<story><title>I&apos;ve decided to move on to Distill</title><url>http://colah.github.io/posts/2017-03-Distill/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tedmiston</author><text>&amp;gt; As colah.github.io has grown in prominence… Well, it’s been very rewarding, but it’s also been a bit uncomfortable.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; For one thing, it’s created very high standards for my writing. Most of my articles took 50-200 hours to write. I feel like I needed to live up to that quality with every post, but that means I can’t put out thoughts without investing a huge amount of energy.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve done a bit of blogging and this echoes my experience as well.  One successful posts precedes another, then you start to feel like you can&amp;#x27;t put out off-the-cuff type posts.  It&amp;#x27;s tough to follow up a rockstar post with an intermezzo.  So you invest more and more energy into each topic and post to ensure it&amp;#x27;ll be successful in whatever metric, and that mostly works, but then you publish few posts in very specific niches.&lt;p&gt;If anyone has advice for effectively blowing one&amp;#x27;s standards out of the water and publishing more smaller general pieces, I&amp;#x27;d love to hear that.  From this perspective, I admire how Fred Wilson blogs.&lt;p&gt;Edit: fixed typo</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kalid</author><text>I had this issue too, and realized you can frame it by setting expectations in the title.&lt;p&gt;Some posts have needed the 100-200 hours of thinking&amp;#x2F;visualization, labeled with things like &amp;quot;Interactive Guide to the Fourier Transform&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;betterexplained.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;an-interactive-guide-to-the-fourier-transform&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;betterexplained.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;an-interactive-guide-to...&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;Others are smaller insights, written in a day (&amp;quot;Quick Insight: Easier Arithmetic With Calculus&amp;quot; -&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;betterexplained.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;calculus-arithmetic&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;betterexplained.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;calculus-arithmetic&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;p&gt;Others are more essays&amp;#x2F;thought pieces, learning strategies, etc.&lt;p&gt;Setting the expectation up front that not every post is a big thesis-style conclusion can take away the pressure to only create those. (You can have appetizers, entrees, and desserts on the menu!)&lt;p&gt;Often your big articles are built after working through ideas in smaller ones. (The Fourier Transform emerged after getting insights on e, imaginary numbers, Euler&amp;#x27;s Formula, degrees vs. radians, etc.).</text></comment>
<story><title>I&apos;ve decided to move on to Distill</title><url>http://colah.github.io/posts/2017-03-Distill/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tedmiston</author><text>&amp;gt; As colah.github.io has grown in prominence… Well, it’s been very rewarding, but it’s also been a bit uncomfortable.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; For one thing, it’s created very high standards for my writing. Most of my articles took 50-200 hours to write. I feel like I needed to live up to that quality with every post, but that means I can’t put out thoughts without investing a huge amount of energy.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve done a bit of blogging and this echoes my experience as well.  One successful posts precedes another, then you start to feel like you can&amp;#x27;t put out off-the-cuff type posts.  It&amp;#x27;s tough to follow up a rockstar post with an intermezzo.  So you invest more and more energy into each topic and post to ensure it&amp;#x27;ll be successful in whatever metric, and that mostly works, but then you publish few posts in very specific niches.&lt;p&gt;If anyone has advice for effectively blowing one&amp;#x27;s standards out of the water and publishing more smaller general pieces, I&amp;#x27;d love to hear that.  From this perspective, I admire how Fred Wilson blogs.&lt;p&gt;Edit: fixed typo</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Swizec</author><text>I struggle with this a lot and here is a truth: nobody cares.&lt;p&gt;Your blog is not a destination, each post is its own page. Those that are good are going to float and give you recognition and get a lot of traffic and build your brand and your audience.&lt;p&gt;The others nobody will see and they affect nothing.&lt;p&gt;The more you publish the more hits you&amp;#x27;ll have the better you&amp;#x27;ll get. Here is a fable:&lt;p&gt;The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the &amp;quot;quantity&amp;quot; group: fifty pound of pots rated an &amp;quot;A&amp;quot;, forty pounds a &amp;quot;B&amp;quot;, and so on. Those being graded on &amp;quot;quality&amp;quot;, however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an &amp;quot;A&amp;quot;.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the &amp;quot;quantity&amp;quot; group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the &amp;quot;quality&amp;quot; group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.</text></comment>