Here is something I've been working on about taking a step back and looking at the larger picture of improving your skills at photography.

I'm interested in feedback on it, what works, doesn't, needs to be expanded, or should be culled out.

In my opinion, most discussions about taking better pictures have a
misplaced level of specificity. People will ask which camera, or
lens, they should buy with little regard to what sort of photos they
want to take. Pronouncements will be made as absolutes, with little
understanding about about how and when they do and don't apply. I will
try to take a step back and treat photography as a do, (or tao, or
path), a set of skills that can always be sharpened but never
perfected.

The first thing to consider is the idea that the only people who
consider themselves to be experts in any field are those of
intermediate skills. The people who have learned enough to have
dramatically improved since they have started, but who haven't learned
enough to realize how little they know. If your goal is growth, your
opportunities for improvement (future strengths) are at least as
important as your current strengths.

In order to keep your skills at their sharpest at any activity, it is
worthwhile to practice and drill on, the fundamental skills. This
could be musicians playing scales, golfers at a driving range, martial
artists practicing kata the list is nearly infinite. I will list some
of these, and some ways you might learn, or practice them.

What follows is neither a comprehensive list of subjects, and is only
a brief overview of those subjects. It is meant only as a starting
place and each subject, practically each paragraph could be expanded
into a whole book.

Holding your camera:
I could make an argument that this is the most egregiously overlooked
photographic skill. It is something that I almost never see
discussed, but is probably responsible for as many lost shots, and
lost sharpness than almost any single other thing. In many situations
you can get around this by using a faster shutter speed and higher
ISO, in others you can use a tripod or monopod, but there will come a
time when there just isn't enough light and time or space for a
tripod.

Once you have learned some of the basics for how to hold your camera
steady, practice. Set up something to photograph, and practice
photographing it, with different lenses on your camera, at slower and
slower shutter speeds. Then pixel peep the images on your computer to
see how well you do.

As a point of reference, using a 31mm lens, in controlled
circumstances on a camera with image stabilization, I was able to
consistently shoot at 1/3 second without blur, and was still getting a
fair number of sharp photos at 1/2. In real world conditions, I found
that at 1/10 second using a monopod would dramatically improve my
keeper ratio.

Exposure:

On one hand, exposure is incredibly simple, and in good light it is so
straightforward that it can be figured out by a microprocessor that
costs less than a dollar. However, in challenging light, it is
necessary to make tradeoffs. ISO trades off with both noise and
dynamic range. Shutter speed and blur. Aperture can trade off with
depth of field, vignetting, exacerbating dust spots on the sensor,
sharpness, and diffraction. And of course, they all trade off against
one another.

There are different techniques for determining the appropriate
exposure such as expose to the right, using a grey card, spot
metering, center weighted, and of course chosing which side of the
triangle to let the computer automate (shutter speed, aperture, or ISO
sensitivity). You need to understand when to adjust exposure
automatically, and when to let the camera choose. Then there is the
question of when and how to bracket, and how ISO invarience can play a
role, or not in any of the above.

One of the best ways to learn exposure is to get a hand held meter and
spend time using it to get your initial exposure settings, take a test
shot, and after looking at the results (histogram) adjusting your
settings until you get what seems to be a good result. Then you need
to process your photos and take a look at what works, or doesn't, in
the final images. Once you can do it fairly well with a light meter,
do this exercise without a light meter. Look at the scene, take a
guess at the settings, and take a test shot based on your educated
guess, the adjust from there.

Doing this will force you to slow down and actually think about how
you are setting the camera and why. Just doing this can dramatically
improve your work. I know several people who complained that once they
went from shooting large format film (at several dollars every time
they take an exposure) to shooting digital the quality of their work
dropped significantly.

There are many things related to exposure that will ruin a photo. The
biggest tends to be blowing out highlights, possibly in only one color
channel. The second most common tends to be blur, either of the
subject or from moving the camera. Insufficient depth of field, in my
experience is less common than those, and the least common is noise
from underexposure or using too high of an ISO.

focal length:

People often think of focal length only in terms of how large a
subject is in the frame, but choosing focal length is often more
important in choosing what is in the background of a photo. If you
want to isolate your subject from the background, use a longer focal
length and angle of view of the background will be narrower, making it
easy to not show distracting or ugly items behind your subject. If
you want to show more context, use a shorter focal length, move closer
and the background will show a much wider angle of view.

One of the best ways to get a feel for this is to spend a lot of time
shooting at only one focal length. Put either a wide or a long prime
on your camera and shoot with only that lens for a while.

Learn about light:

The authors of the book "Light, Science and Magic" did a much better
job teaching about how to use light for photography than I can. Read
the book and do at least some of the exercises at the end of each
chapter. It doesn't have to be the most recent edition of the book
either.

Critique:

One of the most important skills you can develop is learning how to
take critique. When someone is telling you how your photo could be
better, they are trying to help you, they are not attacking you. When
possible, you should try to follow their advice, and compare the
results with the processing that you originally showed.

Do understand, however, that not everyone has the same idea of what
makes for a good photo. Seek out the advice of people who you consider
to do good work.

Find a community where good critiques are shared and read what people
say of each other's work. You can learn as much from reading what is
said about other photos as you can getting feedback on your own, and
your own feelings are less likely to get in the way.

Similarly, you should learn how to analyze other people's photos, and
how to reverse engineer them. What did they do, and why? How did they
set up the lighting?

Mindfully take a lot of photos:

To a first approximation it does not cost any money to take a digital
photo. Every time you have a few extra minutes you can wander around
with your camera and look for things to photograph. Don't worry about
getting great photos, think about getting the best photo of whatever
subject you see, with the resources you have.

Every time you do this, you learn a little bit and when you do get the
chance at that great photo, you have a much better chance of having
done something similar and learned what works better or worse rather
than needing to start from first principles. Often times, even saving
a few seconds can be the difference between getting a great shot for
your portfolio and missing the shot altogether.

Just as importantly, this exercise helps train you to see potential
photos. There are some places where it is hard to not get a decent
shot, but it takes practice to see the great photo in the same scene.

Take out everything that isn't great:

You don't make a great photo by putting more good stuff into it, you
make a great photo by taking out everything that isn't great. When you
are composing, and when you are editing, look for things that you can
take out.

Show less work:

You will be judged not by your best work, or even the overall quality
of your work, but by the weakest work that you show.

Gear:

Your equipment doesn't matter, except when it does. Your gear doesn't
affect the artistic quality of the photos that you take, it only
affects what photos you can take with it.

One of the most common discussion threads is about what gear to
buy. Before spending money on gear you should know what photographs
you want to take, why the gear you have doesn't work, and what gear
you need to get those photos.

In order to know those things you need to intimately know your
gear. The first thing you should do is to RTFM, Read The Fotographers
Manaul. Actually read the manual that came with your camera, spend
some time practicing using each of the functions, so that you
understand what they are for, and what their limitations are.

Similarly, when you have time while taking a shot, try taking it at a
wide variety of settings, different sensitivities and shutter
speeds. Bracket your exposures. And, when you are processing the
photos, not only see what did and didn't work, but understand why.

One area where it makes sense to invest in better gear sooner is
tripods and tripod heads. Almost everyone starts off with a cheap
tripod, goes through a series of progressively more expensive tripods,
shooting for a while with Manfroto RC2 quick releases, then finally
dropping the money on a decent Arca-Swiss based system.

You might as well just start out with an Arca-Swiss based system so
that you can at least reuse your quick release plates and some of your
heads, rather than investing in a lot of tripods and heads that you'll
never use again once you realize that they were crap and you need to
change systems.

Workflow:

Understand the full workflow of your photos. I often see people
bragging that a particular photo was "Straight out of the
camera". Straight out of the camera wasn't good enough for
photographers like Ansel Adams, I'm not as good a photographer as he
was, and if you are reading my advice chances are that you aren't
either.

Just using the JPEGS that your camera produces is either like taking
your film to the drugstore and throwing away your negatives after you
get the 4x6 prints, or alternatively mixing up all the ingredients for
your dinner, then giving them to someone else to cook.

Shoot raw files, or possibly raw+jpeg, learn how to process them into
the final image you want, and keep that whole process in mind when you
are taking photos in the first place.

One important aspect of workflow is how to organize your
photos on your hard drive. The processing software that you use today
might keep track of all of that for you, but for various reasons you
are likely to change the software at least once, and you want to be
able to find those photos.

Another important aspect is culling out everything but the very best
photos. I have found that the most time efficient way of doing this is
many fast passes, where I just weed out a few photos each time until
I've narrowed them down to a more reasonable group to select. At that
point, I will often ask someone else to go through and rate them as to
which ones they like the best to the worst.

Keep a diary:

As you progress on your journey as a photographer, you will learn a
tremendous number of things, and probably forget many of them. Take
notes about what you learned, things that you tried, things that you
want to try, and occasionally go back and review them.

Summary (TL;DR):

Books have been written about every topic that I mention. The
important takeaway it to think of photography (or any skillset) as a
life long opportunity for improving your skills, to think about what
each of those skills might be, and how to work at each of the smaller
skills that go into the full skillset.