What Is Technical Blogging?

The most generic definition of blog (an amalgamation of the words web and log) is a site that contains a series of posts organized in reverse chronological order. This sterile definition doesn’t quite convey what people really think when they hear the word blog, though.

In the collective mind, the word blog sometimes calls forth a picture of a writer in pajamas, talking about his or her daily life. Many of the concepts we’ll cover in this book will be beneficial to those who want to start such a personal blog; however, our focus is specifically centered around technical blogging.

A technical blog is a nonfiction blog, the main subject matter of which is technical—rather than personal—in nature. Generally, you won’t delve into what you had for lunch or include pictures of your newborn nephew. Instead, you’ll use your blog as a way to share your expertise with others in your field.

Examples of some popular technical blogs that you might already be familiar with include TechCrunch (tech news), Engadget (gadget news), Joel on Software (programming), Signal v. Noise (entrepreneurship), Coding Horror (programming), Troy Hunt (tech security), and Seth’s Blog (marketing),^[2] to name a few.

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Figure 1. A sample of a popular blog

As a developer and web entrepreneur, I imagine my ideal readers to be developers and technically minded entrepreneurs who are blogging about software development and business-related subjects, respectively.

Fitting into one camp or the other isn’t a requirement, though. You may be launching a blog about biotechnology, dentistry, or photography, and the content of this book would still apply to you. In fact, you could be using the information from within this book to promote a mom-and-pop type of shop, and you’d still be able to derive useful guidance to succeed in your content marketing efforts.