Blogging @ Home

Today is the ninth anniversary of me starting this blog and blogging in general. Over the years on the anniversary of my first blog post, I have written a reflexive piece on this blog and my feelings to blogging in general.

The title of my first blog entry ever is Nothing to blog home about as I feared I wouldn't have much to blog about. It turns out I was very wrong on that account.

Webslinger is my first ever blog, but over the years others have come and gone. I had a blog about my daughter's hijinx when she was a toddler; now she is a preteen and we blog together about her artworks. I have public blogs, like this one, and private ones, such as those I set up for clients. I have guest blogged for other blogs and had my blog syndicated by Backbone Magazine. I blog about serious stuff (such as digital media - as what is more important than that) and less serious (but possibly more fun) topics such as my postcard collection. I blog via Blogger, WordPress and have tried others, such as Tumblr and Yahoo 360.

Today, the topic of creating a new blog for one of my current jobs came up and I'm leading the charge for setting up yet another blog that I'll be working on. (I had wanted a Facebook page or static website - but blogging software can be used creatively to achieve both those ends.) This is an interesting coincidence as on the fourth anniversary of me creating my first blog, I created my second one (see post about that) - based on the outcome of a meeting with a client.

Over the years, my interest in blogging and posting frequency has ebbed and flowed and ebbed again. It is hard to maintain interest in something when it takes a lot of time to do and doesn't have immediate (or ever) compensation. But blogging has opened up doors for me and lead to some exciting opportunities. For awhile, I was even making some money selling ads on this blog - although my Google ads have still not resulted in enough money to take my family out for a pizza yet.

There are also ancillary benefits to blogging, such as providing an awesome venting source. For example, it is a continuous pleasure to me to see my post on a horrific customer service experience with Bell Canada continue to get hundreds of views. Blogging has also introduced my research and ideas to more people then traditional academic publishing has ever done and helps my SEO too.

I find I do have a fair amount of things to blog about on my various blogs. I don't really have the time to do it, but I find it useful to post something here or just plain fun to post about my postcard collection that I find time to do it. No doubt, blogging is also a procrastination crux for me and help to alleviate the unending pressures of my PhD process.

The biggest change with my blogging is that I am doing almost all of my blogging at home. Now that I'm working almost entirely remotely in both my studies and employment, I work from my office at home. Although isolated from others, blogging gives me an excellent outlet for sharing my thoughts, experiences, feelings and postcards in a way that continues to be very personally rewarding.  So despite all the writers blocks and time-vacuums that hit me, I think Webslinger and other blog team will rage on!

What's the Best Blogging Platform for My New Blog?

Greetings from Oudtshoorn, South Africa

I started a new blog recently to showcase my postcard collection. I have been using Blogger (owned by Google) since September 2006 when I started this blog and I have also used other blogging platforms. But I haven't had the opportunity to really try some of the newer, hyped blogging platforms such as WordPress and Tumblr. Also, I have grown frustrated with Blogger and it's lack of visually appealing templates, its lack of innovative features, and its inability to be automatically imported into Facebook (I used to have this functionality, but Facebook took it away).  Blogger also has trouble formatting paragraph breaks and  blank spaces, when copying and pasting from other sources.

WordPress seems like the ideal solution for having full control of the design and features of a blog, but I wanted something really quick and easy to use. Also as the focus of my postcard blog is the visuals of the postcard, I wanted a design for my blog that was optimal for presenting visual content. I tried Tumblr and have not been impressed at all (I'll blog about my problems with Tumblr shortly) although it is really easy to use.

Before giving up on Blogger, I gave it one more try as it integrates really well with another Google product, Picasa. I've been using Picasa to polish my postcard images to make them suitable for publishing online. Picasa enables push-button publishing to Blogger, which would be good if it works.

A note on Picasa - although it does offer basic photo editing such as brightness, contrast, cropping, and special effects  - it doesn't have the ability to paint or fix dust/scatches on images as I need.)

I tried four times to use Picasa's publish to Blogger feature to work and it failed to post and lost all my work.

If the feature did work, there are still problems. For one, the blogging window that it opened doesn't have the full Blogger functionalities. So I can't time the post or add tags. It also doesn't seems to have the full formatting options either. And it only lets me post one image per post, which doesn't work for postcards as I'd like to post the front and back images. Finally, the geotag feature on Picasa, which seems promising appears to do nothing when published on Blogger - a great opportunity misssed.

So I'm not sold on Blogger or Tumblr. Does anyone else have any ideas on what an optimal blogging platform would be for me?