Rules for blogging

“Is this your ‘fall gothic’ blog look?” Karin asks.


Nah, I just compulsively reformat and revise, as regular readers know.

The most significant change is that the section-separating diamonds (♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦) are now tomato-colored, not orange. This would be tricky to implement globally rather than one entry at a time. So I haven’t done it all yet.

Some of my rules for blogging:
  • Get the formatting right
  • Corollary: learn the necessary HTML
  • Get the prose right
  • Revise style unstintingly
  • Revise propositional content sparingly
  • Post ten times per month (this constrains revision)
  • Tell the truth
  • Use free fonts
  • Don’t try to make money
  • Don’t track pageviews (I do see what countries my readers and reader-bots come from, but I can’t distinguish between them)
  • Allow comments from human beings, not bots (right now, I’m failing to allow comments at all)
  • Don’t worry about who reads (exception: Madame)
  • Don’t worry if your wife doesn’t always read
  • Don’t worry if people who once read don’t now
  • Don’t worry if your content is utterly trivial
  • You have almost nothing to say
  • This blog is for exercise
  • Just follow your very long nose; then retrace and clean up
  • Write more like a Briton than like a gringo
  • Corollary: some convolution is acceptable
  • But emulate your stylist-heroes (e.g., Agatha Christie, Evelyn Waugh)
  • If, in overall conception, you must emulate someone, let it be Pepys
  • Read more Pepys so you know what you’re talking about
  • The Shorter Pepys should suffice
  • But it might not
I’ve posted some 1,300 entries here since 2013, and before that I posted on Xanga for almost ten years, so I can speak with some authority.