Ideas of March

Today, I read a couple of tweets on Twitter which lead me to Chris Shiflett’s post, Ideas of March, where he encourages a blog revival by asking folks to write a similar post (saying why they like blogs) and to blog more for the rest of the month. So, here’s my post with that same theme.

Here are a few reasons why I like blogs:

• First and foremost, I’ve learnt a huge amount by reading blog posts on a variety of subjects. Also, by writing articles myself, I’ve had to research each post (and learn) a lot more than I expected. This particularly applies to more technical posts, for example about CSS. All in all, this educational process has really helped me.
• Blogs have provided me with many answers to coding problems.
• Blogs definitely help form my opinion on other designers/ developers.
• Comments on blog posts can be really insightful (but, see my bugbear below) and provide more in-depth conversations than Twitter.

For this blog, I do enjoy writing the posts (although the publication frequency may not always reflect that, ahem).

Most blogs are a great resource for the reasons above but I do have two bugbears…

• Blog posts that are predominantly lists when the list is more than 10 items. Come on, the ‘Top 100 etc etc’ is not helpful if there is no prioritisation or reasoning behind the selections. Let’s get rid of those posts.
• Many blog authors seem to equate a higher number of article comments as a good thing. However, if many of the comments are just ‘great post’ and/or are made by people with ‘names’ like ‘web design india’, I would argue that there’s little value in that. Let’s not publish those comments.

Right, that’s my short Ideas of March post. I plan to write more posts than usual over the next few weeks (at the very least). Let’s all do that!