Making Your Writing Work Harder For You

https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/content-marketing-strategy

by charlieirish • 12 years ago

222 110 12 years ago

training.kalzumeus.com

patio113• 12 years ago

This was partly in response to a conversation Thomas and I have been having lately with some people from the Internets, about the value of blogging in one's professional capacity. His take was "Have a blog, but don't call it a blog." I thought that was generalizable to a larger segment of the operations of product businesses than just blogging. They're generally called "content marketing" these days but I hate that word -- if someone has a better one, please suggest it.

By the way, if you're a regular-ol'-geek and wondering "I wonder if writing about technical topics could help me career-wise", the answer is "Absolutely yes." You can use blogging software but it probably isn't your benefit to adopt the blogging format of 500 ~ 1,000 word articles displayed in reverse chronological order about disconnected topics. Instead, you could make it a goal to write three pieces and polish them to a mirror shine.

(Related advice that I find myself saying frequently: If you publish OSS and expect to get anything via doing so, don't just drop the OSS on github. Spend the extra bit of time packing it into a site with a getting-started guide, a visual identity distinct from "Github rendering a Readme file", and the request that interested people $TAKE_THE_ACTION_YOU_WANT_THEM_TO_TAKE.

swanson3• 12 years ago

Really like your point on OSS. Even if you don't make a whole "marketing site" - you can get a lot of mileage by considering your README as a sales page (and not just a technical document).

Here's an actual example, compare the READMEs for these open source RSS readers:

https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/blob/master/README.md

https://github.com/SSilence/selfoss/blob/master/README.md

https://github.com/swanson/stringer/blob/master/README.md

https://github.com/Athou/commafeed/blob/master/README.md

https://github.com/feedbin/feedbin/blob/master/README.md

https://github.com/gothfox/Tiny-Tiny-RSS/blob/master/README....

Which ones jump out at you? Which ones are memorable? Which do you want to install/contribute to/star?

(I'm biased because I wrote one, but I was very intentional which how the README looks and reads!)

dublinben2• 12 years ago

Which do you want to install/contribute to/star?

To be honest, not yours. I'm immediately suspicious of "open source" projects written by OS X/iOS users and demonstrated on said platforms. Without installing your program myself, I can't expect it to work on GNU/Linux, since all of your screenshots are taken in Safari.

prawn• 12 years ago

I find the "and was made with love!" stuff really off-putting to be honest. Rest looks helpful though.

laxatives• 12 years ago

Not sure the point you're trying to make. I opened all of them at once and just scanned each of them and the one most appealing to me is the one with the detailed changelog and list of credits. The least appealing was the one with the superficial graphics and screenshots, which turned out to be yours. Maybe I'm biased since I don't really enjoy working on the front end, except for maybe a few games side projects (but I would never make games as a career).

sethev• 12 years ago

Tim Conley over at the Foolish Adventure podcast calls it education based marketing (although he uses the term content marketing as well).

I think that term matches up nicely with what you're saying.

yummyfajitas3• 12 years ago

By the way, if you're a regular-ol'-geek and wondering "I wonder if writing about technical topics could help me career-wise", the answer is "Absolutely yes."

This is so true. I think the bulk of my consulting work comes to me via my blog - I've put basically no effort into seeking it out. A conversation which happens with some regularity:

Bossish person: "We are having trouble with $MATHY_STUFF. Do we know anyone who can help us with it?"

Codeish person: "I've been following these tutorials on chrisstucchio.com..."

I'll disagree with patrick a bit about "a visual identity distinct..." and formatting, at least for people who never touch the frontend. The people looking for you probably don't care that much.

Here are some fugly blogs of people you'd almost certainly hire:

http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/08/21/random-inequalities... http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts.html http://elem.com/~btilly/ab-testing-multiple-looks/part1-rigo...

That said, dropping $1000 on some pretty visual design probably can't hurt.

brickcap• 12 years ago

I agree with what you said but these blogs are not ugly. In fact I think stephen's blog is pretty good looking.

tptacek14• 12 years ago

I think you're right about appearances, but design isn't the core of Patrick's point. If you called your posts "short tutorials" and had a little section on your site that listed your "short tutorials", your work would probably get cited more, and do a better job of marketing your services.

In particular, some clients will eyeball your list of short tutorials, and see "A/B Testing", "HFT Algorithms", and "Ad Placement Optimization" and immediately form positive associations that they won't by paging through your old blog posts, which is something I just had to do to write this paragraph that very few casual readers will actually do.

You write something, you think it has lasting value, you should say so. It's a corollary of "ask for the sale".

b_emery• 12 years ago

Your suggestion "write three pieces and polish them to a mirror shine" has a long and substantiated precedence: scientific publishing. The fact is, you're judged by the quality of your work. Better to produce something of lasting significance that just throw some 'musings' up on the 'net.

gohrt4• 12 years ago

Huh, the largest complaint about scientific publishing is quality over quantity, incremental papers,publish or perish,milking each idea for as many articles as possible.

josephjrobison3• 12 years ago

I'm thinking that adding an "Updated May 2014" intro text to older blog posts that are still relevant can do a lot to show the date, but also show the readers that you still approve of an older post and it's relevant a few years later, and that someone is home, reviewing their old work.

marijn4• 12 years ago

Every work has a time context. Even if it takes 100 years for it to become irrelevant, it is still useful for people to be able to find out when it was written. Books need a year, pdfs of scientific articles need a publication date. Doing your audience a disservice by not showing a date may have some shallow traffic driving advantages, but is still a dick move.

patio113• 12 years ago

Are you amenable to the solution "Put it in a header or give it emphasis comparable to the copyright notice rather than the title"? I think a lot of people agree with you in the abstract that it's a huge imposition to not have dates on things, but are unwilling to even right click to actually figure the date out, but they'll start doing measurable discounting of the work immediately if you do the typical thing and put the date front-and-center. I would also bet that people will simultaneously say they're not giving the date undue attention, mostly because people are terrible at introspection.

marijn4• 12 years ago

If you mean an HTTP header, no, that doesn't work, since you never know whether the thing you get there is an accident or an actually meaningful value. Putting it somewhere where it doesn't stand out is acceptable. What annoys me is if I want to know when something was written (for example because the interpretation of a reference it makes would be different before and after some historical event), and there is no way to find out.

syntern• 12 years ago

Could you please provide more context on the extent of this discounting (esp. the measurable part)?

protonfish• 12 years ago

Do you think having both an originally published date plus an "updated on" date would fix the issue without being devious? The published date is important information to me, but if I see that the author has edited it recently it makes me feel that it has been checked to still be relevant.

lacosan• 12 years ago

pg's essays have Month Year after title, e.g. February 2009.

http://paulgraham.com/identity.html

I think the cheap feel to blog posts partly comes from exact date (and time even) that's often shown on each blog posts.

Tomte5• 12 years ago

That's exactly how I'm doing it.

At the very bottom, just before the backlink to the home page, I have (in a smaller font size) something like "Original publication on March 2nd, 2014, last changed on March 16th, 2014".

I don't have anything to hide, so it's there, but I don't see any real value in it for the reader. So I effectively buried it.

k0• 12 years ago

Relevant, timely example. What do you think about this: http://blog.prosody.im/mandatory-encryption-on-xmpp-starts-t...

programminggeek• 12 years ago

Here's an important point about dates. Do your customers care? Does preserving some notion of temporal context deliver more value to your customers or sales of your product than not having it does?

Decisions should be made to support the intended goal of whatever you are doing. A lot of creative work does not have a date stamp front and center and people still enjoy it.

For example, when a movie like Terminator 2 is played on TV, do you watch it? Sure. Do you freak out if you start in the middle of the movie because you don't get to see the opening credits? Are you annoyed that you don't have the date stamp on every frame so that you KNOW when the movie was produced?

We technical people might care a bit too much about formats and things, but to a normal, non-technical person i.e. most of your customers, they probably don't care. Most people don't check the copyright date on books or look up the year a movie was produced on IMDB.

marijn4• 12 years ago

Are you annoyed that you don't have the date stamp on every frame so that you KNOW when the movie was produced?

Clearly, no one is suggesting any such thing. For movies, there's IMDB to find such things out. For blog posts, there is no IMDB, so if you remove the time stamp, you are removing access to a crucial piece of information.

davidw2• 12 years ago

Most people don't check the copyright date on books

It depends! Would you buy a collection of essays about how to best market on the internet from 1997? Maybe, maybe not.

Other stuff is pretty timeless (hey, this Shakespeare is old!), so it really does depend on what the material is about.

raamdev• 12 years ago

No. The date matters. A lot.

When I open a paper book or a blog post, the first thing I want to know is, "When was this published?" That immediately gives me context as to the state of the world when this was written.

This is a no-brainer when it comes to technical publications because technology is changing so rapidly but it's equally as true with any other type of publication (even fiction to some extend, but much less so than non-fiction; the same goes for movies: entertainment is not as time-sensitive as a documentary).

A date of publication provides context for the reader to know what world the author was living in when he/she was writing. That's very relevant.

On my personal site, I put the year of every post right in the permalink (e.g., example.com/2014/my-new-post/).

dragonwriter6• 12 years ago

Most people don't check the copyright date on books or look up the year a movie was produced on IMDB.

Movies, not so much, because they aren't seek current factual information in them. Books, when used as references on things that might change, yes, most non-technical people I know do consider how new a book is when evaluating them for that use, often checking copyright/publishing dates.

blisterpeanuts• 12 years ago

I like seeing the date. I get confused and frustrated when I see an article like "Simplify your web apps with JQuery" and there's no date of publication. Was it the first edition of JQuery circa 2005, or was it a recent version? At least when talking about a rapidly evolving software ecology, I think the date of publication is a critical piece of information to provide up front.

If an author fears the "bit rot" effect, then why not update the piece and provide an "updated" date, e.g.:

  "Solving World Hunger with JQuery"
  by Blister Peanuts, October, 2010
  Updated May, 2014

That magic "2014" cues the reader that there may be very recent, relevant information, and they are less likely to skip past it.

ssharp• 12 years ago

But by excluding the date, you eliminate the reverse: people being more likely to skip past it because it's not 2014. For some things, like your example, the date is very important. What solved world hunger in jQuery in 2010 may not work in the latest 2014 version.

But in Patio11's example on salary negotiation, the date isn't nearly as important. Some information is relatively timeless. I saw a comment on HN today advocating that people read "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and "The Prince". These books are still very popular today and were written in 1936 and 1532, respectively.

It really comes down to relevancy. If the date is relevant to readers, you should make sure it's easily found. If the date isn't relevant, why does it matter if it's posted anywhere?

tptacek14• 12 years ago

Writing a book and selling it is just fine. But writing the same material as a free article on a website and failing to attach a piece of metadata to it is a "dick move". Thanks, The Internet.

BoppreH2• 12 years ago

Books almost always contain a date.

And while everyone enjoys free articles, there's still a huge future ahead. When searching for technical problems it's not uncommon to get results from over a decade ago. The internet is still in its infancy, so please, let's take all possible care to not pollute it.

Note it only applies to technical subjects and other fast-changing areas. I wouldn't mind reading TFA if it was decades old.

thenomad2• 12 years ago

I routinely check the publication dates of books where technical information will have changed, and recently got quite irritated when Amazon mistakenly directed me to the First Edition (2007) rather than the Second Edition (2012) of a reference book.

In that particular case, the book was about the business and finance side of independent film distribution. Information on that topic from 2007 is about as useful as an article on optimising web servers from 2004 - there might be some useful stuff in there, but a lot of it will be seriously outdated and the landscape's changed beyond recognition.

I also find articles on rapidly-changing technical areas to be essentially useless without time context. For example, I'll automatically discount any article about the more technical aspects of advertising on Facebook if it doesn't have a date on it. Advice that was valuable on that topic in 2010 is often useless or dangerous to your business in 2014.

lauradhamilton• 12 years ago

A lot of good points in here, but personally I hate it when bloggers remove the publish date. Really irks me, and reduces my confidence in the content.

joshkaufman• 12 years ago

Patrick's advice about taking dates off is spot-on for optimizing conversion rates on key pages. I've taken dates off of my most important evergreen resources.

There's sometimes a happy medium - you can deemphasize the date with CSS or by putting it at the bottom of the post.

Here's an example of a blog-style post on my site: http://joshkaufman.net/malinvestment/

People who want to find the date can find the date. People who aren't looking for it aren't likely to see it.

josephjrobison3• 12 years ago

What do you think of the idea of adding an "Update" intro text to some blog posts that aren't necessarily evergreen resources, but aren't dated sensitive posts.

Such as if you wrote a post in May 2012, then in May 2014 adding a quick intro saying "Updated May 2014: I've added x, xy, and xyz, but this post is still relevant today." or something of the like?

tptacek14• 12 years ago

Lots of people say that removing prominent datelines "reduces their confidence in the content", but can you marshal any evidence for your observed preferences matching this stated preference? Because I don't think it's true in practice at all. I think people form opinions about content based on the content unless you beg them to do it some other way, for instance by calling your content a "blog post".

pknight6• 12 years ago

It's pretty simple though, if you're researching a topic you need to be able to assess the chronology of a post. Without it the content becomes less reliable. Now you have to second guess the content to know whether it's still relevant/current and where it slots into other resources. Where's proof that losing the date improves ROI/readership/etc. Let's just be honest about our content.

iamwil• 12 years ago

I dislike coming upon writing where there's no date. Because then I can't judge for myself from what context or perspective the author wrote something. (Is the assertion that mobile market is growing in the context of pre 2008 iPhone, or after?)

There's many assumptions we take for granted, even when we try to write evergreen. And sometimes those assumptions turn out to be overturned after a while.

When I happen upon articles, essays, blog posts, etc without a date, I usually trust it much less, and try to find similar information with a date.

The only way you'll know if your writing is evergreen, is over the course of time. I'll read stuff from 2002, and find it's still relevant, but we need to judge whether it is for ourselves every year. And not timestamping it robs us of that.

aytekin• 12 years ago

tl;dr

- Don't call your writing "blog". Call it essay, guide or article.

- Don't put a date on your writing.

- Show your best writing up front.

- Collect email addresses, send your writing by email, track conversations.

- Keep detailed notes about your previous experiences and re-use them.

- Don't just write for other experts. Write for beginners.

hagbardgroup• 12 years ago

It also helps to think about it in terms of the old print formats.

Only blogging is like handing someone a stack of leaflets with some semi-descriptive tags on the side to help you navigate through them. A good test is to ask yourself if this would be useful or compelling if someone handed you a print version of the text.

Blogs developed the way that they did, I think, because they really took off as a way to socialize about the news, usually created for print or TV first. Social networks have taken over that role. Now, web publishing is beginning to take a more leading role rather than being wagged by traditional media. It helps to hold your writing to the same standards of quality that you would in a print publication.

jellicle• 12 years ago

The lesson people learn from articles like this is "don't put dates on date-sensitive web spam", or alternately "always put today's date on every article".

Both of those are just spamming techniques.

If it doesn't have a date it's almost certainly worthless content. Having a prominent date is actually a huge positive credibility sign.

hbien• 12 years ago

People are quick to call other authors' work worthless. Patio11's piece you just read was very valuable to me, but it doesn't have a timestamp on it -- did you think it was worthless? Patio11 calls TechCrunch pink slime. He may find it worthless, but it's valuable to others.

The truth is just have an audience/subject in mind and cater towards that. Writing a technical article that depends on current state of technology? Put a timestamp on it. Writing evergreen advice about salary negotiation? No need to put a timestamp on it.

tptacek14• 12 years ago

That is empirically not true in my experience and in Patrick's: putting a dateline on a piece of content (surprise) dates the content, and creates the expectation that the material is effectively superseded by any piece on the same subject with a newer dateline.

It's also quite a stretch to point to any of Patrick's writing (or, I guess, mine) and call it "spam", or its promotion a "spamming technique". You probably didn't mean to say that, but that's the impression you created, by giving undue weight to spamming tactics. And your penultimate sentence is, of course, trivially refuted.

icelancer• 12 years ago

Taking the date out of the slug made perfect sense and I put it into place right away. Be sure to add rewrite rules if you switch permalinks in WordPress, as simply switching to %postname% will won't automatically 301 the old slugs.

dwd• 12 years ago

This worked nicely for me when I switched a while back: RewriteRule ^blog/\d/\d/(.+) http\:\/\/www\.example\.com\/blog\/$1 [R=301,L]

Also if you pull the authorship code from the template, make sure you don't leave any class="hentry" unless you like seeing a crap load of structured data error messages in WMT about missing author details. I don't remember seeing any mention of reserved class names in the HTML spec so it would be nice if the Googlebot was a little smarter about that.

dkrich• 12 years ago

Open question: has anybody ever considered or tried publishing updated versions of evergreen content? Textbook publishers make a great living doing this so I'm wondering if it wouldn't be possible to apply this same technique to essays.

For example "A guide to better salary negotiations, 2014 edition", etc. with some minor updates to reference new examples, anecdotes, popular businesses of the day, etc.

I think this could have the dual effect of reengaging previous readers with content they've already read as well as keeping your content fresh and giving you the upside of having a brand new article to (re)publish. In my own experience, I don't mind and actually enjoy rereading articles I've read before and enjoyed so I don't think as a reader, this would bother me at all.

mikeleeorg• 12 years ago

I like this idea, and could've sworn I've seen it done someplace (but can't find the URL anymore).

I get the feeling that Medium.com is trying to build a platform for this too. The date is still there, but it's deemphasized and placed at the bottom, instead of in the byline. Someone could easily append "2014 edition" to the title - or perhaps, Medium could offer that feature too.

josephjrobison3• 12 years ago

Yes! Moz.com has a great example of this. They do a bi-annual industry survey and update the persisting URL with the most recent findings and create a new page for the newly outdated survey.

Current Survey Results: http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors

Past Survey Results: http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/2011 http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/2009

Tomte5• 12 years ago

tom's Hardware is a bit like that:

"System Builder Marathon Q4 2013", "System Builder Marathon, Q1 2014"

205guy• 12 years ago

Why would I want my writing work to be harder? I'd rather use unambiguous title that don't confuse my readers.

zrail• 12 years ago

This is one of those instances where the English title is ambiguous, as you say. The piece is about a few techniques for making a piece of writing more effective, not about making your writing process more difficult.

tptacek14• 12 years ago

People on the Internet get really angry about this. "Of course you should have a dateline on your posts!" "Readers are smart enough to understand when something has long-term value!"

Don't listen to them. Of course readers are smart enough to perceive long-term value in a blog post. But they don't, because appreciating that value requires them to expend mental energy to fight against the blog format. Instead, they see a blog post and:

* Assume that because it's on the blog it was written in a single draft.

* Assume that it's part of some larger conversation amongst lots of bloggers.

* Assume it's an invitation to a discussion among readers rather than your definitive take on an issue. (For extra fun: add a series of complaints about not having "comments" enabled on whatever you wrote.)

* Assume that it'll end up syndicated along with the rest of your blog posts on "Planet People Like You" or whatever blog aggregator you end up on.

* Assume that it'll be followed up on in some future post.

In general, the reader isn't wrong about this! Those beliefs are continuously validated by the majority of blogs. Which makes me wonder why anyone would sink days or weeks of effort into a piece only to deliberately position it alongside every other dashed-off blog post.

I think you can get immediate value just by doing what Patrick said: write a blog, but don't call it that. But you can do things that are much more creative, too. Our crypto challenges started out as a text file of 40 3-paragraph challenges. We thought about putting it up on the website, but we worried that we'd end up getting skimmed by people on (not to put too fine a point on it) HN who wouldn't really understand them, and end up "debating our own posts" with those people. So instead of publishing them, we accepted email addresses for people who wanted them, and doled them out 8 challenges at a time. More than 12,000 people signed up; we're finally releasing them in their entirety, along with solutions in every single mainstream language and a bunch of weird ones, in a Black Hat talk this year. It became one of our most profitable recruiting vehicles.

It was originally a blog post. Man, that would have sucked, if we stuck a date and a title on it and hit "publish".

danielweber• 12 years ago

If you are publishing the crypto challenges, does that mean you have stopped giving them out as challenges? I requested in on Mon, May 12, 2014 at 2:23 PM Eastern Time and did not get a response.

tptacek14• 12 years ago

We are in crazy bananas email backlog Mail.app database corruption digging madly hell with the challenges right now, but if "getting all the challenges all at once" won't destroy your motivation and you've been on HN long enough that I'd know you by reputation (you count), I'm happy to send all of them over.

jobu• 12 years ago

Any post that involves "best practices" or any specific programming language should have a date attached. Programming languages change and best practices change to follow suit.

When I'm looking up a topic it sucks to get halfway through an article and realize that half of the methods it recommends have been deprecated. If the author had bothered to put a date on the post I would have known to avoid it.

tptacek14• 12 years ago

See, right there, you've captured it. If I write a "Best Practices" article with a 2012 dateline on it, the first thing you the reader will do is try to track down the most recent piece that updates it.

tjr• 12 years ago

Would not referring to specific software versions work approximately the same as including a date in such situations?

E.g., writing about recommendations for Python programming, and stating that you were running Python 2.7.5 at the time, or whatever.

gohrt4• 12 years ago

That's a list of 5 interesting things 99% of readers have never considered one way or the other.

lifeisstillgood• 12 years ago

> * Assume that it's part of some larger conversation amongst lots of bloggers.

that is the killer - articles and books carry their own context. Even well written articles that start with "As Fred smith commented on his well received blog" have a huge mental drag of having to go read Fred's article, grok that context and then come back and ...

Self contained, even though having good references is still best.

pknight6• 12 years ago

Removing the date from a post/article/essay is like saying FU to a reader who's trying to research a topic efficiently.

Pitarou2• 12 years ago

Tips for reading a Patrick McKenzie essay:

1. Get a laser printer

Sorry, Amazon, but the truth is that staring at the flickering, dancing lightbulb that you call a computer screen wears the eyes, and can lead to serious sleep disorders. e-ink readers are okay but, for an essay of this magnitude, there's still nothing that beats good old fashioned ink-on-bleached-woodpulp.

And don't even think about using ink-jet. For the price of the ink, you could hire Patrick for a full one week consultation.

2. Paste the text into a wordprocessor

If you're au fait with LaTeX you don't need my help here. But for the rest of us, a word processor is the way to go. And, for you Windows users, bypass WordPad and go straight to MS Word (if you have it) or LibreOffice Pages (if you don't). Either is fine.

(In the past, I would would have suggested WordPad in a pinch, but LibreOffice is free and has important features that we're going to make use of.)

Now, at this point, you'll encounter a technical snag. If you just blindly copy and paste the text into your word processor, the formatting will come out all messed up. This is because Patrick uses '90s style tables for website layout. This is no big deal -- just go to the webpage, open up the developers' console, and copy-paste the text one table-cell at a time -- but you need to be aware of it.

3. Find and tag the section headers

There are usually 4- or 5- section headers in the text. Pick them out, and tag them as section headers.

4. Style your text

If you're a design maven, go knock yourself out here. The system I've found that works for me is:

- typeface: Arial Condensed 6 point (hate it all you want, but it's free and it gets the job done)

- page layout: minimal margins, 3 column

- paragraph style: 1 cm indent, no leading or trailing space, full justification

For the section headers, I allow myself a generous 9 points bold font size.

5. Check your printer

Make sure you have plenty of printer ink and paper available, because this is going to be a big job. And make sure you're not going to need the printer for anything else for a while.

6. Print!

By the way, don't attempt to take a Patrick McKenzie essay with you on a plane: you'll exceed your in-flight handluggage allowance.

gohrt4• 12 years ago

Incredibly long comment just to say you find patio's writing long.

Pitarou2• 12 years ago

It's more of an homage than a comment. But, judging from the downvotes, people don't seem to enjoy my sense of humour.

thenomad2• 12 years ago

"You can, and should, make the strategic decision that you'll primarily write things which retain their value."

I'm a huge fan of Patrick's, but I couldn't disagree more on this point.

Choosing to write primarily about evergreen topics is ONE valid approach to creating value, but it's not the only one.

It's equally useful to write about topics that people have a burning desire to know more about, even if that desire will fade over time, provided you are building that knowledge into your strategy.

For example, one of the sites I run provides accurate, up-to-date information on optimal builds for World of Warcraft characters. That's the very definition of information that becomes rapidly useless. However, the time it takes to write those guides compared to the value it provides to me (in terms of advertising revenue) and my readers (in terms of giving a quick, accessible answer to a question they really want authoritative information on) makes those guides a very solid business proposition.

Likewise, I started an information site about the Oculus Rift a while ago. Again, everything on there is going to go out of date relatively fast - but whilst it's relevant, it's extremely relevant. And that allows me to build the site on a very small time investment and be in a good place to ride the wave of the DK2 and consumer release.

This is HN, for goodness' sake. Half the things we're likely all interested in are ephemeral. Anyone ever searched for information on Ruby on Rails configuration? Or Heartbleed? Neither of these topics are unlikely to change over time (said he, looking sadly at the wreckage of his Rails 1.0 sites), but it's still a solid decision both for business and value-creation reasons to write about them.

However, choosing to focus on evergreen topics is also a valid strategy.

(The rest of the article, by the by, is fantastic advice, and by the end of the week my main site is likely to be split into "news" and "articles", the latter of which will have a significantly deprecated - but still visible - date field.)

jimejim• 12 years ago

I took away 2 things from this article and don't agree with him on everything:

1. If you're intention is to write evergreen content, you should probably separate it from your blog so people don't automatically assume it's less valuable. Like it or not, the date and format matter. At the very least, I would create a separate page to highlight the more important articles.

2. I would make sure to include a date on some topics, like tech that's going to change rapidly. Not every topic needs a date though, like his salary negotiation article.

You said some of this too, but just felt like summarizing myself.

dools• 12 years ago

Man I hate it when people publish articles without dates on them.

Making Your Writing Work Harder For You

Related Stories