Articles in Hongkiat | Some Readers FAQ

By . in Blogging. Updated on .

I’ve been stacking up emails in my inbox with questions, problems, suggestions, etc regarding articles at hongkiat.com and I’ve been replying on a routine basis, answering with similar answers from time to time. So I thought to make things a little easier for me, I might as well publish a blog post. For those that I’ve missed replying your email, I apologize and if you think I really need to read the email please insert ‘ATTENTION:‘ before your title.

I’ll try to make things as easy to understand as possible in a Q&A format below, if you think I’ve missed something important, please drop a comment.

  1. How do you manage to get ideas for your article ?

    Couple of ways actually.

    Individual references – As a web designer come, developer, I faced the same problem as any designers and bloggers out there. We ran out of ideas, we need to find stock photos, free vectors, always looking out for cool AJAX scripts, WordPress plugins and fixes, etc. And I though since I’m already out there searching for these, I might as well collect some couple of dozens as alternatives and references, and the best part, I can share with people of the same interest. That’s mostly how blog posts are created.

    Readers feedback – Anytime when blog posts were made, I’ll receive feedback in an email or comment box (and I appreciate that) with related suggestions and comments. For that, I’ll usually initiate a blog post because that’s what readers truly want to read.

    Read a lot– I read a lot of feeds on daily basis. If there are some cool ideas and interesting topics, I’ll write. Now that being said, if someone wrote an mashup of 20 cool stuffs, I’ll will not recompile it to 15 cool stuffs or 25 cool stuffs. It doesn’t work like that. You need to ‘enhanced’ the existing by broaden up the perspective, or at least put efforts in researching and put up something 2-3 times more. Proper credit needs to be given if you are inspired by any specific article directly.

    Sequel – Whenever a post is published and if the responses are fairly higher than the normal blog post, I’ll consider a sequel. Sequels will have to be way better than part 1 and they will take more time to compile.

    Left right, up down – Take the Best Photoshop Text Effects blog post for example. When the article was published, I started considering related topics left right up down. Perhaps readers might be interested in Photo effects as well? or how about free alternatives of Photoshops? These are some stuff I’ll start pondering.

    Be alert – Be alert and keep yourself updated with the up-coming trends and news within your niche. Not only I strive to be the first few to blog about it, but also to find related resources and do problem-solving. The WordPress image upload fix here is a good example.

  2. How long does it take produce an article ?

    I can’t really give a fair number, neither in a unit of hours nor days because they really vary. Some researching articles take weeks (to months) and some take up a couple of 3-4 hours or half a weekend day. This article, for example, took me 1 hour before sleep.

  3. Can I copy recommend your articles in my blog, to my readers?

    That depends on how you do it. If you:

    • Reproduced head to toe. – It’s a No even if you insert credit link back at the bottom (or top)
    • Take a small portion, and link the rest back to the origin – Yes.
    • Take a small portion, and take the images (images I manually produced) – Normally it’ll be a Yes, but please send me an email first :-)
    • Create a link-mashups –Yes.
    • Images hot-linking – No.
  4. Images are loading real slow, can you shorten up the blog post?

    There has been a couple of email feedback from users suggesting that blog post should be shorter as images are taking a hard time to load. I’d like to apologize for the inconvenience caused. The reason why I liked to produce a greater list in mash-ups is that it gives you more alternatives. In terms of images loading problem in feed, I’ve migrated all images to Amazon S3, which in my opinion loads faster and better efficiency. I hope this solves the problem, even though it’s going to cost me money on the bandwidths.

  5. Do you take freelance writers?

    Not officially but I’m keen in getting co-authors, with a revenue-sharing model. Please contact me if you are interested.

  6. Do you write for other blogs?

    Not at the moment, but occasionally when I feels like it :-)

    7. So again, if there is anything I’ve missed drop me a message. More articles coming right up but for now it’s time to sleep :-)

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