The rebirth of Russ and Diego as bloggers has reminded me - not that my stats haven't been telling me for a while - that this blog has been crawling along. The posting has been sporadic, and whilst I've been quite happy with the quality of most of the content, the focus and sheer volume of interesting posts hasn't been there. Two or three years ago I was posting at least one item a day every day, it's now slowed to one a week (if you're lucky), sure there used to be more dross, but also more useful nuggets. I suspect the signal to noise ratio was little different, and it was a more interesting read overall.
So, to get back to those heady levels I'm going to re-embrace some of the techniques I used then, and bone up on a few of the strategies in the following guides:
- ProBlogger: 31 Days to Building a Better Blog
- Dive Into Accessibility 30 days to a more accessible web site
- Business Blogs: How to Build A Better Blog
- The Mark Twain Guide to Better Blogging
I suspect the two Mark's are the ones I'm going to take most seriously, I wonder if Mark Twain has joined Google yet? It certainly looks like it...
Returning to the main theme, the most productive technique I used was to have one (just one) large text file in which I wrote all my draft posts. In this file I scribbled short sentences, ideas, and saved links for later use. I have tried other strategies (multiple files, dumping links on delicious, editing on a wiki), but none worked as well for me as one big melting pot. I'll use Unison to keep the file synched on multiple boxes, so I can take notes wherever I happen to be. I'm also going to be jotting down notes on the most interesting stuff I talk about on im or irc as some of that probably deserves a bigger audience.
