writing
⌨️✍🏻 Writing is the act of creating, expanding, editing, and updating primarily text posts such as notes and articles.
The challenges of how to best write and post were discussed at an IndieWebCamp in Cambridge in 2015 in the session Thought Draft Post.
How to
This section documents various techniques that IndieWeb community members use themselves to write better, more often, etc. on their own sites.
Tantek
Tantek Çelik has found the following helps him write better longform posts on tantek.com (both more quickly and of higher quality)
Gregor Morrill
gRegor Morrill uses WriteMonkey on a PC to draft longer posts. It has a full-screen, no interruptions mode. Also has optional typewriter sound effects if you're into that.
Tracy Durnell
Tracy Durnell has posted novel writing progress reports on her website as an accountability and tracking tool, as well as during NaNoWriMo
Sara Jakša
Sara Jakša uses a couple of techniques, that get her to write more:
- Participate in the different events, like the blog carnivals, NaNoWriMo, fanfiction gift exchanges and prompts challenges.
- Writing in her own version of the Written Kitten that can use any set of pictures, which she hosts on her site. She used to use the Write or Die and it did make her write more, but these days she prefers a more positive motivation.
- Having the writing environment, that works offline - a lot of her writing is done offline.
- The 'Don't Like Don't Read' mentality, which poses the responsibility for deciding to read on the reader - so there is no need for any piece of writing to be perfect.
- The 'potter' mentality (from the making of the pots experiment), where people improve more, if they simply do something more frequently, instead of trying to make it perfect.
- Writing so much, that writing had become a way of therapy and emotional control
... add yourself ...
Please add the techniques you actually use yourself to write on your site!
Please do not add techniques you recommend but do not use (or use infrequently), or especially do not use on your personal site. There are too many random lists of "recommended" techniques (that the authors either themselves do not follow or do not do so on their own sites - both instances of failing to use what you make).
Additional Links
Posts with people discussing their own writing process
- Tracy Durnell's How I approach crafting a blog post
- Sara Jakša's How do I write my blog posts
- Bix's Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary
- capjamesg's How a blog post came to be: Behind the scenes
- capjamesg's When you want to write a blog post but can't...
- Pablo's How I Want to Write
Posts with people discussing reasons for writing/blogging
- Kev's Friends from Blogging
- Colin's post
- Scott's Your Blog is The Engine of Community
- Winnie's Why I write (2013)
- Bix's Blogs, Gardens, And Thinking Aloud In Public
- rubenwardy's Five reasons why I write (2023)
- Rachel's Why write?
- Henrik's A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox
- Juha-Matti's You should start a blog today
- Max's 7 Reasons why I don't write
- Annie's Is your blog for you or other people?
- Henrik's When I have a slower publishing cadence my blog grows faster
- Roy's You Can Write About Anything
Posts with people's advice about writing/blogging
- Julia's Some blogging myths
- Winnie's on writing as me
- Sara Jakša's Some musings on how to write more
- Tracy Durnell's Questions to guide what you write online to help shape the internet you want
- Tara's Revisiting Remarkable Content to Consider Digital Ecology
- Winter's On editing as you write
- Nat's Does Your Blog Need a Niche? Maybe Not
- Elizabeth's The power of unnecessary creating
- Elizabeth's Yes, you can blog without a niche!
- Roy's On Social Media, Lurkers, Introverts, and Blogging
- Michelle's What to Blog About When You Don’t Know What to Blog About
- capjamesg's series about the technical writing titled Advent of Technical Writing Posts including posts about Navigation Structure, Navigation Links, First Sentences, Types of Documentation, A Day in the Life, Clarity, Lists, Duplicate Information, Style, Deprecating Content, Internal Dry Run, Placeholders
Events to participate to write more
IndieWeb Specific
Others
Sessions
IndieWebCamp sessions on writing, how to improve your writing, and how to write more often & quickly.
- IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024: Writing
- IndieWebCamp Nuremberg 2023: How to stop rewriting your site and write more
- IndieWebCamp Cambridge 2015: Thought Draft Post.
- ...
Homebrew Website Club - Writing Edition
- HWC - Writing Edition 08 October 2024
- HWC - Writing Edition 01 July 2024
- HWC - Writing Edition 27 May 2024
- HWC - Writing Edition 08 April 2024
- IndieWeb events tagged #writing
See Also
- create
- note
- article
- text-first design
- wikify
- NaNoWriMo
- copywriting
- 2024-04-11 Good and useful writing
via Jeremy KeithThe most important lesson that blogging taught me is that writing is for thinking first, communication last.