Blogging Routines

Over the years of blogging, my methods and tendencies have evolved. For instance, when I first started blogging with Jeremy over at Ensight back in 2003, I had little desire to blog or how to blog. My life was wrapped in a “forum mentality”. It was something to do and something to try.

In those days, we setup a Moveable Type blog and haphazardly blogged about whatever. Looking back, there was no real cohesiveness to blogging in general or in my personal style. It’s actually embarassing.
When I began blogging at Technosailor in May of 2004, it was, again, something to do. There was no direction or aim - just a desire to be occupied by something.

The next phase of my life as a blogger came in the fall of 2004. I was actively and proactively blogging the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, and had gained quite a small following of political hounds who enjoyed the back and forth. My sources were generally mainstream, pulling from sites like CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews and Drudge.

After the 2004 election, I was really tired of politics and turned to blogging other things. I created a few WordPress themes, published them and, as a result, found a whole new breed of traffic coming my way - bloggers. It was during this time that this site reached 8000 unique monthly visitors which was pretty dramatic for me.

The next wave of growth really didn’t come around until August 2005 when I began to reconnect with Jeremy with whom I had had a lengthy falling out with over Ensight over a year earlier. We agreed to write You Can Blog together. Hurricane Katrina struck the mainland U.S. at the end of August and my life changed. I spent three weeks in Mississippi with 15+ guys I had never met on a recovery trip with my company. That trip forced me into a non-isolationist mentality that I had been operating in for so long. I realized that I was better working with people than I was working alone. And it came to life in my blog.

Upon returning to Maryland, I continued working with Jeremy on the book discovering the power of so many of the things we were writing about and that Iknew in principle but did not know in practice.

For instance, RSS is such a powerful medium. It is especially critical for bloggers who keep several blogs. Using RSS, I quickly aggregate information and news from a variety of different sources and have it organized topically. If I need Web 2.0 news, I have a folder in Bloglines just for that. Faith… Believe it or not, I’ve got 10 feeds I’ve subscribed to from churches or ministries. I’ve even started really “getting” the emergant church movement such as Darren’s Living Room pseudo church “thing”.

November came around and I was first introduced to b5media. Ha! What a ride that little email from Jeremy would introduce. Essentially, he wanted to know if I wanted to make a couple hundred dollars to simply write an import script for the b5media-About Weblogs merger. Sure, I said, not knowing that the import script writing would actually turn into managing the entire technical side of the migration.

By the middle of December, I had joined b5media as a blogger for Emerging Earth. This was a watershed moment as it was the first time I branched out from a single blog to multiple blogs - another trend that carries through to today.

Tangent: Joining a network was probably one of the best things for my development as a blogger. It put me into direct relationship with other bloggers - relationships that will carry on long past my time with b5media. Not only that, it put me in cahoots with high profile bloggers like Darren, Duncan, Scott and Tris. You see, blogging is all about relationships. No man is an island.

Over the past few years, my path has meandered sometimes aimlessly. My role today is, as I see it, completely by accident. I am not the typical blogger that is famous for his writing. My role is a combination of writing and support. By support, I mean, I do things that allow other bloggers to do their job well and I make it easy for them. This takes the form of an upcoming book for new bloggers, supporting servers for over 100 blogs and assisting in WordPress patching, writing import scripts and deployments. I have been asked a number of times to assist in moving from one blog platform to another or move from server to server (most notably the transfer of the Blog Herald). My role is know-how.

Some bloggers are good at monetizing their blogs, while others are superb writers. My strength is in the invisible, but critical, workings of a blog.

I now have six blogs: Technosailor, Emerging Earth, an emerging technology review, Alpha Tango, a journal of a walk of faith, The Not So Free State, a cynical look at Maryland politics, That Damn PC, a blog about managing a Windows XP computer, and Observing You, an irreverent people watching blog. In addition, I contribute weekly to ProBlogger in the area of technical “how-to” for probloggers.

Each blog has it’s own demands and requirements. I usually scour Bloglines for new entries based on the blog I’m going to write for. Remember, everything is organized by topic. When I find a story, I’ll generally run the topic through Google and Technorati to find out what else is being said about the topic.

A prime example was a story that broke earlier this evening surrounding Engadget and plagiarism. When I first picked that story up off of RSS, I wrote an initial post taking a defined stance of neutrality. I think it’s impossible to know both sides of the story fully. I did some Googleing and Technorati’ing and read some of the other opinions out there. This is usally the routine.

Depending on what time I am blogging and which blog I am writing to, I’ve got different approaches to writing. For instance, with Technosailor I usually write directly inside WordPress. The reason for this is my use of tagging which is best implemented directly inside WordPress. When I’m blogging from work, or for blogs such as ProBlogger, I use Ecto. Ecto is a nice desktop editor that has advanced features like date/time configuration (required for ProBlogger which is in Melbourne, Australia - GMT +11) and proxy configuration (required to post through the proxy at work).

Most of my other blogs get the love of Qumana though, which I’ve reviewed here. Qumana has grown on me a bit since that initial review - mostly due to the due diligence and open dialogue from Arieanna and Ianiv, the main developers. Every issue I’ve had, they’ve been tremendous assistance with.

Finally, as a “support” style blogger, my blogging landscape would not be complete multiple instances of multiple different blog platforms where I sandbox my experiments with code, plugins and effects. I’m constantly trying to make life better for b5media bloggers, and really any blogger who wants my help. I also consistently have multiple SSH windows monitoring core performance on servers, etc.

Man… I’ve rambled, eh?

Tagged as: b5media, Blogging, problogger, WordPress, Writing