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by chomp 2957 days ago
I tried going down your path and blogged only about stuff that's arcane or interesting tech wise, and it did nothing but cause me writer's block and turn me off blogging.

Learn to write for yourself first. If you set up Raspian on a Raspberry Pi over the weekend, write about it! If you popped a CentOS install disk and set up a server, write about that. It doesn't matter if there's 10000 blog posts about the same exact thing, you can turn even mundane topics interesting as long as you have a good writing style- and that's what you're going to be exercising by blogging.
2 comments
josefresco 2957 days ago
This is good advice. I too have a personal blog that I mostly neglect. This past week we "cut the cord" on our cable TV service at home and the process has inspired me to blog. I've been composing blog posts "in my head" for the past few days and I take this as a good sign about my future intentions.

I have thoughts on Xfinity's value, YouTube TV's ad policies, Hulu's DVR restrictions, Roku's awesome interface - all good useful resources for those researching the same process.

In contrast, some weekends I'll sit down (without an idea) to compose a new blog post and frequently hit a wall.

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unwiredben 2957 days ago
I'd be very interested in seeing your thoughts on Roku :)
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godot 2957 days ago
Very much this. I find how-to guides to be a very good type of topic to blog about: 1) It serves as documentation for yourself to get back to later on (it has come in useful for myself many times to look back at my blog on how I set up something), 2) It serves as a good guide for others and is how you build your audience. Almost any how-to guide out there misses some information. Not everyone ran into the same issues. Your guide will have some info others who have written similar ones have missed. Similarly, you won't be covering some issues that the next person will write about. Someone googling around setting up their raspberry pi or CentOS server about the exact same issue you had, will find your article (and not any other because other guides didn't mention it), and save hours of time because of your guide. (I have comments on my blog telling me this, despite writing about topics that have hundreds of guides out there about)
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