My current reading is ‘Create your own Blog, 6 easy projects to start blogging like a pro’, by Tris Hussey. I’ve been able to congratulate myself rather, since I’ve already done several of the things he recommends. I’m using WordPress, and I’ve bought my domain name, although I’m not using it yet.
I’m surprised by how long he’s been doing it for, obviously he was in at the very beginning, and also by the amount of time he must spend at this kind of thing. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by the latter, however, since it’s his career and business.
There are a few other good points in the book. One is that people tend to follow blogs which have regular activity, and that perhaps rather than one longer post per week I should be looking at two or three shorter ones. Alright, I know I missed last week, but I was away from home, and didn’t have the opportunity to post easily. Perhaps when I get better at this and more in the habit it will be easy to just run off a couple of hundred words without too much effort, but at the moment it’s still rather hard work.
He also suggests using a specialist blog editor, rather than writing in Word and the cutting and pasting. I know from experience that doing that too often leads to lots of unnecessary invisible formatting which just clutters up the file, I imagine that a blog editor avoids that. Therefore I’ve downloaded ScribeFire, since I’m a dedicated Mozilla fan. So far it’s certainly easy to use, I shall spend some time getting used to it and tweaking a little to make it work how I want it to.
Next project is to check out Tris Hussey’s blog, and see what other good ideas he has. More follows!