Basic Template with Ingredients for a Technical Blog

A good Technical Blog Post follows the Law Of Retention: repetition helps Retention

Some Questions on your Blog Post:

• Is your blog a frequently used resource for yourself and your readers? 
• Does it grow as you learn more - addressing different levels of questions?
• Is it short and informative while being complete and self-contained? 

Is your blog addressing The Readers Perspective?

1. What's in it for a Reader?
2. Tell 'em what you're going to Tell 'em.
3. Tell 'em.
   
4. Tell 'em what you just told 'em.
   
5. Further info.

Howto Improve your Blog's design

Accessibility: Does the title grab the attention of your intended audience?

1. Does the title have keywords used by the audience while searching google?
2. Does google index your blog regularly?
3. Push your blog updates to blog broadcastors like weblogs.com
4. Does your blog load up fast? Use the "Jump/Read More" feature and Optimize load time.

Retention: Is it easy for a casual browser to remember your blog and info you pain-stakingly put in?

Why write technical blog posts Part 2

Some interesting quotes (with links) from "Apprenticeship Patterns":
 
Section 6: Construct Your Curriculum

" the vast amounts of wisdom captured in the books of experienced practitioners like Jerry Weinberg, Fred Brooks, Steve McConnell, and Kent Beck cannot be replaced, not even with higher-bandwidth information. Even if you’re not a bookworm, a successful apprenticeship needs to include some books as well as time devoted to studying. You’re not in school, though. There is no assigned reading—it’s up to you to find recommendations and construct your own curriculum."

0) Reading List
          "Problem: 
                   The number of books you need to read is increasing faster than you can read them.
        Solution: 
                Maintain a Reading List to track the books you plan to read, and remember the books you’ve read."

1) Study the Classics:

"Joshua Kerievsky once asked Jerry Weinberg how he keeps up with all the books that come out. Jerry said, “Easy—I only read the great ones”
[...]

"Successful apprentices tend to focus on “long-lived books” and use the Web or experimentation to learn how the information has evolved. Dave remembers vividly the experience of reading his first classic in this field, The Psychology of Computer Programming, and marveling at how relevant the book felt, despite the stories of punch cards and room-sized computers. The wisdom captured in such classics is vital information to keep you heading in the right direction on The Long Road."

2) Dig Deeper:

"Problem:

You keep running into difficulty maintaining the code you’ve written because it turns out that the tutorials you followed cut corners and simplified complex issues. You find that your superficial knowledge of a thousand tools means you’re always floundering whenever a subtle bug arises or you have to do something that demands deep knowledge. People often accuse you of having a misleading CV because you don’t distinguish between a couple of weeks of extending an existing web service and a deep knowledge of the issues inherent in maintaining an interoperable and highly scalable enterprise system. What’s even worse is that because your knowledge is so superficial, you’re not even aware of how little you know until something or someone puts you to the test.

Solution:

Learn to dig deep into tools, technologies, and techniques. Acquire the depths of knowledge to the point that you know why things are the way they are. Depth means understanding the forces that led to a design rather than just the details of a design. For instance, it means understanding type theory (or at least the simplification offered by the typing quadrant at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TypingQuadrant) rather than simply parroting the things you’ve heard others say"

Utils for Linux and Windows

Search Everything:
This is a really fast and compact file search utility for windows. It beats Google desktop hollow if all you need is to search file/directory names. Already its saved me from re-downloading stuff, finding work that I’d stored away (safely!!) somewhere and just plain discover that I’ve got more goodies on my system than I’d thought!!
Having a huge HDD (by today’s standards) 1 GB does help to keep useful stuff ready for “Search Everything”.
Some nifty features to add would have been
1) Search inside compressed files and maybe
2) Catalog generation for offline media like CDs/DVDs.

Bharat has written a nice blog post on it called "Search Everything – A wonderful utility to reduce file searches".

Recently reinstalled Windows/Ubuntu and had to reinstall all the stuff.

I was using the old blog editor in blogger and managed to lose nearly 75% of a blog.
No undo function to revert to previous version of my blog. Searched for a work-around in blogger.
Nearly 3 hours of hard-work gone down the drain.
Found these GUI utilities for Ubuntu and Windows to hold ALL copy-paste stuff from the clipboard.

1) Glipper the multiple copies clipboard manager on Ubuntu Gnome Desktop

#a) Installs Glipper the multiple copies clipboard manager into Ubuntu Gnome Desktop
apt-get install glipper
#b) Right click on the "Windows Quicklaunch Bar" and Add to Panel->Clipboard manager
#c) Click on any of the previous copies to get the copy-paste you need.

2) Nautilus elementary -> Elegant Gnome. Making the desktop look neat.
     http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Elegant+Gnome+Pack?content=127826
     (Found it from somewhere inside http://lifehacker.com/tag/linux/!!)

3) Also Clipboard Manager for Windows for extending the basic Windows clipboard.
      http://space.dl.sourceforge.net/project/clipman/Clipman/v1.0/ClipMan_Setup.msi
      Note: May require .net framework 2.0.50727 to run if it's not already installed.
      Easily downloadable  from this site

Why write technical blog posts Part 1

Technical blogs help to:

• Record and speed-up the process of learning a new topic.
• Can be used as learning devices. 
• Provide a useful format for note-taking as you learn new things.
• Sharing and growing knowledge with others.
• Provide invaluable feedback necessary for your own growth.
• Capture the essence of what you learned during research

Technical blogs should evolve from one-liners to concise researched posts.
They should act as brain-dumps of all your research.

Research is a frightfully expensive activity with loads of context building up as you search.
What happens after to all this invaluable context after you spend a week or more researching it?
It evaporates within days of research as you move on to other things.


The beginners mind full of questions is an invaluable resource.
Unfortunately it's impossible to retain as you learn more and more!!


Slowly the questions give way to answers...
Only for more questions to pop-up... with answers following slowly.
The mystery thickens fast as you try to satisfy your quest for understanding.

Researching, reading books, articles, blogs that you browse on the Net, experimenting, theorising, modelling.
All these go into the steaming cauldron of your quest....

Slowly the mists part to slowly yield insights into what makes the thing tick!!


Writing and Revising your blogs is a definite way to nurture and match this process of  growth.
The very process of writing simply and clearly forces you to seek out the core of the concept.
This is THE most valuable gift to the technical blogger - fuelling his own growth while helping others on the path.

Innocence yielding to Experience yielding (very) slowly to Mastery.



Not only does it capture the questions and answers you found.
It can very easily form the basis for helping out someone on the same path.