How to (not) write a blog

Hello there.

For quite a long while now, I've had a lack of interest in the recent user blogs section. Although you do find some really good and informative content occasionally, for the most part, I would easily spot several problems in the blogs posted there. Laughing at those minor errors can be fun for a while, but seeing not much improvement here in the long run really isn't. So, I thought, how could I potentially help in raising the general quality of the daily blogs? Now, here's where we begin...

Alright, so, before we go into what we shouldn't do, we need to first see an example of a bad blog.

Here's a sample bad blog I've written for the sole purpose of this.

Now, tell me. Is it bad?

I bet your opinion on that unlisted blog is negative. But what exactly makes it bad?

Bad title, bad thumbnail, horrible use of quick links / headers, bad use of basic styling, capital letter spam, emoji spam, horrible spelling and grammar, irrelevant information, irrelevant image, poor formatting and lack of content.

Oh and also, it immediately spoiled the pun.

Of course, those are not the only things that drag a blog's quality. Other stuff such as excessive css spam and codes that end up breaking the website should be avoided too. Proofread and test your blog before you upload it. If your grammar skills aren't exactly great, don't hesitate to try out grammarly or anything like that. Those tools would be great for fixing pre-existing grammatical and spelling mistakes and they also grade your work out of 100 so you can see how well-written your blog really is.

Now that we've seen an absolute nightmare of a blog, let's have a look at something you should definitely look up to. Chinese History 101 is a blog series created by cuotak, who, in my honest opinion, is very underrated as a blogger. This series involved heavy and detailed research as well as a lot of interesting information that is somewhat obscure to the Western world. At the end of each blog, there is a summary of what was mentioned in that blog as well as a short introduction of the topic of the following blog, which establishes a connection within the series.

Also, obviously, good use of images, relevant headings and the hyperlinks to articles of different historical events contribute to the great overall quality too.

The section immediately above was primarily for informative blogs, now let's hop onto others. Some may think that personal blogs are unwelcome as they do not educate the readers about any event or piece of information that is really useful. That is definitely not true. This completely depends on the blog itself. Just like informative blogs, you would also need good grammar, good spelling, context, etc. My first feature by SWATkun is a pretty good example of this. The blog covered the background, is full of relevant information and contains relevant hyperlinks. Now, you may argue that there are a couple grammatical errors in the blog. Yes, but those errors are very minor and the average reader might not notice it. Though I'm not saying that you can be lazy and leave in errors here and there if you feel like to, minor and less obvious errors are certainly acceptable.

Remember, the topic doesn't matter as long as it does not make a lot of people uncomfortable. The blog will be welcome as long as it is neatly written.

Those were some nice examples, now let's dive into a very popular blog series - Interview of a JetPunker by baptistegorce (you may also know him as Poirot). Poirot is a popular user on the website and is known as the "dictator of Interviews" in the blogging community. This series by him involves introducing mostly popular JetPunk users by having them answer a few questions. These blogs allow people to understand what goes through other active members of the community. They are incredibly interesting and I certainly recommend reading them through.

Oh and also, the 12th interview is still one of the most liked non-official blogs on the website.

When you see anything wrong about the blog and have ideas for potential improvements, just write it out, but in a nice way obviously. Constructive criticism is welcome, but excessive ranting about anything without any suggestions really isn't a great way to help out the new bloggers.

Oh and also, if you yourself can't even create a blog that's in any way better, I don't exactly recommend nitpicking in the comment section. It only paints a bad picture of yourself.

Alright, I think that's all I want to say here. It's been a while since I've written a blog as I'm not really a fan of the RUB. Let's hope that we can see more interesting (and accurate) content here in the near future.

Oh, by the way, if you ignore this and continue releasing terrible content...

Happy Blogging.