For what they're worth, here are some of the blogging principles I try to stick to as much as possible.

Avoiding controversy

I'm aware that the world outside is a mixture of positive and negative, good and bad, right and wrong. I'm not going too deep into the philosophical or religious aspects of this. All I can say is that there are thousands of websites out there which allow discussion of controversial topics and I try not to be one of them.

I've had my fair share of rants, but I've consciously tried to avoid voicing my thoughts on negative or controversial topics. I am especially wary about being critical of other people and issues of world-wide magnitude. Flame wars are a strict no-no on this blog.

Keeping it varied

I try not to dwell too much on the same topic again and again. I know this is easier said than done, but when I find that I have nothing much to say on a particular issue, I don't raise that issue at all. I've abandoned a lot of drafts in this manner after realizing that I've either said all I wanted to say before or really don't care much about the issue I've started writing about.

This is also a reason why I started doing cartoons and other features. It's a nice change of pace and adds colour to an otherwise dull blogging routine.

Keeping it light

Original humour is very creatively very demanding, but I have consciously followed the policy of making a few light, humourous posts every now and then to maintain a positive feel to this blog. Too many serious articles tend to weigh heavily on readers over a period of time.

For the same reason, I avoid being too personal in my writings.

Keeping it (reasonably) informative

I've been a bit lazy about sharing information in the past, but I have realized the importance of documenting certain information even if only to remind myself of something in the future. For instance, I tend to get something to work in Linux after a lot of fiddling around and then months later, I keep wondering how I got it to work and repeat the whole procedure all over again.

Sometimes it's a non-technical issue, but mostly it's technical in nature, so I decided that nothing is too insignificant for documentation - in fact, the more obscure the information, the better.

Keeping it content-rich

I have a morbid dread of one-liners. I've seen a lot of bloggers post one-liners regularly and it seems to work for them but somehow I've never got myself to do that. In the past my posts have tended to run too long, but these days I try to maintain a balance. Short posts are good for variety but even in my longer articles, I try to avoid large blocks of paragraphs without breaks. More recently, I've started using structuring (like headings, bulleted and numbered lists and so on) to vary the monotony of large chunks of text.

I'm still not sure how many people appreciate reading my longer posts though

I know that most of my regular readers will be aware of these aspects, but I thought I would make a post about it anyway. If any of you have blogging principles like these, I would be interested to know what they are.