Tosbourn – Belfast based Ruby developers

Decoupling Git and my Jekyll work

toby@tosbourn.com — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’m experimenting with a new way of using version control on this Jekyll-powered website, I thought I’d share in case it was useful for someone.

I will state the problems, what I used to do, and what I’m going to try out.

The problems

I have one article I want to write at any given time, but sometimes that article can take days to write and in the interim I might have small tweaks, or different articles I want to get out.

I also want to have articles scheduled to be posted at a date in the future.

Finally, I have several articles that I want to have in a draft state. These aren’t the main thing I’m focused on, but something I’d like to have ticking away in the background.

Jekyll has the ability to handle both drafts and posting in the future, and git has the ability to use branching to mean I can easily come back to an in-progress article. The issue is combining these three needs together can feel a bit clunky, I don’t want to have to merge a PR with a completely work in progress draft in it, but I also want access to it across all my branches.

How I was solving this

The way I approached this before was branching based on the main article. We store our article ideas in Github issues, so the branch might be called something like 1431-rails-migration-guide.

If an article was going to take longer than a session to write, I would commit it as a draft and if I needed to take a break from it I would branch again from main on my new topic.

Once an article was ready, I would move it from the _drafts folder, rename it to suit the date I wanted it to go live onm and create a PR.

This works fine, but often when I’m writing one article I have an idea for improving or drafting an unrelated article. I could add my thoughts to the issue, but sometimes that felt like more effort than it was worth.

What I’m moving to

What I’ve started experimenting with is a branch name of today’s date, e.g. 2024-08-04, which is always branched off of main and always showing the next state of the website that I want to deploy.

This should help me be a little more fluid with what I’m writing, whilst still maintaining a decent Git history by staging commits with appropriate mentions of the issue numbers I’m addressing.

At the end of my work, I will send the branch up for pull request, and get it merged in.

If there are issues, I won’t start working on another branch until those have been resolved.

This feels like less process, but still an appropriate amount of rigor. Let’s see how it goes!

We've deleted an article's worth of unhelpful words

toby@tosbourn.com — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We have removed around 600 words from across our articles that served no purpose. Indeed they detracted from the point of the articles they were removed from.

600 words could easily be a solid article, especially if the writing is kept tight!

In no particular order, here are some of the words we removed;

basically
essentially
probably
possibly
hacks
you need to
trivial
obviously

In almost all cases the rest of the sentence didn’t need to change at all, and whilst it isn’t fair to say all instances of these words have been removed from the site, a fair few have and will continue to over the coming weeks.

Why we removed these words

Words like ‘basically’ and ‘obviously’ are problematic, they infer that the reader gets something that they may not. It is up to me, the writer, to help them understand what I’m writing, not assume a level of knowledge.

Most of the other words are filler. We write a lot of technical tutorials that have step-by-step parts of them. Changing “You need to click this button” to “Click this button” halves the word count of that sentence without changing anything about it.

Why we edit old articles

Almost all of our over 600 articles are visited at least once every two months, some articles get thousands of visits a month. We can’t predict when an old article is going to get linked and suddenly get viewed by a lot of people.

With all that in mind, it isn’t good enough to just apply improvements to new articles, we always take care to update wording and links across all of our articles when we can.

I love the idea that a 15-year-old article has been providing value to someone all this time, and to think it has had a small improvement to mean for the next 15 years someone will get to the value that little bit quicker. Great stuff!

Want to get in on this?

Do a quick search of your articles for some of these terms, have a think about how the sentence would read without that term, and if you agree it is better, delete.

When I started this process, I had two words on my list, but as I was visiting articles I was noticing more and more phrases that served little purpose. I’m sure you will find the same.

Getting Obsidian word count on iOS

toby@tosbourn.com — Sun, 01 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes you need to know the word count for whatever you’re working on.

If you’re using Obsidian’s iOS client the word count isn’t permanently on screen; however it is just a tap away!

By clicking on the three-dotted kebab looking icon, a menu bar will appear, with both the word and character count at the top.

Screenshot showing the kebab icon on the top right of the screen

Happy counting!

The main reasons why we shouldn't use click here as link text

toby@tosbourn.com — Sat, 09 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A typical pattern on the web is for links to hide behind text that says “click here”, “read more”, or similar. I’m going to share the reasons why this is bad and suggest some better patterns to use.

If you trust that I know what I’m talking about then the short version of this article is:

Using “click here” is bad for accessibility, it adds cognitive load and will hurt screen reader usage
Your SEO efforts will suffer with “click here” text. Internal links don’t have the context search engines need to score your website
Copy punctuated with “read more” is harder to read than when link text is more natural
“Click” is mouse-centric and “read” is screen-centric. People consume content in more ways that by a screen connected to a mouse
If this list has convinced you, follow my “what to do instead” guidance

For more detail, please read on.

Accessibility

When it comes to web pages, most assistive technologies will grab the page and parse it. Instead of rendering the page, it will showcase the content in a way that is useful for that particular assistive technology.

Screen readers, for example, would be a terrible experience if they didn’t allow for skimming. One way they allow skimming is to collate a list of all the links on the page and read them out.

Links on a page saying “click here” or “read more” have no context when reading in a list.

You’ve made it hard for someone who can’t see the link in situ, decreasing how accessible your website is.

There are other accessibility reasons why “click here” is a bad idea.

Generally speaking a “click here” link will appear close to some explanatory text. The presumption is that your reader can keep the context in their head as they go through your website.

Assistive technologies are binary, someone is either using one or they aren’t.

Cognitive ability is anything but binary and can be entirely situational. When I’m in a noisy room it’s hard to think but when it’s quiet it’s easier.

The chances are when you are writing your copy you’re in your office environment. This will not be the same environment someone will read your content in.

In short; “click here”, or “read more” style links are bad for accessibility, don’t use them.

SEO

I’ve worked in plenty of teams and companies where accessibility is a nice-to-have. I could rant for hours on the reasons why that makes zero business sense, but it is a common position for a company to hold.

One of the beautiful things about accessible writing is you almost always end up making your content do better in search engines.

There are two simple reasons for this:

If assistive technologies can understand your content, so can search engine bots. If a search engine can understand your content better, it will rank it better
Content that is available to more people will allow more people to complete their task. Search engines want to send people to places where they can achieve their task

I could turn this post into a rationale for using marketing budget to make your website more accessible. I will refrain.

Search engines have many ranking factors. Ranking factors are criteria for what makes one page rank above another page. One of the most significant ranking factors is how many links point to a page.

If we have two pages answering the question “what is a gemfile?”, the one with more links will likely rank higher. There is good reason to assume the one with all the links is more authoritative, why else would people link to it?

But links are more than the value of the href attribute, they are also the link text, which is the stuff between the opening <a> and closing </a>.

Search engines use the link text to understand why someone would link to a page. This extra context is essential.

If we have a website that everyone links to with the word “cat”, we would not expect it to rank well for the word “dog”. Everything the search engine knows about this site is that “when people link to this site, they are talking about cats”.

Search engines don’t only look at links from other sites to yours. They look at how your pages link together. These internal links send a signal of “this is what this website thinks is the best page about this link text”.

To sum up. Using “click here” links won’t pass relevant context to search engines, which means they can’t score the page you linked to appropriately.

Readability

Accessibility and SEO are two excellent reasons why you would want to avoid “click here” links. I can see a counter-argument if the content you’re writing is personal and you don’t care if others can read or find it.

I counter this by suggesting that you want your writing to come across as well as it can, even if the only audience is you.

“Click here” or “read more” has become a weird kind of punctuation on the web. Like any punctuation, when overused, it becomes annoying and gets in the way of the content.

You presumably want your ideas to flow well on the page. You can do this by not punctuating your writing with meaningless words.

The Text is Semantically Incorrect

My final point is a semantic one. Clicking is something you do with a mouse or trackpad. The chances are most of your writing isn’t read by someone using a mouse. The notion of clicking is the equal of using a picture of a floppy disk to mean save. It is an archaism that rarely makes sense to use in the current context.

Likewise, to suggest someone should “read more” sounds silly if they are listening to your content either via a screenreader, or a speech-only device like Alexa.

There is an argument that web users know that a click means a press or that reading means consuming. In the same way, someone knows the save icon without having had the joy of using floppy disks. Why take the risk that someone doesn’t? What happens when someone translates your content and the word “click” gets turned into something far more literal.

You presumably want to present yourself well in your writing, so you should make an effort to use the right words.

“Click here” or “read more” don’t make sense now and will make even less sense in the future.

What To Do Instead

By now I bet you’re on board with the idea that we should do away with “click here” text. What next?

Each case is different. I have a few general tips for improving your link text.

Replace mechanical words with actions

We’ve already talked about how “click” is a weird choice of word. As well as not being accurate in all cases, it is focused on how you interact with the link, and not what the link will do.

For example “click to view screencast” is telling you to use a mouse to interact with this link. If we used “view screencast” then this link text is telling us the action.

Assume no extra context

Assume someone has removed all other text from the page and only your link text remained.

You should replace “You can click here to buy a Nintendo Switch” with “you can buy a Nintendo Switch”.

In the first example, you would see click here, and you would have to guess at the point of the link. In the second you would have buy a Nintendo Switch which is clear.

Name many links

A common pattern people follow when they want to share many links is to make an in-line list:

“You can read more here, here, and here”.

Within the context of the sentence, the reader might know the type of content they should expect. They could not infer what is different between the three links. It makes it impossible for them to know which one they should prioritise.

You can still use in-line lists, but you need to add some context. For example, “You can read The Guardian’s write-up, @tosbourn’s thoughts, and a LinkedIn thread talking about this.”. The same three links now convey more information about what might be different between them.

Move action links to the end of a sentence

If you were citing an article, you might link to it, but you wouldn’t expect your reader to follow the link, read everything, and come back.

Sometimes you add a link because you want someone to do something. When this is the case, you should consider putting the link at the end of the sentence.

Giving it after the context means they can decide at the point of seeing the link. “Tosbourn has a LinkedIn account, you should follow them” means the reader has to scan back to find the link. “You should follow Tosbourn on LinkedIn” gives the reader less work.

Improve your website by improving your links

When I first started writing this article, I thought there was only enough content for a few paragraphs, so thank you for making it this far!

Putting thought into how you name your links will improve the accessibility of your site, increase your rankings in search engines, and will engage your readers more. This will result in more people reading and getting value from your content.

If you have any other reasons that “click here” is wrong, or if you have any fantastic tips to share on writing great link copy, I’m all ears! Please share in the comments below.

If you want advice on generally improving your website, I’ve shared an article all about free tools I use to improve my websites.

Blog posts are projects not action items

toby@tosbourn.com — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever wondered why you have so many great ideas for blog posts, but so few actual articles? It might be because you’re treating a blog post as a single action and not an entire project.

I’ve found when I treat blog posts more like projects and less like singular to-do items, I can move through them more quickly. In this post I want to detail why that is and share what I mean by treating a post like a project.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of what might go into a blog post:

brainstorm ideas
coming up with titles
researching similar articles
designing graphics
bounce ideas off someone
editing the copy
publishing the article
cross-promoting it to other places
sharing the article on social media

That is a lot of stuff, and each of those points has several actions.

Don’t try and trick your brain

If you have a to-do list that says “write a blog post about blah” your brain will freak out every time you cast your eye over it. It knows that isn’t one item, it is about 30 items.

Your brain will try and land on anything else that has a more concrete outcome.

If you treat the blog post with the reverence it deserves and place proper actions next to it, you are far more likely to make progress.

Not all posts are equal

While there are certain tasks you might need to do on every article you write, not everything you write needs each step, and some will need a heck of a lot more.

If you’re sharing a recipe to a personal site that you know then you don’t need to do half the things listed above.

This is why the first and only action should be something like:

“Draw out steps needed for blog post on blah”.

This is a 5-minute task which has a clear output. By the end of this you should have several action items to work through.

Each of these actions should go into your to-do list. I love Omnifocus, but the important thing is having all parts of the project listed, not just the headline.

How I break this task down

I often have my initial task set to “Brainstorm blah” and time-box it to five minutes.

Time-boxing helps me to set aside excuses, I can find five minutes. You will surprise yourself at how much can get done in five minutes.

To make the most out of the five minutes I will often refer to more complete versions of the list I shared at the start of this article.

Concrete items lead to action

Now when you skim your task list your brain will be calm. The action will be more like “find an image to represent blah” which is much more concrete.

Getting Things Done

The notion of treating a blog post like a project instead of an individual action comes straight out of the getting things done playbook. If you haven’t read it, I’d suggest picking up a copy.

Tools I Use When Blogging

toby@tosbourn.com — Fri, 12 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

There are a handful of tools that I regularly use when I blog; some of them are massively well known; some of them maybe not so much. I wanted to write about them here for two reasons.

The first is to help people who are maybe looking at tooling for their blogs.

The second is to get feedback from people who know much more than me to see where my tooling can be improved.

There are three main stages to most of my blog posts:

Research
Writing
Publishing

Research

The research I do varies depending on the post, but the tooling remains consistent.

Plausible

Plausible is a web traffic analytics tool; it lets you know about the types of people coming to your site and what they do once they get there.

It is beneficial for several reasons but specifically for blogging, I use it to see what posts have historically done well for two criteria;

Did the topic bring lots of traffic and attention to the site
Did the subject convert well against the site’s goals

If I spot a few topics that have been doing particularly well, I can use this to research other topics which could complement or build on them.

It is similar to Google Analytics only much more performant, privacy focused, better designed.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is a set of pages that Google has made to allow you to understand better how Google views your site.

Much like Google Analytics, the use goes way beyond what I am about to describe; I use this tool to find what people have been searching for to find my website.

You might ask why I don’t do this within Plausible, you certainly can, but this is straight from the horses mouth, and you can also easily see where you rank for that given search term. Handy stuff when trying to work out what to write.

Writing

Once I finish my research, it is onto the writing and editing stage.

TextMate

I almost always try and write offline these days; it keeps distractions down to a complete minimum. I use TextMate for the majority of my writing.

TextMate is also my text editor of choice which means I’m in it most of the day writing code anyway, so it feels very natural to me.

Grammarly

After I’ve created my first draft, I copy and past it into Grammarly. Grammarly is a tool that will do advanced grammar checks on your work. It goes above and beyond what grammar checks are usually performed by writing tools.

One of the things I love about Grammarly is it can run in your browser and help correct typos and grammar errors that you make when filling in text boxes online, say when making tweets!

TextExpander

TextExpander is text expansion software available on pretty much all platforms at this point.

I’ve written an entire review of TextExpander, this is a tool I use a lot to help reduce the number of characters I need to type.

With TextExpander, you can type a short code, and it will expand into a larger block of text. For example, when I type llorem anywhere on my computer, it will add:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris sollicitudin laoreet felis, tincidunt ultricies odio laoreet ac. Vestibulum porta euismod sapien, a blandit nisi congue id. Pellentesque feugiat orci nec tellus consequat consequat. Nullam sit amet quam cursus leo vulputate mollis feugiat nec elit. Integer neque eros, sagittis euismod malesuada eu, congue eu sapien. Quisque pharetra pharetra dolor eget tempus. Vivamus fermentum, enim eget lacinia hendrerit, est quam aliquam mi, sit amet convallis metus metus sit amet leo. Curabitur sed metus massa.

I’ve written up some of my favourite TextExpander snippets.

MacBook Pro

The MacBook Pro is one of the high-end laptop computers created by Apple.

The MacBook Pro is my workhorse; it is where I do my coding and my writing.

You might wonder why I bother to mention that here. Having an excellent machine to write on can make all the difference.

Naturally, you don’t need the majority of the spec that my MacBook Pro has, but a lot of thought has gone into how comfortable it is to use.

One thing I have experimented with recently is using the inbuilt screen reader to read my posts aloud to me; this can help find odd phrasing.

If your machine isn’t a joy to use, you will find reasons not to use it.

If you’re interested in reading more of our setup, we have a post all about it. Read about our setup.

Publishing

Once I have written my post, edited it and put it up onto the website I’m writing for it is time to Publish. In literal terms, I just hit the Publish button, and the content is there for everyone to see, but that isn’t when my workflow ends.

Link Aggregators

Reddit and HackerNews are link aggregation websites, people share links they think the communities would find interesting, and people can vote on them.

Voted up links get more visibility, voted down links tend to get hidden and forgotten about pretty quickly.

Depending on the content I will share on one or both of these sites because I find it is an excellent way to get an initial burst of traffic and get immediate feedback from folk.

Very few people on my social media networks are going to tell me my point of view sucks or my writing is terrible. People on the internet at large, however, will go out of their way to tell you something sucks.

This type of criticism (when constructive) is hugely useful and can inform edits or new posts that you make.

Wrapping Up

If this has helped you, I am delighted. Please consider sharing this post with others as it might help them also!

If you have different ideas for what works and what doesn’t, please let me know in the comments. Better yet, post your list and share the link with me :-)

2019 Update

This post was updated in 2019 to add my current tooling. Here are the tools that I have stopped using since this was first published:

Evernote – I used to love Evernote but found it just wasn’t justifying the cost to me and seemed to get worse with newer releases.
HitTail – This was a fantastic tool that would show you content ideas based on Google searches. Unfortunately, it relied on data Google provided which Google turned off some time ago. RIP.
Google Keyword Planner – I replaced this with Moz.
Writer Pro – I’ve replaced this with Bear.
Buffer – I’ve replaced this with Social Pilot. My time at Buffer wasn’t great.

2021 Update

This post was further updated in 2021 with current tooling, I have removed and replaced some tools:

Bear was removed as my note taking tool, I’ve reverted to use Apple notes for everything, I don’t love it but it works for the type of notes I generally take
Google Analytics was replaced by Plausible
Moz was removed, I don’t do much keyword research these days
I don’t use any social media posting tools any more, so Social Pilot has been removed

What I’ve learned from looking through my old posts

toby@tosbourn.com — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

One of the first non-urgent tasks that I knew I would have to do when I started freelancing was to look through all the content on my site to make sure it was a fair reflection of the work I am doing now.

I wanted to get a good grasp on what content would be worth keeping up-to-date and properly promoting, versus content that is useful but doesn’t really need to be promoted, verses content I should remove because either my opinions have changed or best practice as moved on.

I’ve written over 500 articles on tosbourn.com. Going through them all took some time.

Here are some things I’ve learned from doing it.

There are articles I honestly have no recollection of writing, about technologies I would almost have sworn I’ve never used.
A lot of my opinions have veered towards the centre as I’ve aged. I used to dislike a lot more things than I do now!
My writing style has largely stayed the same, in that it is fairly conversational.
I used to have a hard-on for getting points on Hacker News. (fairly cringe worthy I have to say!)
Only about 10% of the articles I’ve written have what it takes to be decent evergreen content.*

One of my big takeaways was that is well worth doing and something I would recommend everyone with a website that has been generating content for years do. Apart from noticing odd little things like the above, there was a practical component to it.

Why I went through all my old posts

Here are some of the practical things I was able to do.

Delete old posts that were of zero value to anyone (I verified by seeing there was zero traffic hitting some very low quality posts)
Fix typos / broken links in older posts
Highlight posts that I believe have potential, which I shall be re-working in the future and re-sharing
Update posts to have decent Schema and other meta information associated with them.

Redirect everything

Make sure if you do decide to kill content (which as an act, should never be taken lightly) that you redirect the user somewhere useful.

Notes

* I’ve written about problems with Evergreen content before, ironically (or not), that post didn’t make my list of things that would be useful as examples of evergreen content.

How to overcome thinking that no one will find your posts useful

toby@tosbourn.com — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This evening I received some tweets from an online buddy @punkeel

@tosbourn or a very "personal" use case ... :(
PunKeel (@punkeel) December 3, 2015

In case that doesn’t always work (you can’t trust the internet) the question is.

How do you overcome the idea that “Nobody will find my posts useful” Every subject I wanna blog about is either covered up or a very “personal” use case

This is a great question. I have some thoughts on it which were too long for Twitter and I think that may be useful to others.

Let me break my thinking down into three sections as I feel there are three things to address here.

I will wrap up with some other random thoughts.

Nobody will find my posts useful

This is complete rubbish but let’s assume that you have zero audience. If you are writing a technical blog post there is always going to be one person to find it useful. You.

Knowledge

Even when just re-writing the steps I took to un-break something I broke I come out of the blog post with a much better understanding of the problem and solution than before I began.

Growth

You need to write a lot before you even start to get in any way decent at it. I still think I am a terrible writer but I can see I have come on leaps and bounds since starting this blog. Not every post needs to be ground breaking.

Problems come back

How many times have you encountered an issue that you remember fixing 6 months ago and you kind of half remember the steps but you need to start stringing back together the various things you did before. It would have been great to have a record of that somewhere.

I have lost count of the times I have searched something and my solution from 1+ years ago is the first result. Past Toby had my back.

Every day there are new developers

Every day there is a new person coming along who has just started on their journey and is completely lost. There is always a need for fresh and current new posts to be made to help these people.

Every Subject is covered

It does seem like the web has every subject covered. I often stop an idea in its tracks once I realise it has been covered by a “real expert” in the industry. This is a bad.

Your own voice

Everyone has their own voice, their own way of putting something across and sharing ideas.

People have a wide range of preferences when it comes to what words make something stick for them.

This means there is a high chance there are people out there that find what others have said too hard to understand, or too dry to read.

Your explanation (even if it is just a re-write of what someone else had said) might be the thing to make something click with someone.

People don’t all search the same

This is related to you having your own voice, but I have found that people use different phrases when looking for the solution to something. There could be 10,000 articles detailing the solution to a problem but if the person doesn’t know what to search for they are never going to find it.

Your choice of words and how you present the problem will widen the pool of solutions and some people will find it and thank you for it.

Best practice changes

Best practice in our field changes a lot, as does the tech we use. This means people are always looking for up-to-date guides on ways of doing things.

My ideas are too personal

I hate to break it to you, but you are not a special and unique snowflake. I am reminded of an old bash.org listing

The internet is a beautiful place….

Because no matter what kind of twisted freak you are, you’ve got a friend out there :D

You could ask the internet “Find people who have sex with goats on fire.”

And internet will ask you, “What kind of goats?”

There is no situation that is too personal that someone isn’t going to find it useful. I have a specific example to illustrate.

I wrote this blog post because I managed to break the standard CSS that would have enabled this to work out of the box.

Someone researching potential authors to write about Typeahead.js noticed it – some emails later I am a published author.

Stack Overflow

The entire Stack Overflow community is based around people having questions they think are too specific to be answered by a blog post.

Personal is Niche

Problems that are localised to things you are working on or your particular setup are niche, and niche is great on the web!

In content marketing you find that the more niche the thing you write about the fewer the people that will read it but the ones that do will be engaged with the content.

These people are more engaged because they can really relate to what you are writing about. They are more likely to want to speak to you and come back to your site.

OK Now to actually answer the question

I have just spent around 800 words saying I don’t agree with the premise of Punkeel’s question. I think people will find their posts interesting.).

Write in your mother tongue – Everyone wants to write in English because that is the language of the internet, but not everyone knows English – posts in your native language will be valuable to folk who don’t speak English.
Don’t worry about other people – Write for you, or for one other person that you know is having a specific problem. Treat the post as if it is something you might want to read at a later date, but you could take or leave if other people do.
Answer emails as blog posts – if you ever get asked your opinion on something or the answer to something in an email or on social media, consider it an idea for a blog post.
If you are stuck for ideas, I compiled a list of resources on how to generate ideas or you could look at these content curation services.

I hope this helps.

6 Months in and bowing out

toby@tosbourn.com — Sun, 12 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I have been thinking about the project lately and I have decided that this is going to be my last blog post that has been “forced” by the 365 project.

I started doing the project under very different circumstances and with goals in mind that I feel I have reached. Let me elaborate.

Goals

One of the main goals I had for this project was to systematise how I write blog posts, I wanted to get better at generating ideas, collecting information and writing.

I feel I have accomplished this. My methods for doing all of those things have matured and I have developed what I believe to be sustainable habits for ongoing writing.

Not that sustainable

The one thing that hasn’t been sustainable is the output. I knew going into the project that the equivalent of one post a day was going to be tough going, but at the time of planning this project I thought it would be doable.

Life of course has other plans. A change in jobs and some other projects starting/stopping that I couldn’t have planned for has meant that the time I can dedicate to writing isn’t as long as I thought it was going to be.

Proud of some of the output

Whilst I am very happy with the processes put in place, the output I have been giving people hasn’t been completely up to snuff. I worried this would be the case when I took on the project.

When speaking to a friend about it he initially said (and I am paraphrasing here) “Why not make the task to write 10 really great blog posts this year”.

That would have have been a noble goal, but I don’t think it would have achieved what I wanted, which was to develop processes to help me write, not just put a lot of effort into a handful of one off posts.

In retrospect I should have went somewhere in the middle. 100 posts could have been the sweet spot between enough to need systems and allowing enough time for quality.

I am still going to write

I still love writing, and indeed for the next while you might not even notice a change in the frequency of my output because I have a lot of ideas I still want to write about and a lot of half complete posts in the pipeline.

If you would like me to write for your website or publication please let me know.

Some stats to finish everything off

Since I am calling time on this project I figure I should share some of the stats I have gathered during this time.

Posts Written

This is the 125th post written during the project. I was 68 posts behind schedule.

Being behind never worried me, like I say I have plenty of ideas and things in draft.

I have written around 50,000 words in this time. Which is quite a nice feeling.

Traffic

The majority of my posts were written on my personal website so this is where I was checking for traffic. I have pulled these stats from Google Analytics.

Interestingly traffic has decreased on my site between the first six months of 2015 compared to the first six months of 2014.

Users on the site has decreased by 13.45% (83,525 this year vs 96,506 last year).

The bounce rate as increased as well, by 2.72% (it has been 90.65% so far this year vs 88.25% last year).

Both could be symptoms of lower quality content being put out, something I am not happy with.

Favourite Posts and Highlights

There are three posts that come to mind (3 out of 125 is pretty depressing) when I think of highlights.

Set Intersection in Ruby was picked up by Ruby Weekly, which is huge!
HTTP Status codes for SEO I learned a load writing this article and it has been getting positive feedback.

Quality of your Input and Output

toby@tosbourn.com — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I find it interesting that the common advice when communicating orally is to listen more than you speak but the same advice is reversed when creating content. People often say you should consume less and produce more.

I think in both cases it is the quality of the input and the output that matters. This is why I try and prune my inputs as much as possible to keep the quality high. I find that when I plan to read several things in my day I am less worried about the quality. If I set things aside and say “I am going to read one article this evening” I am much more likely to be critical of the source of the article.

I am trying to cut back on the majority of curated content and visit places like Reddit and HackerNews far less. The problem I find with curated content isn’t that the quality is low, it can be very high. The issue is that the curation is for the industry or group writ large, which doesn’t help me get my work done or get my juices flowing.

My Twitter feed is a much better source (for me) of content, this is curated by people I care about and they are sharing stuff because they think it is cool, not because they will get some internet points.

I thought Rob Walling made a great point in a recent episode of Startups for the Rest of Us when he said that even with podcasts podcasts he is a big fan of he would skip episodes that aren’t relevant to his current interests. This is something I want to try and do more of, just because I like one person’s blog doesn’t mean I need to read absolutely everything they write.

With regards to outputs, I still struggle with keeping my output quality high. Bear with me in that one :-)