brite fisher

More Difficult than I Thought

Well, I've been blogging for a a couple weeks now, I have 6 posts of questionable quality and I've got to say this is pretty hard.  I always knew this would take a bit o work, but I figured a couple minutes each day and I could have a post or two a week.  Man was I wrong.

The first thing I've found is that taking a minute here and there doesn't work so well for me.  Each time I come back to a piece of writing and try to pick up where I left off it doesn't end up making  as much sense.  I need to sit down and get, at the very least, chunks done, preferably the whole piece.

Research is a pain.  I had been leading up to this blog for a long time now and had a number of ideas to blog about jotted down but it's still pretty difficult to do all the leg work.  I would remember about blog posts that I had read that would be great to link to for an article but of course there's no way I'm going to find it again after a couple of months. 

I tend to write most of my posts in notepad, with all the links dumped in below what I'm writing.  I then copy it into Typepad and add all the links in after.  This ends up taking a lot of time, scrolling through the post to try and find everything.  I could write it directly in they Typepad interface and add the links as I go but I feel like that cuts into my thought process.

There have also been a couple of articles that I got everything written up but haven't posted yet (a TC50 one specifically) because I feel like I'm being pretty harsh in the article and I'm not sure what people will think about it.  This article also got very long so I was presented with another dilemma; do I post this long rant or split it into two smaller pieces?

I'm sure this is only the beginning, I haven't been doing this long so there's bound to be more hurdles to face.  I've decided to take all these things that are making blogging difficult for me and turn them around so it'll be easier.  So, here it is, my list of guidelines for getting started blogging.

1. Block out an hour or two of solid time to do writing and turn off all distractions
2. Don't link to everything under the sun.  If it's really important add a link, or add the references at the end of the post.
3. Don't worry about the rest of the world, write what YOU want.
4. Use a desktop app to write posts.  Safer for network loss and more screen real-estate.
5. Don't put off writing about something.  The longer you wait the harder it'll be.

Hopefully I'll be adding to this list and I'd love to hear any other suggestions people might have.