Making Your Writing Work Harder For You
This was partly in response to a conversation Thomas and I have been having lately with some people from the Internets, about the value of blogging in one's professional capacity.  His take was "Have a blog, but don't call it a blog."  I thought that was generalizable to a larger segment of the operations of product businesses than just blogging.  They're generally called "content marketing" these days but I hate that word -- if someone has a better one, please suggest it.<p>By the way, if you're a regular-ol'-geek and wondering "I wonder if writing about technical topics could help me career-wise", the answer is "Absolutely yes."  You can use blogging <i>software</i> but it probably isn't your benefit to adopt the blogging <i>format</i> of 500 ~ 1,000 word articles displayed in reverse chronological order about disconnected topics.  Instead, you could make it a goal to write three pieces and polish them to a mirror shine.<p>(Related advice that I find myself saying frequently: If you publish OSS and expect to get anything via doing so, don't just drop the OSS on github.  Spend the extra bit of time packing it into a site with a getting-started guide, a visual identity distinct from "Github rendering a Readme file", and the request that interested people $TAKE_THE_ACTION_YOU_WANT_THEM_TO_TAKE.