January 14th, 2009
Getting A Little More Technical
As you probably know, I relaunched my blog on 1st of January and since then it has really started to take off. I am getting quite a decent amount of search engine traffic and the amount of direct traffic I am getting is also on the increase (which tells me people like my posts and are coming back to read more). Most importantly though, I am really enjoying blogging and am I loving the feedback I am getting.
Anyway, one of my goals (not made public) was to start writing a lot more technical/development related posts. Now, I know that may not be everyones cup of tea and it may even drive a few return visitors away from the blog but it is something I really want to start doing. I especially want to talk about some of the stuff I am currently working on and explain how I am doing it. Heck, you may be able to tell me how to do it better. That’s what I want.
What I am going to do though (to cater for visitors who are not so interested in development but are interested in technology) is supplement each development related post with a non-technical post. Those non-technical posts will be stuff like reviews, current happenings on the web, tech trends, a lot about mobile stuff and I also hope to start videocasting soon!
At the current rate, I am getting out about 2-4 blog posts a day (usually more on the weekends when I am not working). So I definitely think I will be able to manage one technical and one non-technical post a day. What do you think of this idea? What do you want to read more of?
How about blog posts that cover things that aren’t covered in the zillion other PHP tutorial sites. I always find that developer blogs get cheapened by basic PHP related stuff that’s been covered many times before.
I (and possibly others) find development posts that cover the day in and day out stuff of development work more interesting. Things like scaling, work-flow, SVN, best-practices, working with and managing a team will engage the developer audience. This is one of the things that the 37Signals, Carsonfied and others blogs do well. They share hard earned knowledge rather than code snippets.
Personally I’d rather see you post more informative useful posts rather than quick no-to-useful ones because you need to fill your post a day quota.
Maybe I have it wrong. There clearly are lots of PHP experts out there that don’t even know how to get the ASCII integer value for a text character. Since most peeps out there learned their PHP by using it rather than via some kind of structured course means that there are huge gaping holes in their PHP (and dare I say programming) knowledge, so maybe the basics fill in those gaps.
Keeps the great posts coming. Remember it’s quality not quantity.
Hey Richard,
Thanks for the very cool suggestions and comments.
I definitely hear where you are coming from. Its a tough call to make due to the fact that I don’t really want to isolate any one group of readers. As far as I can tell I have a very diverse readership. I get questions from people just starting out with PHP or even questions about customizing a WordPress template and then I also get people who ask way more advanced questions.
With that said, I definitely want to get more advanced posts out there and I actually have a few in mind. I think it is all about balance. A little bit of everything. I would prefer to do about 2 advanced posts to 1 basic post and then tech posts scattered in between.
As you say, it is definitely about quality and not quantity. It is important for me though to get at least 1 post out each day to keep the flow and to keep me going at it.
Anyway, enough rambling from me
Thanks again.