I'm Guilty of Bad Titles Too. Are You?

Bloggers, can we make better titles for our posts? michaelharley.net
By Michael Harley

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I came across this blog post by Michael Harley. I started following him after I came across some of his blog posts on bubbles.town (I want to call it button.town every time I type it, and I don't know why 😀).

But he does have a point, and I am guilty of making bad titles too. In fact, if it were up to me, I probably wouldn't have any titles. But I think most things in writing do deserve titles and subjects. Even emails, although I don't like filling out the subject line most of the time.

He argues:

Use descriptive titles #

Please for the love of god, give me some idea what your blog post is about. I'm interested in a wide range of topics. So even if your post is about something obscure, give me something other than Recent Thoughts... or So Far, So Good. Recent thoughts on what?! What is good so far??? Especially on Bubbles, but maybe even on other blog aggregators, the title is the main signal so pause for a beat and try to come up with a decent title for your blog post.

— By Michael Harley · Bloggers, can we make better titles for our posts? michaelharley.net

I think he's right about that. A title doesn't need to be clever or optimized for search engines. It just needs to give people some idea of what they're about to read.

But I have to disagree with his other point:

Avoid bucket posts

I think this one might be a bit unpopular but I do not like the round-up posts. You know the ones. They're titled Week Notes, Week in Review, Weekly Links and the like.

I think these kinds of updates are totally acceptable, and I learn a lot by reading them. In fact, I am long overdue for a subscription update myself.

I have also been trying to do more of his next item: writing posts in reply to other people. Especially since I am using webmentions everywhere I can and self-hosting and publishing the replies myself.

In the end, I enjoy reading Michael's posts, and he usually, like Kev Quirk, gives me ideas about how to shape my blogs and my posting, and even how to practice replying to other blog posts.

So go check out Michael Harley and bubbles.town.