Micro.blog

Advise for those struggling to write on the web. Written 3 years ago and honestly could have written the exact same thing this morning.

@kaa brilliant! I agree with all of those. A nice reminder, thank you! 👍🏼

@kaa Really great post and advice, I’ve bookmarked this!

Side note: love your blog theme, did you customize one of the defaults?

@kaa Timeless advice.

@kaa Great advice. Also heartily agree about the 80% design tip. The This Day X Years Ago feature is reason enough for write your blog for your future self.

@kaa That’s great. The 80/20 rule about how the site looks is an important one—at least if you are not producing the content you want to. Sometimes on Micro.blog people write about tweaking their blog endlessly. I think that’s OK, if blog design is their hobby. For those of us who mostly want to write, we should choose a theme that is legible, leave it alone for a while, and then focus on the writing. No one cares how your site looks nearly as much as you do. 😀

@pimoore thanks! Although it uses a base its relies heavily on Skeleton.css (http://getskeleton.com) and my secret weapon, Merriweather. I find that if you want to make your site dostinctive, find the typeface that works best for you and spend the time to make it sing. It just so happens that Merriweather is open source.

@pratik that point is made out of my own painful and meandering experience. It didnt help me apart from allowed me to tinker. Wish I tinkered less and spent my time on something else instead.

@mjdescy I think you are right, tweaking the look of your site is a form of tinkering first. Nothing wrong with a little tinkering. Its just understand that it then becomes procrastination from doing what the site is meant to be for in the first place. Spend the time at the start, then only a little bit, understanding that it will never be really complete and that is OK.

@pimoore apparently Charter has some issues when you try and put it on the web (according to Matthew Butterick, although he uses it on one of his sitea) - both excellent choices!

@kaa I actually have a site bookmarked that walked through changing the css for the Charter web font so hopefully it will work if I choose to use it.