"Title First" is the name of a new process I'm trying with my writing. Rather than having a topic and wanting to write about it, I instead come up with a title that has some 'bite' and then the content follows on. As I wouldn't dare to write about something which I haven't the foggiest, it doesn't mean the content is necessarily all going to be attention grabbing fluff (just some of it ;-)). This idea stemmed from some fine advice from Brian Clark, the "CopyBlogger".

My first try at "Title First Writing" was with yesterday's post on Ruby Inside entitled "19 Rails Tricks Most Rails Coders Don't Know". I had an internal debate about this post title while writing the post. I knew many of the entries were not 'tricks', but rather just techniques or tools. I also knew that it was not necessarily that most Rails coders "don't know" them, but rather that they don't seem to be commonly used. Still, as Brian explains, being 'technically correct' is not the same as being 'effectively correct', and Title First Writing assumes that you want to be effective.

The results? Well, within 24 hours the Rails Tricks post hit the top of the current most popular links on del.icio.us, with over 500 bookmarks, and the post has already attracted a few thousand pageviews. Even RubyInside.com itself only has about 100 del.icio.us links, so this is great. What I want to see, though, is if it affects FeedBurner feed subscriptions at all..

(Update: The post is now over 6000 page views.)