Lately quite a few friends have asked me about blogging, and the thing that gives them the most trouble is how to actually write a post. This is something I can speak about with some authority.
First, don’t let the aura of it intimidate you. Just write an ordinary article. You don’t need to worry about who will read it. (Tutorials with a clear audience are the exception.) My blog has four categories, but really there are only three kinds of posts: diaries, technical posts and essays.
Diaries are the fun little things from daily life, written down. There isn’t much to say about them; they’re notes for myself.
Technical posts come in tutorial form and explainer form. The first purpose of writing one is for myself — to organize my thoughts. But I figure publishing it online might help someone else too, so it goes on the blog. I also write up obscure flashing processes, mostly as notes to myself.
Essays deserve a longer explanation.
When I have a thought during the day, I jot it down in Notes, then on the weekend I go through those scattered notes. The ones that can become a full piece go on the blog; the ones that can’t keep accumulating. The purpose is still for myself: ten or twenty years from now, when my experiences and thinking have changed completely, I can look back at what I thought when I was young and maybe sigh about something.
As for AI, I’m not opposed to it. I occasionally use AI to help me organize a piece or fix places where the wording doesn’t match what I mean. I’m good at talking, not at writing systematic articles. I think that’s a pretty distinctive personal trait, and honestly it’s kind of interesting.
But I also have to think about the reader, so I’ll have AI fine-tune the structure and paragraph breaks to make it easier to read. Nobody wants to stare at a giant wall of text with bizarre sentence breaks that makes them feel suffocated.
At the very least, though, you should not let AI invent an entire article for you. Letting AI polish your content without changing its meaning is editing. Letting AI conjure a castle in the air out of nothing is fabrication.
