Writing Tips : Should I write off-topic posts?

 

writing

I’m a Jedi master at writing off-topic posts! This blog started life as an Oracle blog, but now I just write reviews of Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey. 🙂

The simple answer is you should do what you are happy with. I had been writing on my website for 5+ years before I started this blog. When I started the blog, I thought it would be technical. It quickly became apparent that the Oracle content was better suited to my website and the blog became a series of opinions, rants, movie reviews and book reviews. That’s why I changed the tag line to, “Oracle related rants (and lots of off-topic stuff)”.

I know in the early days that kind-of frustrated a lot of people. I used to receive negative emails and comments about it all the time. That doesn’t happen much these days because most readers seem to have become accustomed to my stance of “Oracle content goes on the website. Bullshit goes on the blog.” I’m sure some people would say bullshit goes on both. 🙂

Blogging platforms allow you to categorise and tag your content. I would suggest you make use of that so if someone is really irritated by off topic posts, they can avoid them.

Speaking for myself, I like to read the off-topic posts written by people I follow. It gives me some insight into the person and makes me feel connected. If I actually meet them in person, I feel almost like I know them already. It’s kind-of freaky! 🙂

If you find yourself consistently writing about a completely different subject, you might want to consider starting up a new blog. I’ve written some MySQL and SQL Server articles and put them on oracle-base.com, but if I ever start doing more of them, I would probably branch them off into a separate blog. It’s not necessary, but would seem a little cleaner to me.

Check out the rest of the series here.

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

4 thoughts on “Writing Tips : Should I write off-topic posts?”

  1. Well… up to a point. If you ever find that posts on this blog that are about or related to cats rises above around 6.2%, you’re going down a very dark road.

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