Hari's Corner

Humour, comics, tech, law, software, reviews, essays, articles and HOWTOs intermingled with random philosophy now and then

My blogging principles

Filed under: Internet and Blogging by Hari
Posted on Fri, Jun 29, 2007 at 11:35 IST (last updated: Wed, Oct 29, 2008 @ 21:02 IST)

For what they're worth, here are some of the blogging principles I try to stick to as much as possible.

Avoiding controversy

I'm aware that the world outside is a mixture of positive and negative, good and bad, right and wrong. I'm not going too deep into the philosophical or religious aspects of this. All I can say is that there are thousands of websites out there which allow discussion of controversial topics and I try not to be one of them.

I've had my fair share of rants, but I've consciously tried to avoid voicing my thoughts on negative or controversial topics. I am especially wary about being critical of other people and issues of world-wide magnitude. Flame wars are a strict no-no on this blog.

Keeping it varied

I try not to dwell too much on the same topic again and again. I know this is easier said than done, but when I find that I have nothing much to say on a particular issue, I don't raise that issue at all. I've abandoned a lot of drafts in this manner after realizing that I've either said all I wanted to say before or really don't care much about the issue I've started writing about.

This is also a reason why I started doing cartoons and other features. It's a nice change of pace and adds colour to an otherwise dull blogging routine.

Keeping it light

Original humour is very creatively very demanding, but I have consciously followed the policy of making a few light, humourous posts every now and then to maintain a positive feel to this blog. Too many serious articles tend to weigh heavily on readers over a period of time.

For the same reason, I avoid being too personal in my writings.

Keeping it (reasonably) informative

I've been a bit lazy about sharing information in the past, but I have realized the importance of documenting certain information even if only to remind myself of something in the future. For instance, I tend to get something to work in Linux after a lot of fiddling around and then months later, I keep wondering how I got it to work and repeat the whole procedure all over again.

Sometimes it's a non-technical issue, but mostly it's technical in nature, so I decided that nothing is too insignificant for documentation - in fact, the more obscure the information, the better.

Keeping it content-rich

I have a morbid dread of one-liners. I've seen a lot of bloggers post one-liners regularly and it seems to work for them but somehow I've never got myself to do that. In the past my posts have tended to run too long, but these days I try to maintain a balance. Short posts are good for variety but even in my longer articles, I try to avoid large blocks of paragraphs without breaks. More recently, I've started using structuring (like headings, bulleted and numbered lists and so on) to vary the monotony of large chunks of text.

I'm still not sure how many people appreciate reading my longer posts though :P

I know that most of my regular readers will be aware of these aspects, but I thought I would make a post about it anyway. If any of you have blogging principles like these, I would be interested to know what they are.

10 comment(s)

  1. Papa Hari's principles for blogging are very much appreciated and recommended for other bloggers.

    Comment by Shrinidhi Hande (visitor) on Fri, Jun 29, 2007 @ 18:20 IST #
  2. Why thank you, kind sir :mrgreen:

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Fri, Jun 29, 2007 @ 18:28 IST #
  3. Hari, I've always appreciated your thoughtfulness and intelligence. That said, I have to say my blogging principles are almost the exact opposite of yours... except that I try to be content-rich as well.Blog on!

    Comment by aysiu (visitor) on Fri, Jun 29, 2007 @ 19:29 IST #
  4. Nice of you to comment, aysiu. Could you elaborate a little bit? I am interested in your blogging principle as well.Also could you tell me what software/tool you use to maintain your static website at psychocats.net? I really like your Ubuntu tutorials website.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Fri, Jun 29, 2007 @ 19:36 IST #
  5. Hmm... and what exactly is Papa Hari's policy/principle on flames in the comment space? War?? :)

    Comment by Sudipta Chatterjee (visitor) on Sat, Jun 30, 2007 @ 04:17 IST #
  6. Sudipta, peace :razz:

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sat, Jun 30, 2007 @ 07:36 IST #
  7. My blogging principle is to blog what might provoke thought, which often ends up being slightly controversial. I'm not trying to be a troll or anything, but I do think being pushed a little stretches people. Most of my best learning and changing have come about through others pushing me and being willing to talk about controversial topics.Since you are an intelligent writer and thinker, I would love it if you would touch on some more controversial topics, but I understand why you want to avoid them.As for the Psychocats site (glad you like it), I use Gedit and FileZilla/FireFTP. It's all hand-coded HTML and CSS, with a little PHP for includes. Hope that helps.

    Comment by aysiu (visitor) on Tue, Jul 3, 2007 @ 11:21 IST #
  8. aysiu, thanks for clarifying. Actually I've read some of your essays and I don't think they're necessarily controversial. You do have a good style of writing, but it doesn't come across as provocative and you don't unnecessarily attack other people. You touch controversial subjects, but you have a good flair for expressing your opinions very clearly and in the least offensive way.On the topic of websitesActually I've written a simple PHP script for creating a content-driven website (without MySQL). You can use that if you want. I can give it to you if you want. Currently my reviews site http://harishankar.org is powered by that script.Also I've now written a Python script to generate static websites from asciidoc sources (see my latest post). Feel free to use that if you wish too.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Tue, Jul 3, 2007 @ 11:57 IST #
  9. Nice Principals

    Comment by hitter1994 (visitor) on Tue, Jul 24, 2007 @ 17:22 IST #
  10. [...] Out of Character   By RT Cunningham My good, online friend, Hari sent me a message that started me thinking. I don't like to think too much about being [...]

    Comment by Stepping Out of Character - Untwisted Vortex (visitor) on Mon, Aug 20, 2007 @ 22:09 IST #

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