Jun 12, 2006 | blog
I’ve been looking for better tools to write, manage, and post to my blog lately – and I’m still looking. The freebie tools are interesting, but are not working that well for me. w.bloggar is about the best one for post creation, and it lets me save posts as files on my PC, so I could manage them in a set of folders prior to posting.
Writely is another tool I’ve been using to write & manage, but not to post. I had been posting directly from Writely, but it soon started to display this ugly skill of skewering my blog layout. The first time I thought it was something I did and it took me about 2 days to track it down, then I wised up.
So this past week I started trying to use Microsoft’s OneNote 2003/2007 as my blog post manager. While it does not have the ability to post directly to a blog, it seemed to be a great way to organize by folders, tabs, and pages all the research, pictures, links, and posts for my blog.
While OneNote is great at doing exactly the thing I was hoping for – organizing & managing the research and post creation – it failed at the most simply thing. Or at least Windows did – Copy & Paste.
When I copied the post text and pasted it into WordPress, the full HTML formatting followed the text. Now maybe I’m being stupid again (shh…), and there is a simple way in Windows/Office/OneNote to copy only the text – like when you paste in most Office apps, you can choose unformatted text as an option. If there is will someone point that out to this slow IT guy? 🙂
If I can get past the copy & paste issue, I’ll be using OneNote full time. I’m about ready to try and request the product at work, it is that helpful to the way I work. Being able to combine all forms of digital information into one page is huge – makes me want to get a Tablet PC ;).
Jun 9, 2006 | blog
Easton Ellsworth talks about how his passion and interest in reading sometimes keeps him from blogging and asks what is the biggest time-waster for everyone else. I know what he means, I’ve got around 120 feeds that I follow daily, and would not be able to do that if it were not for RSS Readers! It takes up a lot of time.
But even aside from reading, simply needing to do the work necessary for the day job takes up most of my time. While I love blogging, it currently doesn’t pay the bills, and I’m making a little progress in ‘climbing the corporate ladder’, so I might as well stick it out awhile longer.
Hmm, other than that I guess I’d have to add that simply taking time to relax and spend some ‘down time’ is another thing that takes time away from blogging for me. This is kind of frustrating in a way because I have a few ‘special project blogs’ that I’m trying to make progress on, and simply can’t find more time to get them to that magical point yet.
Anyway, I’m curious as well – what keeps you from, or interrupts you from blogging?
Jun 3, 2006 | blog
I was just reading Kent Newsome’s post ‘The Swift Way to Blog Stardom‘, and then read Seth Godin’s ‘How to get traffic for your blog‘. The point Kent is making is that there is no sure and easy way to ‘make’ a successful blog.
People will find you – there is no doubt about that, but for you to be successful as a blogger is another thing entirely. If you’re starting a blog for personal reasons, to have a platform of you own for ranting, raving, complaining, praising, then do it for those reasons alone. If you want to start a blog for making money – then plan it that way from the outset in design, content and tone.
Blogs are unique because of the uniqueness of each individual that contributes to them. Since we all have different views of the same kinds of experiences, our writing and discussions reflect that.
The point being that if your blogging to be popular, than you may be disappointed. Be prepared to work hard at your content, style and topics if you want to draw crowds.
And if you really interested, check out Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger blog – he has a huge amount of information on being a professional blogger.
May 30, 2006 | blog
It seems that Performancing has been having some difficulty the past few days. The details are a bit fuzzy, though it seems that their systems are receiving data, but are unable to keep up on processing it.
On Saturday, May 27th, Nick Wilson mentioned that they were working on the issue:
Just to let you know that we’re aware of the reported metrics problem and are on the case Please give us a little time to work out whats going on and how to sort it and I’ll post back here when we have any news.
It looks like the problem started around mid-day on Saturday, and has continued on for the past four days. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to view your metrics while the system is having issues.
I’ve been using the metrics for a few months now and view them as very accurate and have been helpful to me in understanding my traffic patterns. The loss of Performancing right now is only slight – I am mostly using it for my own curiosity, though I’m anxious to view my traffic for the last few days.
May 26, 2006 | blog
Last time I used w.bloggar was a few months ago, probably in January. I have been looking for a really good offline blogging tool. Something that allows me to create, save and store posts offline prior to publishing them on my blog. Of course, I don’t really want to spend any money on a tool so I’ve been searching and trying most of the freeware blogging tools.
I understand that there are several commercial tools that may fit the bill, but I’ve not researched all those yet. So I have gone back and taken another look at w.bloggar, a feature packed freeware blogging tool. To my surprise, it has been updated since I visted the site last. Some new features and support for MSN Spaces has been added. Anyway, this post is my first one written in the latest version of w.bloggar.
Since MS Word 2007 is supposed getting an injection of blog posting tools, we’ll see how the two stack up as Word matures from beta code to RTM. The one thing I think both of these tools are never going to support is a WordPress plugin I have installed on my blog that automatically inserts a Technorati tag into each post – all I have to do on the post editing page is to enter a few keywords. This means that I’ll have to visit my site after posting to add the Technorati tags. I’ll keep you posted as I discover the pros and cons of w.bloggar.
