Bigger is Not Always Better
A week or so ago, Steve Yegge made a post titled Blogging Theory 201: Size Does Matter. I’ll sum up 10,000 words for you - “when you write a blog post, put as much time and effort into it as you would an essay for school.” While I partly agree with him, I also believe you really need to look at your target audience. At least that’s one of the first lessons your writing instructor should have taught you in school.
So that begs the question - who is my audience. Honestly, I don’t even know. A lot of my posts are just random junk I want to remember. Sometimes I post news on what’s going on in my life, which is probably of interest to friends of mine. Then I post random movie reviews. I’ll also post code snippets here and there, when I find an elegant solution to a problem I’ve been looking at.
I guess you could say my target audience is me. That sounds extremely egotistical, but it’s true. I can’t see anyone else getting enjoyment reading every post, my interests are too diverse. That’s fine with me, I’m used to it. I don’t know anyone else who played the violin, was on the football team, then hung out with the math geeks back in high school. I don’t expect anyone to be reading my page every week anyway. That’s the beauty of the internet. I can put Steve Yegge, Sasha Frere-Jones, Zend Developer Zone, and icanhazcheezburger into my RSS reader and spend all of 20 minutes of my time getting an overview of everything I enjoy.