I for one really enjoy reading other developers' blogs, and if it's really good I'll often binge read all their posts. I myself have a small personal blog that I've been working on, and am wondering what habits, or design traits should be avoided? I get the feeling we often copy others without knowing whether it's a good practice or bad habit.
Personally my list of pet peeves are:
- No code syntax highlighting. If code is the main focus of the blog, then why not make it look nice?
- (Stolen from Jeff Atwood) Blogging about blogging. It builds up junk content quickly that diminishes overall quality.
- Having an always visible side bar with your profile picture staring at the reader.
> Blogging about blogging
That's something we can agree on. If a "developer blog" has an article called "Why Every Developer Must Have a Blog", it's a strong signal of low quality content - it tells me that the author apparently likes to make sweeping generalizations without thinking about what they're saying. Either that, or they have nothing interesting to say about more substantive topics.
In fact, I suspect that blog posts like "Here's What I Have To Say About Rust After Using It For Two Weeks" are usually written by people who have just read an article about "Why Every Developer Must Have a Blog" and are now convinced that they desperately need their own blog, despite having nothing interesting to say.
> No code syntax highlighting
People have different tastes. Personally, I find it very distracting to be looking at code in a rainbow of different colors, with tokens like identifiers, keywords, numbers and strings all screaming for attention due to their unique coloring. All these types of tokens can be easily identified without syntax coloring if you're familiar with the syntax of just about any programming language. (The only syntax highlighting I ever use is to make comments slightly less emphasized than code.)
> Having an always visible side bar with your profile picture staring at the reader
Another thing we can agree on. What someone looks like has no bearing on how interesting their writing is, and I find it creepy to have someone staring at me from the screen while I'm trying to read.