wait long enough before searching. In any case, some Google search optimization might be advisable.?

There’s the whole problem of self-promotion (or blog promotion) without being obnoxious. Now that I’ve suggested that topic, you might start thinking about what you consider acceptable versus obnoxious blog or comment posting behaviors. If you read a variety of blogs, you should have a good idea of which, if any, you found annoying.?

What to Blog About?

As far as topics to blog about:

• The easiest thing to do is perhaps to collect useful links on a particular technical topic and post them. Example: “I’m studying topic 3.1 (OSPF Routing) on CCIE Enterprise, here are some links I found useful…”. Maybe add some value by summarizing key items in each of the listed links.?
• Next is summarizing what the reader needs to know about some subject. You can summarize a long article on the web, or better a set of articles on a topic. Just make sure it is your words and not cut and paste, and give credit when you directly quote something.?
• Quotes should not be most of your blog. If they are, what value did you add? There really should be some value added.?
• Calling attention to some useful tech content or new announcement is useful, if you summarize and preferably add value.?
• Hands-on experience is great, particularly if you can help others with rough spots in vendor documentation, or issues you ran into in the field. Sanitized stories from the field (where you work or customer sites) can be interesting. Just omit any identifying information, to avoid embarrassing or offending anyone.?
• I’ve tried doing GUI screenshots to document some detail. That can get a bit long, even for a fairly small topic. It can also age poorly. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.?
• Lately I’ve been finding marketing announcements of new features annoyingly vague and full of buzzwords, so I’ve been mining the “what did they really just announce” type of blog.?
• Similarly, vendor product pages have been getting glitzier and thinner on details. If we don’t know what the product actually?does, why would we want to buy it? For example, Zero Trust Architecture “washing” is the latest hot concept in security. Fine, but do tell me where you product fits into that, please! So “positioning” blogs help others figure out what part of the landscape a product belongs in and what it can actually do for you.?
• Summarization adds value if one blog page saves someone from reading say 8 pages of documentation, and leaves the reader knowing when to go back to the 8 pages (or whatever) to get more details. So you should always provide the link to the material you were summarizing.?
• If you do lab work, diagramming the lab and writing it up may help others. For that sort of blog, it may be useful to break it into shorter 2-4 page chunks, but there’s no reason you?have?to. Nobody is forced to read through a 20 page blog, but it’s there if they want to read it.?

Be aware that blog size limits make things too terse (in my opinion) and, for lab work, hard to reproduce. And clearly I don’t believe in the 800 word or 1-2 page limit some people say blogs must not exceed. That may irritate some people. They haven’t contacted me, so I plan to keep doing things my way. Those irritated can just ignore my blogs.?Yes, 800 words max may apply to marketing and similar blogs.

You’ll also notice I try to be chatty, not doing overly formal writing. That makes it less like work, and I happen to think less formal style may be more readable.?

Picking Topics

One of the harder parts of blogging is picking topics. I’ve watched some of my peers, and most people seem to start out with topics that are far too big.?

You need to pick fairly small topics. If you don’t, you’ll end up writing 10-20 pages. Writing that will take a long time. And you then have to figure out how to chop it up into smaller chunks. That can be made to work, but it’s a lot more efficient to pick a small topic, for example something you might whiteboard with your co-workers.

This is where starting with an outline can help. More than 3 or so headings = too long, break it into several blogs. If you look at my Internet Edge or SD-Access series of blogs (on netcraftsmen.com), you should see how I had to carve the overall topic up into smaller topics.?

Like many things, as you write blogs, you’ll learn as you go. In particular, learn what’s a good-sized topic.?

Blogging Tips

The following tips apply to blogs. Some may help with professional / work-related writing as well.?

Of course, people’s preferences vary. My focus for blogs is more about good / adequate quality, and saving time. There’s never enough time! So I draft and organize, clean up, add diagrams, and review, but also try to keep an eye on the time consumed, and not over-do things.

Having said that, your first blogs will probably take a fair amount of time. You’ll get faster with practice.?

Style:

• You’ll have to find your own “voice”. Mine is somewhat informal.?
• Don’t be nasty. You don’t want to turn people off. Unless nasty is how you want to be perceived. See above re “that obnoxious clown”.?
• Do try to get things correct, and not put anything stupid into print. Although low-caffeine moments do happen. Re-reading blog drafts the next day, and revising when you’re awake and suitably caffeinated can help with that.?
• You may not get a lot of feedback, so you’ll have to do your best to envision what impression you’re making on your readers.
• Honesty. I try to say “appears” when I haven’t actually done hands-on work or testing with a product. I also try to be frank about any significant product short-comings I think I see.?
• Upbeat tone: Overall I try to emphasize the positive aspects (assuming there are some). Faint praise generally means I was under-whelmed by a product (the feature works but could be better, perhaps).?

Writing tips:?

• Don’t get overly fancy with formatting. LinkedIn doesn’t support much formatting. And getting too fancy in MS Word or a fancier blog editor just takes up time unnecessarily.?
• Avoid run-on (overly long) sentences. My chief failing. If the sentence takes up more than one line, it is getting long. Consider splitting it into two sentences or more.??

Try to follow the old recipe:

• Tell the audience what you’re going to tell them (summary)
• Tell them
• Summarize what you just told them

Diagram tips:

• Diagram in Visio or PowerPoint (or whatever) using a landscape mode 8.5 x 11” page (U.S. anyway). I’ve been using PowerPoint since it is faster. Neither one handles device link attachment well. I’ve used draw.io for one customer and liked it (couple of mild bugs but the free price is right).?
• Use 12 point or bigger font size. That way, when you stick your diagram into a MS Word document or a blog, the text will still be readable. If you use a larger “paper size” or a smaller font, the words will not be readable.?
• Don’t jam too much in. Visio seems to let you pack more information in than PowerPoint, but that can lead to high drawing and later maintenance time and unreadability / clutter when the diagram is included in a document.?
• If you run out of room with your diagram, it means you are trying to put too much in. Use hierarchy: show some sort of overall diagram then show the details of each part of the overall diagram.?

General advice about writing and diagrams:

• For what it’s worth: I started doing screen captures of PowerPoint diagrams and inserting those into PowerPoint presentations. The reason is that re-sizing seems to work better that way. If you insert a PowerPoint diagram into a presentation, and have to resize it to get more words on the slide, ugly things happen. With a screen capture, no problem.
• Do be aware that MS Word maintains no more resolution than it needs, so you can get ugliness by saving a small diagram then trying to make it bigger. They probably do that because hi-res diagrams make the file size grow rapidly. And opening a 100 MB Word document can be … slow.?
• Apropos of resolution, if you are screen capturing work and using it to document something like an ISE or DNAC procedure, be sure to save the screen captures separately. I’ve had documents where I couldn’t read some diagram’s fine print by zooming in MS Word, but it was clear (or readable when enlarged) in the screen capture.?
• By the way, plotter sized diagrams are best avoided in general. Been there, done that. They take a lot of time. They tend to not be printed often because the plotter is broken or the ink or paper has run out and is on order. Insertions take a lot of time due to having to move so much stuff around. And while you can pack a lot of information into a plotter sized diagram, that increases the time cost of maintaining it.?
• If your management wants a poster diagram for wall display or something, maybe make it up out of smaller diagrams. “Modular diagrams”. Yes, there’s no great answer to that request.?

Conclusions

Go forth and blog wisely. May you soon obtain many readers!

Comments

Comments are welcome, both in agreement or constructive disagreement about the above. I enjoy hearing from readers and carrying on deeper discussion via comments. Thanks in advance!?

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Twitter:?@pjwelcher

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