I'm really of two minds about the write for you/write for an audience argument. I started blogging early this year, and so far I've written and published four posts that don't make me want to gouge my eyes out. That's not to say that what I've written is especially good, just that it's passable. When I started I was shooting for one post a month, so I'm obviously way behind on what I thought was a conservative goal.
What surprises me most about the whole exercise is how overwhelmingly bad I am at writing. More than 80% of the content I've written has been thrown away. If I wrote code like this I'd have been out of work long ago, but I just can't bring myself to go on permanent record with half-baked poorly thought out blog posts.
I hate to put this so bluntly, but many people out there lack this kind of restraint. As a consequence, there's just a universe of truly awful writing online. The Joel Spolskys and Steve Yegges are really few and far between.
So yeah, write for you, but if you don't mind, could you do the world a service and write for the rest of us too? We'll all be better for it.
I, too, feel like I'm just muddling through my first foray into a personal blog. (For what it's worth, I found your four posts pretty interesting. Hadn't heard of Design for Hackers and I'm definitely checking it out now.)
I think the "write for you" advice is good, because it gets you through the early stages of writing and posting content. This might lead to a lack of restraint in some, but it reminds me that I don't need every post to be super-insightful or essay-of-the-year worthy. I just need to write about what interests me, which takes a lot of the pressure off.
I get what you're saying and I'm on board but the way you put it left kind of a bad taste in my mouth. It came across just a little bit like you haven't considered that you can just stop reading when you come across bad writing. I'm a poster child for poorly thought out blog posts. Luckily, no one reads them. That's the thing I've learned about blogging. You suck at it for a long time and with practice you get better and then people can stand to read your writing.
What surprises me most about the whole exercise is how overwhelmingly bad I am at writing. More than 80% of the content I've written has been thrown away. If I wrote code like this I'd have been out of work long ago, but I just can't bring myself to go on permanent record with half-baked poorly thought out blog posts.
I hate to put this so bluntly, but many people out there lack this kind of restraint. As a consequence, there's just a universe of truly awful writing online. The Joel Spolskys and Steve Yegges are really few and far between.
So yeah, write for you, but if you don't mind, could you do the world a service and write for the rest of us too? We'll all be better for it.