I’m up again after snatching another hour of sleep or so. Before I go to the office, I thought I’d ask the blogosphere (does anyone still use this term? Does it exist?) what makes a good blog good?

This is a question I kind of answered before, when I explained what blogs I usually add to my blogroll. Two main things:

  1. A blog by one person, not a group (or a publication of sorts)
  2. That person publishes posts regularly (once a week or so at least)

These are good, but they are guidelines more than explanations. So what is “good” blog, anyway?

One of the first things that comes to mind is the quality of the writing. It’s hard to pin down, because it can vary from those who write beautiful essays to those who prefer a quick list of links with explanations. Also, I tend to find that people who write about something they’re passionate about are usually interesting and the writing quality takes a second or even a third place, if they include photos or something else that presents what they do.

Writing is still important. It’s not about grammar and typos (though those have their respectful plce) as much as it is about style and confidence. I’m not sure how to put it into the right words, but you can tell when you read a blog by someone who writes often. I think some popular bloggers “wrote it until they made it,” in a way. They’ve been at it for long enough to know how to write well enough, and their style is prominent. You know it’s there when you read it.

Most bloggers use a service for their blog, myself included, which is why it’s even more important that a “good” blog has a certain personality that shows through the service’s default template. Certain visual tweaks, perhaps, or a logo, or some plugin that does something different beyond the usual things, like emails and comments. For example, Sacha Chua writes almost exclusively about Emacs and Lisp, but she sometimes includes sketches and mindmaps as the visual person she is. Annie has a rather simple Micro.blog-themed blog, but she has a Guestbook with sketches. Sal, who has a “plain”, simple-looking blog, writes about other things besides tech (even though he’s a tech guy), showing his readers who he is as a person.

Then there’s the matter of website maintenance itself. Not everyone’s a techie, and that’s good (I keep saying we need more non-techies to blog), but if someone has a blog, they should care about it. These days, this usually means a theme that looks OK on both a computer screen and a smartphone, an RSS feed, and an ad-free experience. I would also like to say no heavy scripts loading in the background, but some folks who use certain services don’t really have a choice; they just use what’s given to them. Still, keeping links working, a good archive, a working search… in my mind, these are the equivalent of keeping your home clean and tidy, at least to a degree.

What do you think?