You might have already noticed that I said ‘how I blog’ instead of the other 100,000 posts in other blogs telling you ‘why’ or even ‘how “you” can blog’. This post will only tell you about my method. My reason for this is because there are very, very few articles on the internet which cover the ‘how’ questions with regard to method, or even better…manner. If you look over the internet there are millions upon millions of blogs, I recently heard that there were 30 million blogs just in China! I will never even get a chance to evaluate some of the categories of blogs out there, let alone get a chance to look over a reasonable sample of what is out there…just as of today.
I’ve had a personal blog before, and from this experience I have learned a few obvious truths. First off, I try to post every day, because if I can’t maintain that low level of basic discipline, the reason for blogging starts to become a background issue (read: why even do it…).
While I do research into some specifics of many of my posts, generally I write the final draft of my post in one sitting and then post it as quickly as I can. In most cases I try to have the ideas in my head, and just write away in an almost impromptu manner (if you read many of my posts, sadly enough you might agree that this is how I did it…sigh…). I also don’t really propound real arguments or offer ‘position papers’, instead I try to ask questions, sometimes even rhetorical questions, in order to try to get you to think about the topic I just covered. As a result, while some of my arguments put for on any particular topic may not be as deeply researched as is humanly possible, I try to present my points as a gambit towards a real debate (between whom is another matter, I guess…).
So, as far as my manner of blogging goes, I choose to write (almost all of my posts) while I sit in various coffee shops. Caffeine is the drug of choice for writing and thinking, and here at this coffee shop I can get it fresh squeezed… I am sitting in a coffee shop right now. There are deeper reasons to write here, most important is that especially or bloggers, with small, if any readership (read: me…) there is a need to have some sort of human interaction in this matrix of creating a post. The idea of sitting in one’s underwear frantically typing away in the small hours of the morning is one I don’t want to find out about! Writing, for me, also takes a small amount of background noise (this is where a coffee shop comes in!). Sometimes I may even put on headphones and listen to any number of online radio or music stations (Pandora, Last.fm etc.).
This, so far, has shown you the setting for what I do on an almost daily basis. Most of my posts only take about 30 minutes to write, upload, and prepare for posting on my website. For me, this is not a “job,” this is a small hobby.
There are almost as many articles about the nature of what it is to write something as there are writer (this is not meant to be hyperbolic either!). The throes of how anyone gets anything onto a blank page are outside the scope of anything I could tell anyone (I don’t even consider myself to be a writer!).
In any case, with a reasonable draft written, I then copy it to my blog. I have had too many experiences of glitches and other random occurrences to trust writing straight into my blog on a regular basis. I find that it is much better to write in the word processor of your choice and then copy it to my blog interface.
This brings us to the place where blogging is mostly a focus. Once I have a post written and copied into my WordPress ‘front-end’, I can then deal with really prosaic topics like fonts, sizing, categories, tags, associated art work, links, and other eye-candy aspects of this hobby.
Then there are the real maintenance issues which relate to keeping up a hosted website. I have, beyond my WordPress front-end, the blog’s back-end, and the websites controls to deal with. This usually entails upgrading code, doing backups, configuring plugins; FTP uploads from my laptop of media, etc. There are also a lot of interesting opportunities to experiment and look into the mechanics of how websites really work. This is, to me, a really important point. I consider myself to me a citizen of the internet in that I have some property there. Actually anyone with a Twitter account, or a Facebook, My Space, Linkdin, Tumblr, WordPress.com, Blogger, or any other free services out there will have just as valid a claim to having internet ‘property’, but I want to actually look over my holdings. That is what having your own website is all about.
These small daily actions I take to maintain this small blog essentially connect me in deeper ways to the whole ocean of information and millions of people out there. There, I just added in the ‘why’.
