From an interview by Cynthia Dunlop of Simon Willison, co-creator of Django, and prolific blogger and technical writer:

Any lessons learned that you want to share with the community?

My number one tip for blogging is to lower your standards! Aim to hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all.

Nobody will ever know how perfect the thing you intended to write would have been. The flaws you see in your writing are invisible to everyone else.

Oh, how perfect is this advice, and how much I feel this is pointing exactly towards me!

I’ve been blogging, off-and-on, since 2007, and I have the drafts and half-formed ideas to show for it. You’ll find, if you go through the history and pace of my writing and posting, how much and how little I have actually published over various periods of time. Over the recent years, it’s not that I have had fewer things to say, write, or comment about. Instead, the crunch is in the time I have available to put together pieces, whether small or substantial, that I think are good enough to publish.

For someone like me, Willison’s advice couldn’t have been framed any better. But. Hitting publish while unhappy is all fine and dandy, if I’m at least satisfied I’ve made the point or the contribution I thought I could make. There’s unhappiness, and there are standards, no? I like how John Gruber put it commenting on the same piece — as playing live music rather than recording an album — keeping it professional and high quality but not sweating the occasional wrong note.

I do need to hit publish more often, though. So, here goes — publishing while I’m still actively unhappy with this piece.

∞

One of my long-time to-do’s for this blog was to be able to create “linked-list” type posts, where the main heading points, not to a single webpage for the dedicated blog post, but to an external website of interest. (This type of post has been made famous by John Gruber, who is, incidentally, also the creator of the Markdown syntax.)

Well, now I know how to do this (evidence—this post! Ta-da! The title for this post points to The Candler Blog). It turns out it’s not too difficult, but even so, I had help all the way, from The Candler Blog. He has this same implementation, and it turns out, he also has a blog post dedicated to discussing how he did it!

Okay, so, “Daring Fireball-style Linked List posts,” for the uninitiated, refers to the publishing style of John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. For the most thorough explanation of how this works, see Shawn Blanc’s excellent 2009 article, “The Link Post” […]

But how is it done in Octopress? It’s actually very simple. I got a great deal of help, when I was first setting up the site, from Connor Montgomery, who posted his own link post tutorial a few weeks ago. I have since refined the code on my site beyond what we worked out together.

(The Candler Blog website seems otherwise very interesting as well. Go check it out!)

∞

I’ve recently discovered Markdown by John Gruber, and it’s a nifty (and absolutely awesome) writing tool. If you prefer (like I do) doing the bulk of your writing in a text editor—rather than a word processor—Markdown is quite incredible.

And if you do all your writing in a word processor, try this out, seriously. Write everything up in a text file, without bothering about fonts or styles or page margins, and then import the document into your favorite word processor for styling. Personally, it’s less distracting, and more productive.

Just so you know—this post is written in Markdown, and then uploaded as HTML.

What Markdown is, is essentially a new ‘markup’ syntax (notice the irony in the name?). For example, HTML is a markup language—you do all your writing in a text file, and then you tag the text to give it different effect. HTML has different tags for linking, adding text effects, and a bunch of other things. Do you use (or have heard of) LaTeX? That’s another markup language: you do all your writing in a text file and then add tags to style the document.

The difference in case of Markdown is this: the tags it uses are all punctuation marks and symbols that we normally use anyway, for example in email. How would you show emphasis in a chat message? By using *, like this: *emphasis*. In Markdown you’d use the exact same syntax. It makes your text readable in addition to having all the markup included.

The only problem with writing all your text in a text file is, you have to go back into your word processor and actually add the styling—for example, the headings must be bold and a larger font, and you have to add the styling for subscripts and superscripts. With Markdown, all that is already done in the text file itself!

The natural export from Markdown is HTML (it’s tailored for web writing), but it’s elementary to import the HTML styled text into a word processor. And until you actually do that, you still have a text file that perfectly readable! (In addition, I think there are scripts available that do a direct conversion from Markdown text to MS-Word format. There’s also the [Dingus page][linkdingus] at Daring Fireball) to see your Markdown handiwork.

Excellent creation, John Gruber. I’ve been a fan of your tech-writing for a while now; now I also know why Markdown is so popular.