How to (not) write a blog
First published: Friday September 10th, 2021
Report this blog
Hello there.
For quite a long while now, I've had a lack of interest in the recent user blogs section. Although you do find some really good and informative content occasionally, for the most part, I would easily spot several problems in the blogs posted there. Laughing at those minor errors can be fun for a while, but seeing not much improvement here in the long run really isn't. So, I thought, how could I potentially help in raising the general quality of the daily blogs? Now, here's where we begin...
Alright, so, before we go into what we shouldn't do, we need to first see an example of a bad blog.
Here's a sample bad blog I've written for the sole purpose of this.
Now, tell me. Is it bad?
I bet your opinion on that unlisted blog is negative. But what exactly makes it bad?
Bad title, bad thumbnail, horrible use of quick links / headers, bad use of basic styling, capital letter spam, emoji spam, horrible spelling and grammar, irrelevant information, irrelevant image, poor formatting and lack of content.
Oh and also, it immediately spoiled the pun.
Of course, those are not the only things that drag a blog's quality. Other stuff such as excessive css spam and codes that end up breaking the website should be avoided too. Proofread and test your blog before you upload it. If your grammar skills aren't exactly great, don't hesitate to try out grammarly or anything like that. Those tools would be great for fixing pre-existing grammatical and spelling mistakes and they also grade your work out of 100 so you can see how well-written your blog really is.
Now that we've seen an absolute nightmare of a blog, let's have a look at something you should definitely look up to. Chinese History 101 is a blog series created by cuotak, who, in my honest opinion, is very underrated as a blogger. This series involved heavy and detailed research as well as a lot of interesting information that is somewhat obscure to the Western world. At the end of each blog, there is a summary of what was mentioned in that blog as well as a short introduction of the topic of the following blog, which establishes a connection within the series.
Also, obviously, good use of images, relevant headings and the hyperlinks to articles of different historical events contribute to the great overall quality too.
The section immediately above was primarily for informative blogs, now let's hop onto others. Some may think that personal blogs are unwelcome as they do not educate the readers about any event or piece of information that is really useful. That is definitely not true. This completely depends on the blog itself. Just like informative blogs, you would also need good grammar, good spelling, context, etc. My first feature by SWATkun is a pretty good example of this. The blog covered the background, is full of relevant information and contains relevant hyperlinks. Now, you may argue that there are a couple grammatical errors in the blog. Yes, but those errors are very minor and the average reader might not notice it. Though I'm not saying that you can be lazy and leave in errors here and there if you feel like to, minor and less obvious errors are certainly acceptable.
Remember, the topic doesn't matter as long as it does not make a lot of people uncomfortable. The blog will be welcome as long as it is neatly written.
Those were some nice examples, now let's dive into a very popular blog series - Interview of a JetPunker by baptistegorce (you may also know him as Poirot). Poirot is a popular user on the website and is known as the "dictator of Interviews" in the blogging community. This series by him involves introducing mostly popular JetPunk users by having them answer a few questions. These blogs allow people to understand what goes through other active members of the community. They are incredibly interesting and I certainly recommend reading them through.
Oh and also, the 12th interview is still one of the most liked non-official blogs on the website.
TL;DR
- Have good titles, thumbnails and blurbs.
- Make sure the content of the blog is relevant to the topic.
- Avoid vulgar language.
- Just, don't emoji spam. Or better yet, don't use them at all unless necessary as old devices generally do not support them.
- Remember to proofread and fix any grammar / spelling mistake you can find. If your English isn't exactly great, you can use tools like grammarly.
- Research properly. Don't just take values on some random website you found on the 10th page of Google search. Make sure the data is accurate.
- When you're writing, don't add unnecessary terms. For example, if you say "China is really populous. In fact, it is the most populated country with over 1.438 billion people!", it would be really annoying as the country's current population is just 1.439 billion.
- Don't CSS spam. They really hurt the readers' eyes and might sometimes even break the webpage.
- When you're choosing a topic, make sure it's not a topic no one wants to read about. No offense intended here. Niche and personal blogs are obviously accepted and can be great, but I doubt anyone wants to read about your broken HB pencil.
- Finally, and most importantly, expect criticism. No matter how hard you worked on your blog, there may always be flaws in it. Don't just ignore all those comments or delete / block them just because you want to avoid them. Seriously, I've seen a few people doing that and it did them no good.
An extra message to commenters
When you see anything wrong about the blog and have ideas for potential improvements, just write it out, but in a nice way obviously. Constructive criticism is welcome, but excessive ranting about anything without any suggestions really isn't a great way to help out the new bloggers.
Oh and also, if you yourself can't even create a blog that's in any way better, I don't exactly recommend nitpicking in the comment section. It only paints a bad picture of yourself.
Alright, I think that's all I want to say here. It's been a while since I've written a blog as I'm not really a fan of the RUB. Let's hope that we can see more interesting (and accurate) content here in the near future.
Oh, by the way, if you ignore this and continue releasing terrible content...
Happy Blogging.
what im not from slovenia(╯°□°)╯︵ 🇦🇪
If you highlight this I will swear word at you.
In case a higher level of moderation is implemented, I think a reason should be given why a blog was denied from being published in the first place. Quality over quantity.
1) Deleting bad bogs - some blogs just need a little bit of TLC then they will be good. These won't need deleting.
2) JetPunk Mod - this probably won't need to be, as the blogging community can do this themselves. What doesn't need to happen with this is to demean people, but to give them good criticism so they can improve.
3) It's all the new users - you cannot foot the blame onto the new users, when current users also make errors / sometimes make bad blogs.
just look at any of mine.Another great blog from
the cat gurlrlllthe Bread!also uwu tankThanks :DI'm gonna swear word at you.
But seriously, this is an important blog, I have been working on a blog for
10 billion years1 month at this point and I have been a little lazy but I want to make it high quality. If you make a few low quality blogs you might get a few comments on each, but if you make a high quality blog then you could get a lot of comments and inspiration.are 6 words considered spamI definitely appreciate this post though. I hope some newer and less experienced bloggers will find this and be inspired to write things that are better quality.
I don't make joke blogs since I thought blogs are rarer and on average take more effort to make.
Btw, it's spelt "cat gurlrlll uwuwwo wowoowo"Some very good bloggers produce consistently good content, and that's good enough for me. Besides, the RUB doesn't have to be this holy grail of writing. We should let people have "bad blogs," unless it's just spam or riddled with grammatical errors, of course. It's part of the development of becoming a good writer.
Bear in mind that I value making an engaging blog with the opportunity for discussion very highly. I'll read around if something looks interesting, but I like what QM does. Picks topics that he knows will garner attention and discussion.
Thanks
P.S.: I learnt thanks to you that I had one the most liked unfeatured blogs of the site... 😅